The British Generals Talk: A Review Essay

GeneralsTalk1 A Review Essay Brian Bond, British Militay Policy Between the Two World Wars, (New York: The Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press 1980),419 pp. During the final year of the Great War (1918), it was the British Army that played the principal role in the Allied offensives that led to the collapse of Germany. In those final offensives the British Army took 188,700prisonersand 2,840 guns while the French, American, and Belgian Armies together captured 196,700 prisoners and 3,775guns. Approximately two decadeslater, on the eve of World War 11, the British Army was in a woeful state, barely capable of influencing events on the continent. There were few divisions and even those were poorly trained and inadequatelyequipped.2 The desperate state of the Army is reflected in the diary of General Ironside, who was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff for the first nine months of the war. Writing in September 1938, at the time of Munich, he remarked: That I should possibly have to go on ative service with such an Army at the end of my long service seems almost tragic to me. No Army, no tactical doctrine, and no co-operation with the R.A.F., no material, and hopeless confusion as to A.A. [anti-aircraft]Defence in England.3 In British MiZitay Policy between the Two World Wars, Brian Bond traces the evolution of the British Army during the inter-war period, outlining in detail the decline of that army in the face of the growing German threat. He does I am grateful to the following people for their helpful comments and suggestions: Michael E. Brown, Eliot Cohen, Michael I. Handel, Barry Posen,Stephen P. Rosen, and JackL. Snyder. John1.Mearsheimer is a Fellow at Hnmard University's Center for International Studies. 1. JohnTerraine, Ordeal of Victoy (NewYork Lippincott, 1963), p. 480. 2. For an excellent description of the state of the British Army on the eve of World War 1 1 , see Brian Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (New York: The Qarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1980),chapter 11. 3. Time Unguarded: The Ironside Diaries, 1937-2940, ed. Colonel Roderick Macleod and Denis Kelly (New York David McKay, 1 % 2 ) , p. 60.Also see Chief of Staff: The Diaries of LieutenantGeneral Sir H e n y Pownall, ed. Brian Bond (London:Leo Cooper, 1972),Volume I. lnternntionnl Security, Summer 1981 (Vol.6, No. 1)0162-2889/81/010165-20 $OZ.SO/O @ 1981by the President and Fellowsof Harvard College and the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology. 165 International Security I 166 an excellentjob, and his book promises to stand as the definitive work on a subject which, until now, has received little attenti~n.~ Bond, however, is concerned with more than mere description. He is also interested in determining why the British Army was so ill-prepared for a war that had been looming for years. Specifically, he wants to know why “Britain went to war without a single effective armoured division or a coherent doctrine of armoured warfare.”5In essence, this is a book that dealswith the determinants of military force structure, a subject that has received considerable attention in the United States during the past two decades. Although Bond is an historian concerned with a single case, his argumentswill be of great interest to social scientists and policy analysts concerned with the origins of force posture and doctrine. What Determines Force Structure? What is the principal determinantof force structure?There are basically three schools of thought on the question. The first is the Marxist school, which arguesthat the shape of a nation’s militaryreflectsits internal socio-economic structure.6National security policy is not the result of a rational assessment of foreign threats but is instead designed in response to class conflicts. The second school focuses on bureaucratic politics and thus shares the Marxist belief that domestic factors determine force structure. Proponents of this secondschoolmaintainthat conflictamongbureaucrats, whose main purpose is to further the interests of their organization, is the key to understanding 4. Aside from Bond’s book, the best examination of the British Army in the 1930s is N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, Volume 1...