Ask most people what the RAF Regiment is and they will tell you it is just the RAF. It isn't. There are three distinct things here and they get conflated constantly — including by people buying badges for them.
The Royal Air Force
The service itself, formed on 1 April 1918 when the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service merged. It was the world's first independent air force, which is why its uniform deliberately looks like neither Army khaki nor Navy blue. That blue-grey is its own thing.
Everyone in it — pilots, engineers, medics, air traffic, logistics — is RAF. Most wear the blue-grey beret with the eagle badge on a black backing.
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The RAF Regiment
The RAF's own ground fighting force, formed 1 February 1942. Their job is force protection: defending airfields, securing landing sites, and providing the ground and air defence a base needs to keep operating.
They are infantry in everything but name, and they are the only part of the RAF whose primary role is fighting on the ground rather than supporting what happens in the air. Nicknamed "Rock Apes", a name they have thoroughly made their own.
They wear a mud-brown beret, not RAF blue-grey — the single quickest way to tell them apart in a photograph.
The King's Colour Squadron
Part of the RAF Regiment, not a separate service. Formerly the Queen's Colour Squadron, renamed on the accession of King Charles III.
They are the RAF's ceremonial unit: they guard the King's Colour for the Royal Air Force, provide guards of honour for state occasions, and perform the continuity drill you see at major parades. Between ceremonial commitments they train and deploy in the RAF Regiment's normal force-protection role — they are not a display team.
Why this matters when you are buying
Badges and rank slides are not interchangeable between the three. An RAF Regiment beret is a different colour entirely. Squadron insignia, TRFs and shoulder titles all differ.
If you are buying for a specific person or unit, check what they actually wear before ordering — or ask us. We would rather answer a question than process a return.
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Where the RAF Regiment came from
The RAF spent the first two years of the Second World War discovering that airfields are enormously vulnerable and that nobody was clearly responsible for defending them. Ground crew were handed rifles with minimal training; the Army resented being asked to guard someone else's aerodromes.
Crete settled it. In May 1941 German airborne troops took the island's airfields, and the lesson was unmissable. The RAF Regiment was formed nine months later with a single clear job.
What they actually do now
- Field squadrons — ground defence of deployed air bases, patrolling the ground a base depends on.
- CBRN — the RAF Regiment holds the RAF's chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defence expertise.
- Forward air control — directing air support from the ground.
- II Squadron — parachute-trained, and the only RAF unit whose personnel wear the maroon beret.
The bit that surprises people
RAF Regiment gunners can and do pass the All Arms Commando Course, which means some of them wear the green Commando beret rather than mud brown. So the RAF fields personnel in three different beret colours — blue-grey, mud brown, maroon and green — and all of them are correctly RAF.
Ranks are RAF, not Army
Worth knowing if you are buying insignia. An RAF Regiment gunner holds RAF ranks: Senior Aircraftman, Corporal, Sergeant, Flight Sergeant, then commissioned ranks from Pilot Officer upward.
The lowest rank is Gunner rather than Aircraftman, which is the one deliberate Army borrowing — a nod to their artillery-adjacent origins.
Buying for the right one
Three things differ between the RAF and the RAF Regiment: beret colour, the badge in it, and squadron insignia. Everything else — rank slides, shirts, No1 dress — is shared.
The King's Colour Squadron adds ceremonial items on top of standard RAF Regiment kit rather than replacing them.
The RAF Regiment: ground defence, not flying
The RAF Regiment is the RAF's own dedicated ground-fighting force, responsible for defending airfields and other RAF assets from ground and air threats — essentially the RAF's infantry, trained and equipped to fight on the ground rather than crew aircraft. It's a genuine, distinct trade within the RAF, not a ceremonial add-on, and its training is genuinely closer to Army infantry training than to anything else in the RAF. The corps was formed in 1942, out of the recognition that airfields needed dedicated, properly trained ground defence of their own rather than relying on aircrew or borrowed Army units to do it.
What the role actually covers
In practice, RAF Regiment squadrons cover a genuinely wide spread of ground-combat specialisms — field squadrons trained and equipped much like Army infantry, and specialist squadrons operating ground-based air defence systems to protect airfields and other assets from air attack. It's a role that's evolved with the threat: as the danger to airfields shifted over the decades, so did the balance between infantry-style field squadrons and dedicated air defence units within the corps.
The King's Colour Squadron: a unit within that corps
The King's Colour Squadron (known as the Queen's Colour Squadron until 2022) is formed exclusively from officers and gunners of the RAF Regiment, and holds a genuine dual role: it's the ceremonial unit charged with safeguarding the RAF's own King's Colour and representing the Service at major state and ceremonial occasions, but it's simultaneously a real operational field squadron — formally 63 Squadron RAF Regiment — that has deployed on actual operations across Europe and the Middle East. It isn't a purely ceremonial dress-up unit; the same personnel do both jobs, switching between ceremonial duty and genuine deployable soldiering.
Why RAF Regiment training looks like Army training
Because the job is genuinely ground combat rather than aviation, RAF Regiment recruits go through a distinctly infantry-style basic training, separate from and more physically and tactically demanding than general RAF recruit training — weapons handling, fieldcraft and section tactics feature heavily, in a way general RAF trades simply don't require. It's one of the reasons RAF Regiment personnel have picked up the informal (and fairly affectionate) nickname "Rock Apes" within the wider RAF over the years.
So what's the actual hierarchy?
Think of it as three layers: the RAF overall, the RAF Regiment as the specific ground-defence corps within it, and the King's Colour Squadron as one specific, dual-role unit drawn from RAF Regiment personnel. If you've ever wondered why some RAF-related listings mention "Regiment" kit that looks distinctly Army-like — boots, DPM, ground-combat gear — this is exactly why. It's genuinely a different job to flying, closer in practice to Army infantry than to RAF aircrew.