The BriTish Way of sTraTegy-making Vital Lessons For Our Times

Gwyn Prins

Royal United Services Institute

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HUMANITIES RESEARCH INSTITUTE

About the Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham This paper is jointly sponsored by the University of Buckinghams Humanities Research Institute, where its author is a Visiting Professor. The University of Buckinghams Humanities Research Institute brings together scholars of international distinction in a wide variety of subjects, but especially in the areas of history, security and war studies. Among the Institutes current Fellows and Visiting Professors are the leading authority on international terrorism, Professor Michael Burleigh; the historians Professors John Adamson, Lloyd Clark, Saul David, Simon Sebag Montefiore, and Dame Rosamond Savill FBA; as well as the author of this present paper, Professor Gwyn Prins. Among the University of Buckinghams London-based graduate courses is its Masters in Modern War Studies, with an internationally acclaimed programme of seminars through the course of the year, delivered by senior officers (including former Chiefs of the Defence Staff) and leading academics in the field. About RUSI The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) is an independent think tank engaged in cutting edge defence and security research. A unique institution, founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington, RUSI embodies nearly two centuries of forward thinking, free discussion and careful reflection on defence and security matters. For more information, please visit: www.rusi.org Cover Image An Allegory (Vision of a Knight) or Scipio and the Muse. Oil on poplar, c.1504. The sleeping knight may be intended to represent the Roman hero Scipio Africanus (236184 BC) who was presented in a dream with a choice between Virtue (behind whom is a steep and rocky path) and Pleasure (in looser robes). The figure on the left is sometimes interpreted as representing the Active Life. The sword and the book offered to the warrior, inviting his engagement, capture well the subject of this study. Reproduced courtesy of the National Gallery.

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Occasional Paper, October 2011

The British Way of Strategy-Making

Vital Lessons For Our Times

Gwyn Prins

www.rusi.org

The views expressed in this paper are the authors own, and do not necessarily reflect those of RUSI or any other institutions with which the author is associated.

Published in 2011 by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in partnership with the Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham. Reproduction without the express permission of the author is prohibited. About RUSI Publications Director of Publications: Publications Manager: Adrian Johnson Ashlee Godwin

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Contents
Introduction: History to the Rescue Origins The Great Test, 193235 The Four Cardinal Post-War Studies 1 3 7 11

Conclusion: The Key Future Innovations Suggested From Past Successes 15 Appendix: The Difficulties of Forecasting Peace 23

About the Author

Professor Gwyn Prins is a research professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Director of the LSEs Mackinder Programme for the Study of Long Wave Events. He is also a visiting professor in War Studies at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Buckingham. Previously a university lecturer in Politics at Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in History of Emmanuel College, he has served in advisory posts in the Office of the Secretary General of NATO and as Senior Visiting Fellow in the (former) Defence Evaluation and Research Agency of the Ministry of Defence. He is currently a member of the Chief of the Defence Staffs Strategy Advisory Panel. The assistance of Colonel J Hazel, Research Fellow in the Strategic Studies Cell, Royal College of Defence Studies, is gratefully acknowledged, as is the help of Professor Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield and of Vice Admiral Sir Jeremy Blackham for discussions about these data and criticism of drafts.

Introduction: History to the Rescue

The October 2010 House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee inquiry into how strategy-making is conducted in the British government nowadays came to a remarkable finding. It concluded that no-one does strategy. In consequence, the British system can no longer make effective national strategy as it once did.1 The August 2011 House of Commons Defence Select Committee inquiry into the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review and the National Security Strategy (NSS) was historic in its constitutional importance. It criticised the SDSR in conception and consequence. It declined to accept the prime ministers view of its effects, or views similar to Mr Camerons in testimony from certain other politicians and senior officials. On broadly the same root and branch grounds as its sister committee had done, it questioned the competence of the methodology used to produce the new National Security Strategy.2 Neither committee thinks that Britain has a robust national security strategy today. Neither committee thinks that this problem can be fixed by marginal adjustment. They believe that the international departments of state have poor maps and compasses with which to plot their detailed courses and dispositions. Ultimate civilian control of the military within our constitution is to be found on the floor of the House of Commons, exercised through its power over both supply and ministers because, in Walter Bagehots words, The constant proximity of Parliament is the real force which makes ministers what they are ... which enforces a substantial probity throughout the administration or should do so.3 Today through a different and applied political work of Walter Bagehots editor and interpreter, Lord St John of Fawsley, namely his innovation of the modern select committee structure while Leader of the House with increasing weight the House entrusts the first line exercise of its authority on specific issues to specific select committees. As appointed bodies of the sovereign House of Commons, select committees have recently acquired additional sway in consequence of the introduction in 2010 of chairmen elected by fellow MPs, which has enhanced the standing of the chairmen in ways that are still unfolding. The fiduciary authority of select committees on behalf of the public interest is above that of ministers who must answer to them for their actions. In the case in point, the Defence Committee embodies that first line. Views on the SDSR and NSS are therefore matters which, emanating from these committees, have serious constitutional implications as well as security dimensions. It is not voluntary for the government to attend to the committees concerns on the committees terms. It is mandatory. There is no more fundamental debate about the defence and security of the realm than this.

The British Way of Strategy-Making

How have we come to this condition that they describe? And if Britain once did strategy better, then how did we do it? Can we learn lessons from how we once made strategy successfully to help us remedy the defects that the select committees have signalled, predictably unwelcome as Whitehall has found their conclusions to be? These are neither academic nor antiquarian questions and they are the subject of this study. By its nature and brief, the departmental Levene Report on defence reform of 10 June 2011 addressed second order questions compared to the first order questions raised by the select committees; but Levene was correct to note that its concerns also were not new. However, after a nod towards the subject matter of this work, his report took the view that history was another country.4 This study takes the opposing position. It will demonstrate as a matter of fact how primary historical research is essential for present and future purposes. Todays governing class seems to feel no shame about its ignorance of history, nor does it seem aware of how risky that ignorance can be. The culture of Whitehall is notable for the absence of corporate memory and for the constant, churning turnover of people in posts. (By contrast, Maurice Hankey, one of the main characters in the story that follows, served as the secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence for twenty-six years.) Together these characteristics mean that those who forget their history are indeed condemned to repeat it. One purpose of this study is to document that old truth in detail in respect of the current crisis in British defence and security. Another is to show how useful knowledge of ones own institutional history can be in avoiding present and future danger. Two key recommendations from past practice are given in the conclusion, which could help resolve efficiently and concretely the core criticisms made by the select committees and thereby strengthen national defence and security.

