Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and the Lessons of War in the 20th Century (review)

The product of a conference organised by the British army's Strategic and Combat Studies Institute in 2003, the volume is intended to examine the ability to adapt to different levels of conflict. Primarily, like most major conventional armies, the British army has had little real experience of major war, its "bread and butter" being various forms of low intensity conflict. Thus, the comment of the much-maligned Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir George Milne, in 1926 that the First World War had been "abnormal" represented the common experience of what was essentially a frontier constabulary. Soldiers, however, tend to believe that they exist to wage large-scale conflict and, on occasions, the allure of "real war" has also afflicted the British. Doctrine has never been a strong point and the army managed to adopt the "British Military Doctrine" for the operational level of war in 1989 just as the power of the most obvious likely conventional opponent was crumbling across Eastern Europe. The assumption, as Hew Strachan phrases it in his introduction, has often been that "shifting down the scale seemed to be an easier task than shifting up it," so preparing for major conflict was also adequate preparation for low intensity conflict. Frank Kitson challenged such assumptions in the 1970s and, as Colin McInnes notes in his essay on the First Gulf War, Peter de la Billière pointedly remarked in 1991, "I am not a BAOR man myself."

Colin McInnes and David French, in his essay on the interwar period, both note that the army has a tradition of "muddling through" in confronting new challenges. More often than not, however, it is the lack of resources that has led to difficulties. Certainly, transition from one kind of conflict to another has not been straightforward and, as has been previously observed in connection with counter-insurgency, the army has tended to suffer from historical amnesia and a lack of an institutional memory. There is value in the historical essays by French, Edward Spiers on the pre-1914 period, and Daniel Marston on the application of the lessons of Burma to the Malayan Emergency—though he misses that Briggs had also served in the Tharawaddy revolt in Burma in the 1930s. Simon Ball finds that the Falklands war had little real impact while McInnes believes that the manoeuvrist emphasis of the latter Cold War years was of some benefit in the Gulf. David Benest's essay on the difficult transition from the experience of Aden to that of Northern Ireland is long on background, but makes an interesting, if controversial, argument on the need for a more robust approach to counter-insurgency in the future, not least in terms of the continued likelihood of serving alongside coalition partners whose approach is itself very different from traditional British methods. In a sense, therefore, while there is the issue of how far the army is now still capable of waging a major war, Benest also raises crucial questions with regard to current deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.