ABSTRACT
The British patterns of civil-military relations involve relatively well-integrated structures at the interagency level, and even more so in the civil-military interface at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The political leadership has enjoyed low costs of civilian monitoring of the armed forces, which has meant civilian ownership of the military’s functional imperative. The hypothesis of this book argues that these patterns of civil-military relations have an effect on the conduct of operations by affecting the organization, culture and doctrine of the armed forces. This chapter, therefore, mirrors Chapter 4 by analysing these features of the British case. An important aspect of the chapter is to investigate to which functional imperative the structure and culture of the armed forces are adjusted, and to relate that to the literature review on the nature of contemporary conflict. In other words, are the British armed forces fit for purpose in the contemporary strategic context? Emphasis is placed on the cultural and doctrinal aspects of the British armed forces. In 1932, British strategist Basil Henry Liddell Hart described the British way of war as that of the indirect approach, which in its ideal form ‘creates conditions in which the enemy is forced to the inescapable conclusion that defeat has become inevitable before battle has been joined’. He arrived at this conclusion, or normative argument, from a disdain for the massive and suicidal frontal attacks of the First World War, and a romantic view of Britain’s businesslike colonial tradition of war, which had at its heart ‘economic pressure exercised through sea-power’ (Hart cited in Freedman 1993). The British Army’s nineteenth century experience of colonial wars influenced British military culture into the twentieth century. ‘The British way of war, as embodied in the campaigns of Victorian heroes Garnet Wolseley, Frederick Roberts, and Horatio Kitchener, reflected essentially all the British people knew of war’ (Cassidy 2004). Since the formation of the British Army and for the greater part of its history, the principal mission was to acquire and then to police imperial possessions (Thornton 2004b). Thus, in the search for a British way of war, it is in the counter-insurgency type of operations of colonial policing we shall place our focus.