Origins
The army that, with misgivings, Prime Minister Salisbury sent to South Africa in 1899, commanded by General Sir Redvers Buller, to fight the Boers was unfit for the task. Both its capability and, more fundamentally, its thinking were defective. It crashed to successive early defeats in battles at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso during the black week of 1015 December. Buller was subsequently relieved of supreme command. The inscription on his equestrian statue in Exeter (He saved Natal) is careful. Substantial British reinforcement (to over 180,000 in 1900) and more defeats, as well as the eventual relief of Ladysmith, followed. Lord Roberts, his successor as commander-in-chief, turned the tide in the war of set-piece battles. Yet it was Robertss successor Kitchener who fundamentally changed the operational strategy. His army fought a controversial counter-insurgency war against Afrikaner society as a whole and an anti-guerrilla war against the bittereinders. It led to the Boer surrender at Vereeniging in May 1902. At great cost of human suffering, monetary expense and strategic risk, the British Army had been utterly re-forged in the fire of combat.5 Rudyard Kipling bitingly observed that it was no end of a lesson. The political skulduggery by Alfred Milner and Joseph Chamberlain, the ad-hoc strategic thinking, complacency and incompetence that preceded the second Boer War preyed extensively on the mind of A J Balfour, Lord Salisburys deputy and successor as prime minister. So, too, did the tactically messy and costly conduct of that war. He was determined that this should never happen again. By December 1902 Viscount Esher had sketched radical new means for him. To ensure, as Balfour explained to the House of Commons on 5 March 1903, that the Cabinet should not be left to the crisis of the moment, the prime minister created the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID). Maurice Hankey, the long-serving and indispensible secretary of the CID and also later cabinet secretary, attested that it was overwhelmingly Balfours own initiative. Chaired by the prime minister, who had absolute discretion in the selection or variation of its members, the CID had an advisory and warning, not an executive, role. It therefore worked to no given agenda.6 Its membership embraced the service chiefs, ministers and officials. But it had wide latitude to commission and to engage external experts, rather like its successor in function, the National Security Council, or the modern select committee structure of the House of Commons. Its function, as Balfour explained it to the Commons, was to survey as a whole the strategical needs of the Empire, to deal with the complicated questions which are all essential elements in that general problem, and to revise from time to time their previous decisions so that the Cabinet shall always be informed. It would be a standing function so that when there is no special stress or strain the

The British Way of Strategy-Making

Government and its advisers should devote themselves to the consideration of these broad and all important issues. 7 The CID began work formally on 4 May 1904. Repeatedly during its thirty-five year life, it proved its worth to the countrys security. Central to that success was the culture of the CID. It welcomed awkward and free-ranging topics and individuals. It was not hobbled by formulaic procedures, nor curbed by pre-ordained constraints on thinking, nor by conventional wisdom , as the late John Kenneth Galbraith accurately named it, which was conventional but not necessarily wise. An early episode usefully demonstrated the CIDs value, by showing the consequences of not consulting it to check proposed diplomatic steps, before taking them, for conformity with war plans. The issue was the attempt, arising from the 1907 Hague Peace Conference and leading to the Declaration of London, to introduce international law into the use of naval blockades. It would have severely constrained Britain but not the Continental powers. In the end, despite Asquiths Liberal government whipping the issue through in the Commons, it was thrown out by the House of Lords. Never before or since has the Upper Chamber justified its existence more completely, wrote Hankey.8 In any case, this initiative sank when the guns began to fire. Only laws of war that all parties accept as beneficial survive that contact. The history of attempts to outlaw particular classes of weapons since the St Petersburg Convention of 1868, on the size of bullets, tends to support this view. Balfours speech expressing his and Eshers plan for his committee can be seen to embrace two distinct meanings of strategy from the outset. Both are necessary. Each is properly the business of the armed forces. But they are fundamentally different from each other. Neither is the same as a policy emanating from ministers. The first meaning of strategy is grand strategy, which is not entirely shaped by any government. It cannot be. Grand strategy studies all geo-political factors that impact upon British national interests as both risks and threats and which are, by definition, beyond the power of any government to control. It is also about how best the national interest is projected. That in turn demands a thorough understanding of how the different sources of what are often in contemporary usage called hard and soft national power inter-relate and are best marshalled.9 The second meaning of strategy is operational strategy, which is both subordinate to and different in function from the first. It is about the best marshalling of ways and means to deliver ends expressed in specific instructions from ministers to HM Armed Forces.10 The most difficult but essential step is, having acquired it, to engage grand strategic and operational strategic insight in ways that can materially inform and shape as well as execute policy. The CID sought and found a way to do this. The definitions remain cogent, and the functions essential, today.

Gwyn Prins

Lord Chatfield, First Sea Lord and chairman of the Chiefs of Staff sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, 193338.

The CID was supported by a small and skilful civil service secretariat which Viscount Eshers plan for the CID regarded as the keystone of the whole edifice. It was brought to life years before the Cabinet acquired its own permanent secretariat (in 1916) and indeed became the basis of the Cabinet secretariat when it came into being. The CID worked extensively through a series of sub-committees. One of the most vital, the military committee, became the Chiefs of Staff sub-committee. The Salisbury Committee of 1923 had responded to the creation of a third fighting service, the RAF, by recommending formalisation, so laying the foundations for future joint working. The purpose of the new sub-committee was to advise the CID on all military matters and to prepare plans for war; and secondly, to obtain from the three Services a combined military opinion for political consideration, in the description of its most important inter-war chairman, Lord Chatfield, who served 193338.11 As a naval officer, Chatfield had been Admiral Sir David Beattys flag captain on HMS Lion at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 and the person to whom Beatty had complained that something seemed to be wrong with our bloody ships that day.

