ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the development of British and American military thought during the twentieth century. Napoleon’s tactical and operational successes were to ensure that the decisive battle of annihilation would subsequently be held up as the epitome of strategic goals by the nineteenth-century military mind. Many of the British Army’s most harrowing experiences during the First World War resulted from unsuccessful attempts to superimpose the Napoleonic model of battle onto modern operational conditions. By the outbreak of the Second World War, neither the British nor the US army possessed a wholly appropriate doctrine for the employment of their armoured forces. The open terrain of the North African Desert was in many respects well-suited to the employment of tanks, and the early battles fought against General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps reflected a new British preoccupation with the mobility that armoured forces conferred.
