ABSTRACT
One of my aims through this Official History has been to take the claims and counterclaims made about the origins and conduct of the Falklands War and test them against the available evidence, including the substantial quantities of archive material that I have been able to view. For this reason I appear to have expended many words on what was a relatively short war, and one that was in many respects uncomplicated, with only two belligerents fighting at the end of tenuous supply lines. It is perhaps of scant comfort to readers who have reached the end, to learn that there are areas I still wish that I could have covered in greater detail. I have decided to resist the temptation to conclude with more reflections, save for one. Immediately after the Falklands campaign was successfully concluded I wrote an account of the conflict for an American journal and noted its curiously ‘atavistic’ quality and how in a war in which the physical elements such as terrain and climate loomed as large as the technical ones, the traditional military virtues-of training, stamina and professionalism-could be decisive. At the end of 1982, in a paper for the British International Studies Association, I suggested that in its political aspects the Falklands might turn out to be a precursor of things to come, in the role allotted to the United Nations, the importance of the principle of self-determination, and a line-up that was neither East-West nor North-South, that is it reflected but was not dominated by either the cold war or anti-colonialism. At the time this was greeted with a degree of scepticism, but in retrospect this argument seems justified. Furthermore, with the end of the cold war and the prospect of further great power confrontations, new types of international conflict have demonstrated the continuing importance of the traditional military virtues. So while in many respects this conflict still stands out as an anomaly in recent international history, the last war of a past imperial era, in others it can now be recognised as one of the first of the coming post cold-war era.