The British Way of Strategy-Making

The Hartington Commission of 1888 had earlier signalled the need for an oversight organ such as the CID, but had failed to stimulate one. The 2010 National Security Council that Prime Minister Cameron introduced has many of the same stated objectives, expressed in todays language. The idioms and political contexts may change but the problem remains the same. The stated purpose of the CID in 1904 was to obtain and co-ordinate for the use of the Cabinet all the information and expert advice required for the shaping of National policy in war and for determining the necessary preparations in peace. The purpose of the 2010 NSC is not different although, by report, its manner of conducting its business is. The CDSs Enhancing Strategic Capability (ESC) Study 2011 correctly identifies the Ismay-Jacob Report of February 1963 as the clearest exposition of the succession of rearrangements to the higher direction of defence that have punctuated the last half century, delineated in a series of white papers.12 Ismay and Jacobs report was commissioned urgently and written quickly at a time of great financial stringency and in response to discord, uncertainty and malaise in the department.13 The country and MoD today being in very similar circumstances, it repays close study. By the same token, their report was wise in itself studying closely the reasons why the earlier CID was such a success for so long. We trust, Ismay and Jacob wrote, that we shall not be thought to be harking back to the bow-and-arrow era instead of looking forward to the space age when we suggest that there are useful lessons to be drawn from the experiences of the Committee of Imperial Defence.14 This study echoes that view.

The Great Test, 193235

The most important test of the CID system came between 1932 and 1935. This was mostly during the period of Ramsay MacDonalds second coalition National Government. By convention, the Chiefs sub-committee rendered an annual report via the CID to the cabinet. In 1932 it had protested against the Ten Year Rule, which meant that the country was calculating on no war before 1942. For more than a decade across the late 1920s and 1930s, the Treasury had maintained that the weakness of the economy was the overriding threat to national security and that re-armament would bring ruin. So the Ten Year Rule was a buttress to its view. As chancellor of the Exchequer in 1928, Winston Churchill had installed a ratchet, so that the horizon advanced a year, each year. The Ten Year Rule was used to justify taking a gap in capabilities in the language of the 2010 defence review, which was likewise underpinned by a Ten Year Rule logic. The Treasurys 1932 line of argument for the Ten Year Rule was constitutionally challenging to a degree that is still breathtaking to read, as well as circular. The Treasury wrote that this formula never ought to be regarded as a study in prophesy. It is no more than a working hypothesis intended to relieve the Chiefs of Staff from the responsibility [emphasis added] of preparing against contingencies which the Government believe to be either remote or beyond the financial capacity of the country to provide against [emphasis in original]. The claim to relieve the Chiefs of their responsibilities on financial grounds showed the gulf in understanding across Whitehall. The Chiefs reply reminded the Treasury that whereas it appeared to view war as a luxury which we cannot afford, the services took the view that actually it is a financial disaster we cannot risk. Contrary to the Treasurys impression, the fighting services were not raring to go to war but saw themselves as the premium which we pay for security from war and financial ruin. 15 In 1932, the Chiefs protested that it was impossible to see three, let alone ten, years ahead. In the famous House of Lords debate of 12 November 2010, whose historic importance is already widely attested, Admiral Lord Boyce (formerly First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff, 200103) repeated their exchange with the Treasury almost verbatim, but in different military currency: the underlying rationale in the [SDSR] review for disposing of this aircraft [the Harrier GR9], which gives the carrier its strike capability until the introduction of the Joint Strike Fighter, is this: In the short term, there are few circumstances we can envisage where the ability to deploy airpower from the sea will be essential. What a desperate expression of hope over bitter experience, Lord Boyce observed, adding that, The people serving on the National Security Council must have been asleep for the past dozen years or so. We have no problem today because we have no emerging crisis. That can change in days.16 And so it did. Seven different crises with potential

The British Way of Strategy-Making

military dimensions for Britain (Korea, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, stand-by support for the civil power in the English riots) can be counted between Lord Boyces speech and this moment of writing (August 2011). Six of them have maritime aspects. Upon his own volition, in 1932 Hankey wrote a short appendix giving eight illustrations of the difficulties of forecasting peace. He started with Queen Elizabeth laying up her fleet five months before the Spanish Armada set sail in 1588 and ended with Milners 1917 memorandum from Russia reporting a great deal of exaggeration in the talk of revolution. (It is repeated as an Appendix to this study.) By 1932 Ramsay MacDonald was reviled by his own party and pre-occupied with the Geneva Disarmament Conference trying to decide impossibilities, like what was an offensive weapon. Hankey wrote to a friend that the prime minister did not much care for this note in draft and would have preferred it not to be circulated. Arguing the same point as Hankey, and to the same end, in the House of Lords debate on 12 November 2010, Field Marshal Lord Inge (former Chief of the General Staff and Chief of the Defence Staff, 199497) expanded the list with contemporary examples:17
We have not been good about predicting the future ... We did not predict the Argentinean invasion of the Falkland Islands; we did not predict the speed of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany; we did not predict the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, nor did we expect Mr Bush to invade the other way round. I am trying to reinforce the importance of maintaining Armed Forces that have capabilities across the spectrum of conflict.

In 1932 the chiefs demanded urgent rectification of a terrible deficiency in essential requirements in a darkening grand strategic scene. This was not granted because, as well as the Treasury argument on the danger of adding military expenditures on top of social ones with higher priority, it was also argued that collective security, assured by the League of Nations, took up the strain. One could therefore, in modern parlance, continue to cash a peace dividend thanks to the multilateral system. So while the effect of the 1932 Chiefs of Staff report was that the Ten Year Rule was suspended by the Cabinet on 23 March (with regret in Prime Minister MacDonalds view, minuted at the CID the previous day), new money was not to be expected or to be forthcoming.18 Therefore in 1933, the chiefs (now under Chatfields chairmanship) and supported by the Foreign Office, described in even stronger terms the mismatch between the grand strategic environment as they saw it and the state of national defence. Chatfield later wrote that, while it was a strong report:

Gwyn Prins

so brow-beaten had been the three Staffs for the last decade ... that there was a feeling, even in my committee, that it was almost improper to be too insistent, to make more than the most moderate demands. But I suggested a last paragraph to our report to the effect that we could not, with the arms we had, accept our present responsibilities as they were laid down.

The implied threat won Chatfield traction in the CID which led to the establishment of a special Defence Requirements Sub-Committee (DRSC) to review the entire strategic scene while taking due regard to the financial position of the country. Hankey co-ordinated and drafted this report which proposed a five-year deficiency programme.20 A special cabinet subcommittee sat to receive it. It frightened parliamentary and public opinion. But the urgency of the financial dangers was again pressed and only moderate increases in funds were proposed. Furthermore, against the background of the newspaper proprietor and aviation enthusiast Lord Rothermeres campaign for the air force, boosted by his newspapers the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, and public fear of air war, it was proposed that the RAF be preferentially funded within the uplifted vote.

