ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the attention paid to the concept of expeditionary operations, particularly but not exclusively by Western navies. Expeditionary operations are not, of course, new. A visitor to St Ann’s Church in the Naval Dockyard in Portsmouth, England, will see physical evidence of this in the epitaphs all over the walls to naval officers who fell (often ashore) in the course of the now-forgotten minor wars and conflicts of the nineteenth century. Rear-Admiral W.Arthur, who served in the Maori War (1845-47), the Kaffir War (1851-52), the Baltic Expedition (1854), the Crimean Campaign (1855) and the China War (1857-60), had a particularly busy but by no means unique career. Perhaps oddly, this preoccupation and the wealth and variety of the experience it generated, attracted little professional interest, even at the time. In the opinion of Sir John Colomb:
It is reasonable to suppose, and past history shows it to be the case, that for every war we have with a civilised power, we have about ten with savages, yet …that fact appears to be totally passed over.2