Lord Hankey, secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence for twenty-six years.

The chiefs refused to accept this settlement. They pointed out that serious fears about air war were being crudely over-dramatised and that the nature of the planet and geo-politics meant that balanced forces, not just aeroplanes, were required. Air power alone cannot finish any political task (neither then nor ever, one should add).21 Therefore, upon these representations

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The British Way of Strategy-Making

and with more strategic shocks occurring, a second Defence Requirements Sub-Committee sat in July 1935. It was composed as before but this time, unusually, it was given altered terms of reference to assess and to prescribe force requirements without regard to financial considerations. Mrs Thatcher employed a similar logic when shaping cabinet procedures for the Falklands war.22 Coincidental with this review work, the Abyssinian crisis broke in May 1935 and revealed the hollowness of collective security (as the DRSC noted in November by which time MacDonald had been succeeded by Stanley Baldwin as prime minister). Countries were prepared to protest against Mussolinis invasion but not to act against it. Britain was left carrying most of the military load. By depleting imperial stations, the navy assembled a much augmented Mediterranean Fleet, under Admiral Sir William Fisher, at Alexandria. As a result, public perceptions began to change. Parallels between the Abyssinian crisis and the 2011 Libyan crisis exceed Mussolinis part in the other Italian colonial enterprise: the awkward welding together of that new country out of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. There are parallels in the international diplomacy leading to UNSCR 1973 in April 2011 and in the conduct of military operations arising. No sooner had Abyssinia subsided than the next unforeseen strategic shock, the Spanish Civil War, occurred in 1936.23 The second Defence Requirements exercise horrified the Treasury. The vast sums required to make up for previous economies ... appalled the financial minds, Chatfield wrote. He added, in words which also have a contemporary ring, that:24
Time after time the Services were told that the financial dangers to the country were greater than the military ones. So long had the Treasury remained the real factor in the Government, in deciding what our armed strength was to be, that other influences only slowly became effective. The Government seemed unable to face the fact that every million spent now reduced the chance of war, and that if war came it would not be spent in time, while the cost would be much greater.

Following the second DRSC report, and with Baldwin again prime minister, but leading the third coalition government, the chiefs did successfully begin to translate their grand strategic appreciation into operational strategy, via what under their influence had now become government policy. The programme of five King George V class battleships was put in hand; carriers were built and the Fleet Air Arm was transferred back to the navy from the Air Ministry in 1938, although Chatfield had to threaten resignation to achieve this; RAF fighter squadrons were built up and radar-based tactics for them formed. Thereby the country was equipped to fight the Battle of Britain in 1940 and sink the Bismarck in 1941 which ensured that later, with

Gwyn Prins

11

Bletchley Park (and the USA), Britain could win the battle of the Atlantic and fire the army as a projectile,25 or evacuate it from harm, in several operations culminating in D-Day. Once decided, this rapid and large re-armament was only possible because, although attenuated, core industries and skills were present to conduct it. Britain could not do this today because of the abraded condition of its defence industrial base.26

The Four Cardinal Post-War Studies

In drawing its lessons from this same history, the first major post-war reorganisation, in 1946, concluded that whereas it was self-evidently true that political and economic considerations had postponed rearmament until it was perilously late, the absence of a unified defence policy for the three services was also a failure which ought to be remedied. That white papers proposals laid the foundation for the three other cardinal reports over the next twenty years: the 1958 and 1963 white papers and the Ismay-Jacob Report. Its proposals were not revolutionary; in particular, The Chiefs of Staff Committee will remain responsible for preparing strategic appreciations and military plans.27 Twenty years later, Ismay and Jacob glossed the meaning of strategical skill in precisely the terms used in Prime Minister Baldwins original Warrant to the Chiefs of Staff: it is the ability to look at warfare as a whole.28 The prime minister should remain chairman of the successor to the CID by virtue of his ultimate responsibility for national defence.29 This combined responsibility for both grand and operational strategy was exercised soon but differently when the Chiefs of Staff withdrew to the Royal Naval Staff College at Greenwich in 1952 to compose their global strategy paper for the government.30 This appreciation became the foundation for the British commitment to a strategic nuclear capability, with all the consequent effects entailed on force posture balance for conventional deterrence. The 1946 white paper also reiterated a cardinal principle of the British organisation. This was that it should be the men responsible in the Service departments for carrying out the approved policy who are brought together in the central machine to formulate it.31 Others would be a fifth wheel on the coach, in Hankeys memorable words. That time honoured principle was reiterated by Ismay and Jacob in 1963 and in the CDSs Enhancing Strategic Capability Study of 2011.32 In the long view it is now plain that the Heseltine changes of 1984 which blurred policy with strategy began to corrode that principle, and that progressive corrosion has occurred since.33 One of the two most important lessons from this history is that this cardinal principle should again be the backbone which both forms and articulates the bureaucratic skeleton of the MoD. It is especially vital because it restores lines of accountability: to the service chiefs for designing force structure; to the permanent secretary for managing the money; and to the CDS for delivering military success. The motto for this relationship is collaboration, not primacy. The four cardinal documents in the post-war evolution of the higher management of defence and security progressively specified the duties and relationships between the military, scientific and administrative branches of the department. These affirmed that the CDS is the principal source of

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13

strategic and military advice to the government and that the permanent under-secretary (PUS) is in charge of co-ordinating the business of the ministry and in particular the advice of the secretary of states three principal advisers the CDS, CSA (Chief Scientific Adviser) and the PUS as well as being principal accounting officer.34 It follows, therefore, that any other views must arise from different principles. By the motto of collaboration, not primacy, it is correct in terms of stated and established functions that the PUS should only be present by invitation at the Chiefs of Staff Committee.35 In summary, therefore, one may observe that the distinctive and complementary roles of different public officials have been clearly expressed and understood, holding constant for a long period, until relatively recently. Recent years have been eccentric to the constitutionally well-founded British way of strategy-making. Clarity about roles is essential for successful collaboration and for clear lines of accountability. The cardinal principle attests to this. It was the 1946 white paper that first described the roles of the administrative and scientific research services, respectively. Ismay and Jacob gave a cogent account of what by 1963 was wrong with and in need of repair in the administrative and scientific services of the department.36 In respect of the Chiefs of the Services, and latterly of the Chief of the Defence Staff, their role as principal advisers to government on both grand and operational strategy has been affirmed in theory and in practice, particularly in the 1930s, 1950s and 2000s. The 1930s story has been recalled above. The 1958 report which established the post of CDS states that he is responsible to the Minister of Defence and will be his principal military adviser. As chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, he will tender its views, that committee being collectively responsible to Government [sic] for professional advice on strategy and military operations and on the military implications of defence policy generally. The Levene Report has in practice mandated a re-kindling of this level of vitality in the Chiefs of Staff Committee when convened by the CDS in armed forces mode.37 As CDS in the 2000s, Admiral Boyces role in demanding and obtaining a legal opinion to his satisfaction before being prepared to authorise the use of British forces during the Second Gulf War illustrates these highest functions of office precisely. The CDS is unambiguously the primary link with the prime minister.38 This is perhaps most conclusively attested by the CDSs role in nuclear release procedures.39 So while collaboration, not primacy, is the explicit motto of reforms from 194663, acceptance of a division of labour to permit it, with clear lines of accountability, is its essential corollary and companion. In more evolved form than in 1946, the 1963 reorganisation presented three co-equal military, scientific and administrative staffs. But it made clear, in

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The British Way of Strategy-Making

its version of the CID (the Committee on Defence and Overseas Policy) that the CDS and Chiefs continue to fulfil their traditional duty to tender military advice to the Government; and they will retain their right of access to the Prime Minister.40 That line, and the logic of special attachment to the Crown, is attested by the form of the Oath of Allegiance and by the constant form of wording in the Sovereigns Commission.41 This understanding remains crystal clear in the services but has been lost progressively in Whitehall since then, muddling military and civilian roles in the higher management of defence. In respect of the civil service, repeatedly its role is described in similar terms across the decades. It is one of support, of administrative co-ordination and of accounting responsibility. It enables. It lubricates. While individual civil servants may provide insights, institutionally the administrative civil service is not an organic source of insights. In the MoD, the civil service is not responsible for delivery of military effect. It, too, should be subject to (and sized by) the cardinal principle of the British organisation. Ismay and Jacob discussed this incisively, in light of the troubles that they were brought in to help alleviate. However, the role of civil servants as accounting officers responsible for the budgetary aspects of the ministry and latterly with personal fiduciary responsibility is specified by Ismay and Jacob in 1963 and is progressively given higher prominence in following decades. It is highlighted in the 2010 Ministerial Code.42 One should also notice an inherent tendency for the size of the administrative civil service to grow in the MoD as more generally across government. This has been understood for a very long time. A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business or official members rather than to leave free the energies of mankind, wrote Walter Bagehot in 1866. It overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality.43 C Northcote Parkinson studied such dynamics in the 1950s. His celebrated Law of Inverse Proportion has particular relevance because it arose from the examination of departments with shrinking outputs: the Colonial Office and the inter-war Service Ministries. He noted that the Colonial Office had the largest number of administrative civil servants at the moment when it had no more colonies to administer, just before it was folded into the Foreign Office. Between 191428, he observed a 68 per cent decrease in numbers of capital ships, a 31 per cent decrease in naval officers and sailors and a 78 per cent increase in the number of Admiralty bureaucrats. Parkinsons analysis is sometimes represented as mere humour. Only the style of writing is humorous. The tendencies he explains are real and need periodic pruning.44 As PUS of the MoD, Frank Cooper considered the department over-manned and cut staffing numbers severely. But civil servants are not just a source of bloat and an impediment to clarity, although they often have been so. In the final analysis, the civil

servant performs an indispensible duty, in the way that one of the stamp of Lord Hankey has been seen exercising it in the main narrative of this study. More recently, in the defence field, Permanent Secretary Sir Michael Quinlan performed his duty as effectively when he shaped the departments intellectual engagement with the general public on nuclear matters at a time of high public agitation. What made for these successes? Collaboration, not primacy. One of the most sure principles is, that success depends upon a due mixture of special and non-special minds of minds which attend to the means, and minds which attend to the ends. What Bagehot meant was that in the British system, the special (or specialist, as Bagehot meant) mind of the skilled bureaucrat depended upon the non-specialist mind of the elected head to ensure that the natural introspection of the official (skilled in the forms and pompous with the memories of his office), and the resulting tendency to bloat the bureaucracy, was controlled. An extrinsic chief is the fit corrector of such errors ... It is ... he only that brings the rubbish of office to the burning glass of sense.45 The model of success that Bagehot applauded and commended to government was of the joint-stock banks, managed by persons mostly untrained in the business and administered by persons bred to the task. Each knew who they were, respected the other and did not try to be the other. Nothing has changed to alter the value of that judgement and advice. In fact, its value is recognised in a trend to introduce non-executives into civil service boards of management. But it is telling that a frequent difficulty reported from recent experience of these efforts is that understanding of what a non-executive director should do to execute that role properly in the civil service context is vestigial. It is part of a more general atrophy of the vigorous interpretation which Bagehot throws across to us from the midVictorian era.46 History can come to the rescue on more fronts than one in this matter.

16

The British Way of Strategy-Making

Conclusion: The Key Future Innovations Suggested From Past Successes

The two ranking parliamentary select committees have called for root and branch return to efficient, constitutionally correct and, one might add, mutually respectful practices in Whitehall, which they have found to be absent. In this endeavour, recollection of the history of the success of the Committee of Imperial Defence in the inter-war years has practical utility. This study has explained the reasons for that success and the momentous consequences of it. It has related how, in the nick of time, the austere, dogged and courageous Lord Chatfield and the supreme civil servant, Lord Hankey, were able to put into Churchills hands the weapons with which to fight and to prevail in 1940. These two men, so much less famous than President Roosevelt, were the indispensible sine qua non, being the first to give Churchill the tools with which to begin to finish the job by ensuring that Britain had the means to fight alone in the darkest hour. As the June 2011 Levene Report correctly observes, the success or failure of any model depends on the people within the organisation and particularly its leaders.47 How true that was then. This study has also documented the dangerous consequences of the progressive loss of grip during the post-war years, leading to the present day malaise. This story has shown that there are several aspects of past practice which could be adopted to help resolve the present deficiencies. The vital importance of re-emphasising the cardinal principle which links formulation and execution of operational strategy to permit true accountability has already been mentioned. But the history of the CID proposes an elegant and specific recommendation that could help remedy the key defect identified by the select committee reports of 2010 and 2011. This is the failure of the current national security strategy methodologies to effect a reliable and credible introduction of grand and operational strategic insights into ministerial policy-making, thus leaving the Ministry of Defence without secure guidelines for deployment of its improved and reformed structure, however good it may be. There is unique value in a combined grand and operational strategic study which is militarily literate and conducted independently, without fear or favour to any party or to any transient issue and without reference to finance, leading to force structure recommendations. The Defence Select Committee welcomes the current coalition governments innovation of formalising the review cycle and the Levene Report takes it as read. To make that cycle really work, the new NSC should cause a modern form of the CIDs 1935 second Defence Requirements Sub-Committee exercise to be repeated regularly as a reality check. Logically, it would be the starting point

of each review cycle. As in 1935, it should be a specially convened expert study for which, at present, there is no suitable institutional frame. It should be provided to, but not conducted by, the National Security Council in its present form. That baseline would also inform a realistic assessment of the strength and potentialities of national soft power agents, which are always dependant variables of hard power.48 Only when the study is complete should financial considerations be introduced to it, as was done in 1935. Doubtless, the Treasury would resent and resist this now as it did in 1935. But as then, so now, it is important that this opposition is overcome. At the point when money is brought into the discussion, the government of the day would be forced to face and be unable to avoid an informed understanding of what it could not do because it chose not to fund the capability or, alternatively, had to do and therefore had to fund the capability. This understanding would help to balance departmental power within the Cabinet, as it did in the 1930s. It would thereby permit the Cabinet to inform more fully the inevitable choices about allocation of taxpayers money, again, as it did in 1935. Crucially, it might thereby provide some slim buffer against being driven uncontrollably by events. This is the way in which to address the deficiency specifically identified by the Chief of the Defence Staff in evidence to the Defence Select Committee: to bring ways and means into correct alignment with ends. The committee itself endorsed General Richardss representation of the problem in its fuller discussion of the National Security Strategy in August 2011.49 That is what is required for and of a safe national security strategy. The way in which, in order to help us achieve that state, we may receive a final benefit from the experience, example and victory of our predecessors, has been the subject of this study.

18

The British Way of Strategy-Making

Notes and References

1. House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee, Who does UK national strategy?, First Report of Session 201011, HC 435, 18 October 2010. 2. House of Commons Defence Committee, The Strategic Defence and Security Review and the National Security Strategy, Sixth Report of Session 201012, HC 761, 3 August 2011. On the prime ministers views, see para. 6066, pp. 3133, which includes a verbatim transcript of his exchanges with the chairman, James Arbuthnot MP. 3. The unseen work of parliament, The Economist, 9 February 1861, in Norman St JohnStevas (ed.), The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, Vol. VI (London: The Economist, 1974), pp. 4549. The purgative consequences of the recent shaming of parliamentarians by the scandal over their expense claims help restore this role, of course. It is a nicely self-correcting effect that Bagehot would have both anticipated and appreciated. 4. Specifically, the report said: The historic record shows there is no single right answer. Our predecessors found the solution that worked for their time. See Defence Reform: An independent report into the structure and manpower of the Ministry of Defence (Chairman Lord Levene of Portsoken), MoD, 10 June 2011, paras. 1.11 1.12, p. 11. 5. T Pakenham, The Boer War (Abacus, 1992), pp. 9294; Field Marshal Lord Carver, The National Army Museum Book of the Boer War (PanMacmillan, 2000). 6. Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command, 1914-18, Vol. I (Allen and Unwin, 1961), pp. 4559 and in particular pp. 4548. 7. For the 1903 Commons speech, see R J Q Adams, Balfour, The Last Grandee (John Murray, 2007), pp. 18586. Esher was also a member of Elgins Commission into the near-failure in South Africa. He held Balfours views. 8. Hankey, op. cit., p. 100. 9. Halford Mackinders original explanation of geo-politics remains compelling today. See The geographical pivot of history, Geographical Journal (Vol. 23, No. 4, April 1904). The differences and relationships of risk and threat are elaborated and illustrated in G Prins and R Salisbury, Risk, Threat and Security: the case of the United Kingdom, RUSI Journal (Vol. 153, No. 1, February 2008), pp. 2227. 10. Enhancing Strategic Capability Study 2011 (directed by Major-General Mungo Melvin), para. 2.21; speech by General Sir David Richards, Chief of the Defence Staff, to the FCO Leadership Dialogue, 9 May 2011. 11. Recommendations of National and Imperial Defence Committee, II, Cmd 1938

Gwyn Prins

19

(CAB104/12), National Archives (NA), para. 8; Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, It Might Happen Again: Vol II (Heinemann, 1947), p. 77. Chairmanship, pre-figuring the function of the CDS, was by rotation between the fighting services. Chatfield was First Sea Lord and it was the navys turn. 12. ESC Study 2011, op. cit., paras. 2.262.31. 13. General Lord Ismay and Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Jacob, Higher Direction of Defence, 20 February 1963, DEFE 7/1898, NA, para. 2 of Covering Letter to the Minister of Defence, 20 February 1963. 14. Ibid., Pt. I, para. 3. 15. Treasury note on Chiefs of Staff 1932 report and Chiefs of Staff reply, 11 March 1932, 1087-B, CAB series, NA, para. 5. 16. Lord Boyce, Debate on the SDSR, House of Lords, 12 November 2010, Hansard, col. 425. 17. Appendix 1 in M P A Hankey, The Ten Years Assumption: historical notes, 15 Feb 1932, 1082-B, NA; Lord Inge, Debate on the SDSR, House of Lords, 12 November 2010, Hansard, col. 438. 18. Chiefs of Staff sub-committee, 23 Feb 1932, 1082-B, NA, para. 39(2); P Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Macmillan, 1983), pp. 28485. 19. Chiefs of Staff sub-committee report 1933, 12 Oct 1933, 1113-B CAB series, NA; Chatfield, op. cit., p.79. 20. Report of the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, 28 Feb 1934, DRC 14/CID 1147-B, CAB series, NA. 21. It is interesting to notice that air issues have triggered difficulty not only on this occasion but repeatedly. Naval aviation being an element of sea power, not of airpower, Chatfield made the return of control of the Fleet Air Arm to the navy one of his three objectives as First Sea Lord, achieving it just before he left his post. See Chatfield, op. cit., pp. 10210. With the TSR2 debacle before their eyes, Ismay and Jacob in 1963 described how the defence authorities feel completely baffled in dealing with a middleman [the Ministry of Aviation] who appears to conduct their affairs not only inefficiently but without a single-minded regard for defence interests. See Ismay and Jacob, op. cit., para. 61. Air issues were identified as a key source of the discord, uncertainly and malaise in the department which had prompted their report. Air issues were also a main trigger of the same feelings in 2010, surrounding the abrupt reversal at the very last moment of settled decisions in the SDSR exercise regarding the Tornado and Harrier fleets, leading by extension to the deletion of the countrys fixed-wing maritime air capability, possibly (and unintentionally) permanently.

20

The British Way of Strategy-Making

22. Report of the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee, 21 Nov 1935, ToR, para. 4, p. 5, DRC 37, NA. Regarding Mrs Thatchers exclusion of the chancellor from OD(SA) the Falklands War Cabinet, for similar reasons, see Sir Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Vol II (Routledge, 2005), pp 2122. 23. Kennedy, op. cit., gives a useful map of the 1930s worldwide defence problems of Britain. See Map 10, p. 291. 24. Chatfield, op. cit., p. 84. 25. An arresting strategic truth often attributed to Admiral Jacky Fisher it does sound like him but actually first uttered by Lord Grey of Fallodon, the Foreign Secretary the same man who also remarked that he saw the lamps going out all over Europe in 1914, not to be re-lit in his lifetime. 26. This is for a combination of reasons. An obvious one is that the major defence industries have shrunk. Britain has only one warship builder, no ability to design a new combat aircraft, much reduced missile manufacturing capacity; and modern naval, air and even land platforms take around twice as long to build as their equivalents in the 1930s. Secondly, the engineering and especially software design skills are running down fast, because of the lack of work to give engineers experience and high demand for such skills in the worldwide economy. A relatively short gap (between five and seven years) in designing and building destroyers and nuclear submarines led to delays of about six years in both programmes as skills were recovered to build only one of each kind of ship per year. Management skills were similarly affected. The task of resurrecting the defence industrial base would be huge and certainly disruptive to the civil economy. Today, there are also rafts of compliance regulations that were absent in the 1930s. It would probably require direction of labour in a time which, by definition, is not one in which we are at war but one in which the skies are darkening. There is of course the option of purchasing off the shelf. There is a mainly American shelf in some areas, although we may have to take our place in the queue; and there are obvious problems of IPR, the ability to adapt and alter capabilities in platforms for which Britain is not the design authority and for which we do not hold the information. Finally, there is a severe infrastructure constraint which may be a determining, limiting factor. Many military bases have been sold off, developed as industrial or residential space and are almost certainly irrecoverable. Modern equipment is hugely complex and requires specialist support arrangements which were simply quite unnecessary in the 1930s and 1940s. (I am indebted to Vice Admiral Blackham for advice on this brief summary of main points.) 27. Central Organisation for Defence, Cmd 6923, October 1946, III, para. 13, pp. 45; IV, para. 20 (d) p. 6.

Gwyn Prins

21

28. Ismay and Jacob, op. cit., para. 72, p. 14; first specified as consideration of questions of defence as a whole by Warrant from Prime Minister Baldwin, 3 Aug 1926, SECRET 714-B, CAB104/12, TNA. 29. Cmnd 6923, op. cit., para. 25, p. 7. 30. Defence policy and global strategy, COS (52) 362, 15 July 1952, DEFE 5/40, NA; for discussion see, Lawrence Freedman, Britain and Nuclear Weapons (Macmillan/RIIA, 1980), p. 3. 31. Cmnd 6923, op. cit., para. 17, p. 5. 32. CID 1207-B, 3 March 1936 Annex B, para. 32, CAB 104/12; Ismay and Jacob, op. cit., para. 29; ESC Study 2011, op. cit., para. 2.29. 33. The Central Organisation of Defence, Cmnd 9315, July 1984, para. 20 (a) is the first occasion where the contemporary blurring of policy with strategy is seen: a strategy and policy grouping, headed by a deputy secretary and consisting of both military and civilian staffs is prescribed there. 34. Central Organisation for Defence, Cmnd 2097, July 1963, para. 26, p. 4; para. 54, p. 9. 35. See Streamlining report, 2007 (an internal MoD study), para. 3.21, p. 15; see also, ESC Study, 2011, op. cit., para. 2.24. The Levene Report suggestion of a strategy forum jointly chaired by PUS and CDS perpetuates this mistake. 36. Cmnd 6923, op. cit., para. 29, p. 8 and para. 32, p. 9; Ismay and Jacob, op. cit., paras. 3744, pp. 810. 37. The Levene Report, 10 June 2011, para. 5.5, pp. 2526 and Key Recommendation 3(b), p. 68. 38. Central Organisation of Defence, Cmnd 476, July 1958, para. 14, p. 5; para. 15, p. 6; and para. 18 (a-c). 39. The human button: deciders and deliverers in P J Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst, 1945-2010 (Penguin, 2010), pp. 31059. 40. Cmnd 2097 (1963), II, para. 9; III, para. 1517. 41. The oath is given in Values and Standards of the British Army, January 2008, para. 8 (that I will in duty bound honestly and faithfully defend her Majesty, her heirs and successors in person, crown and dignity against all enemies) and is glossed at para. 9; the Sovereigns Commission given at Annex to Order in Council 22 March 1927 being revision of Order in Council 5 May 1873 holds to this day. It indicates the reciprocity of

duties and obligations that came to be known informally as the Military Covenant, now shortly to be formalised in statute. 42. Ismay and Jacob, op. cit., para. 37; Ministerial Code, Cabinet Office, May 2010, section V, particularly para. 5.3. 43. First published as On Changes of Ministry in the Fortnightly Review, 15 October 1866, and subsequently in The English Constitution (1867) in Norman St John-Stevas (ed.), op. cit., Vol. V, pp. 32728. 44. C Northcote Parkinson, Parkinsons Law or The Pursuit of Progress (John Murray, 1958). 45. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, op. cit., pp. 33031. He explains what is signified by the rubbish of office more fully, in these words: If it is left to itself, the office will become technical, self-absorbed, self-multiplying. It will be likely to overlook the end in the means; it will fail from narrowness of mind; it will be eager in seeming to do; it will be idle in real doing. He also makes the equally cogent point that the British system he described builds in a reciprocal control upon the quality of ministers, since the non-specialist has to defend his department in public and a fool who has publicly to explain great affairs ... must soon be shown to be a fool. 46. I rely for this comment upon confidential discussions close to the National School of Government as well as to the Whitehall reform processes. 47. The Levene Report, 10 June 2011, para. 1.13, p. 11. 48. Explained further in J J Blackham and G Prins, Why Things Dont Happen: Silent Principles of National Security, RUSI Journal (Vol. 155, No. 4, Aug/Sept 2010), pp. 1422. 49. Defence Committee, Appointment of the Chief of the Defence Staff, Oral and written evidence, HC 600-i, Session 2010-11 Q 3; Defence Committee, The Strategic Defence and Security Review, para. 74, p. 35.

Appendix: The Difficulties of Forecasting Peace

This Appendix reproduces from the National Archives the Appendix which Maurice Hankey composed and caused to be attached to the 1932 Chiefs of Staff sub-committee report to the Committee of Imperial Defence (see p. 8 above). Historical Notes. THE following examples illustrate the difficulties of forecasting peace : I. Five months before the Spanish Armada sailed, Queen Elizabeth dismantled and laid up her fleet at Chatham, and, when the moment for action came, our cause was placed in jeopardy for lack of ammunition and supplies. See Froude, English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century. II. In 1698, after the Peace of Ryswick, King Williams Parliament reduced the army to a peace footing of 7,000 men at a time when the French army was at a strength of 180,000 men. Optimism and pacifism reigned at the festal boards of Englishmen in the Christmas of 1700. But with the New Year these sentiments received a series of rude shocks. In January 1702, the army was recalled to the Colours. There followed the war of the Spanish Succession, lasting until 1713. G. M. Trevelyan, Blenheim III. In 1774 The British reduced the number of seamen in the Navy, and took no serious steps to strengthen their forces in America. War broke out early in the following year. In 1775 Burgoyne wrote from Boston After a fatal procrastination, not only of vigorous measures but of preparations for such, we took a step as decisive as the passage of the Rubicon, and now find ourselves plunged in a most serious war without a single requisition, gun-powder excepted, for carrying it on. G. M. Trevelyan, History of England, p. 553.

24

The British Way of Strategy-Making

IV. Extract from a speech in Parliament by Mr. Pitt, on the 17th February, 1792, during a debate on Public Income and Expenditure : I am not, indeed, presumptuous enough to suppose that when I name fifteen years I am not naming a period in which events may arise which human foresight cannot reach and which may baffle all our conjectures. We must not count with certainty on a continuance of our present prosperity during such an interval; but, unquestionably, there never was a time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, than we may at the present moment. A year later began the War of the French Revolution and Empire, lasting, with one short interval, until 1815. V. The great Exhibition of 1851 was pervaded by a sense of international goodwill and the brotherhood of the human race, which was celebrated by the Poet Laureate in extravagant terms : Breaking their mailed fist and armoured towers, &c. Three years later the Crimean War broke out, and many of our regiments were still armed with the Brown Bess of Waterloo days. G. M. Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century. VI. On the 6th July, 1870, Lord Granville received the Seals of the Foreign Office in Mr. Gladstones first Government. The previous day, between 3 and 4 oclock, Mr. Hammond, the experienced Under-Secretary of the Department, had told him that with the exception of the trouble caused by the recent murder in Greece of Mr. Vyner and his friends by brigands, he had never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign affairs, and that he was not aware of any pressing question which Lord Granville would have to deal with immediately. By the time Lord Granville was addressing the House next day for the first time as Foreign Minister, the sky had already grown dark and the sea of politics was streaked with foam. Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, Life of Lord Granville. A fortnight later the Franco-German war broke out.

Gwyn Prins

25

VII. On the 14 July, 1914, the Committee of Imperial Defence met and, among other routine business, approved the War Book, a new edition of which, by a coincidence, was just completed. There was no mention of any prospect of war. On the 22nd of July the Secretary to the Committee was directed by the Prime Minister, according to the custom then prevailing, to take the Minutes to the King. On the way to Buckingham Palace he called at the Foreign Office to ask the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who was also Chairman of the Sub-Committee that was responsible for the War-Book, whether there was any risk of its being put into operation. The news that day was reassuring, and Sir Arthur Nicolson considered that there was practically no prospect of the War Book being put into operation. On the following day the Times reported optimism in Paris and Berlin more optimistic. M. Poincar was in Petrograd; the Kaiser yachting in the Baltic. It was only on the 24th July, when the terms of the Austrian ultimatum were known, that the situation began to be regarded as serious, and on the 27th July that war was recognised as definitely on the horizon.
th

VIII. In a Memorandum dated the 13th March, 1917, on his visit to Russia, the late Lord Milner assured the British Government that As far as the purely political aspect of the matter is concerned, I have formed the opinion that there is a great deal of exaggeration in the talk about revolution, and especially about the alleged disloyalty of the army. The Russian Revolution broke out the same day. (Signed) M. P. A. HANKEY. 2, Whitehall Gardens, S.W. 1, February 15, 1932.

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The BriTish Way of sTraTegy-making Vital Lessons For Our Times

Gwyn Prins
From the Falklands to Libya, none of the wars in which Britain has engaged was predicted. Not in location, nor in character, nor scale. Surprise is the norm for wars. So how efficiently does government make strategy today to provide for our security in the face of epic geopolitical uncertainties? Very poorly indeed was the verdict given by parliaments two specialised select committees on the 2010 National Security Strategy, and the Strategic Defence and Security Review based on it. If we have become as dangerously unable to make strategy as they find to be the case, then why is that so? How could we do better? Did we ever do better? This timely study documents and explains the progressive loss of clarity in British strategy-making since the Second World War and especially since 1984. It argues that the best first step in such a crisis is always to look to history for help. Using fresh research from the National Archives, Gwyn Prins tells how two largely forgotten men used the structures of the Committee of Imperial Defence to break the Ten Year Rule, to conduct coherent strategic analysis and begin re-armament in the mid 1930s. Lord Chatfield and Lord Hankey gave Churchill the weapons with which to fight in 1940. This study draws vital lessons for our times. It describes key future innovations which could abolish the weaknesses identified by the select committees in current strategymaking. It shows how policy-making and strategy-making can regain harmony. It re-states tried and tested understandings of the core concepts of grand and operational strategy, and of policy. These lessons are a final benefit that we may receive from the experience, example and victory of our predecessors.

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