1Few of the great thinkers on strategy who wrote before 1918 did so in English, and few of those who have do so since 1945 have been British as opposed to American. From Sun Tzu to Jomini, from Machiavelli to Clausewitz, most of the true originals in strategic thought have not hailed from the United Kingdom. But in one respect at least Britain can claim to have made an original contribution to strategic thought. Strategic culture, the focus of much attention in contemporary strategic studies, has developed an ancestry which traces its roots to the British Isles.

2Not that the connection is immediately obvious. In 1977 an American, Jack Snyder, wrote a report on Russian strategic culture for RAND. Snyder defined strategic culture as “a set of general beliefs, attitudes and behavior patterns with regard to nuclear strategy [that] has achieved a state of semipermanence that places them on the level of ‘culture’ rather than mere ‘policy’”.1 Snyder’s piece was seminal: he asked the strategic theorists to look at Soviet attitudes to war in the light not just of Communism but also of Russia’s geopolitical position and its Tsarist legacy. It was a point well made. Strategic culture took root in political science, and, although Snyder himself has since moderated his position, others— notably Colin Gray—have adopted it with increasing vehemence.2

3Strategic culture explains why strategy does not change, not why it does. It contains strategy within a familiar framework, assuming that strategic culture limits choice and inhibits any adjustment in priorities, despite the fact that both are essential to the making of strategy. It is not a coincidence that its immediate origins lie in the Cold War, or that Snyder was specifically addressing the use of nuclear weapons. For many political scientists nuclear weapons had created a stability within strategy, a position which today seems increasingly untenable.

4What followed from this fixation with continuity was a desire to give strategic culture a pedigree, and political scientists found it in the writings of the British military thinker, Basil Liddell Hart, who in 1932 coined an expression, ‘the British way in warfare’, which can still shape debates on British strategy. The title, however nationally determined, has had international repercussions: in 1973 Russell Weigley adopted it for his study of military thought in the United States, The American Way of War, and – like Liddell Hart’s British version—this one too has shaped subsequent discussion;3 and in 2005 Robert Citino produced The German Way of War. Liddell Hart’s aim was “to show that there has been a distinctively British practice of war, based on experience and proved by three centuries of success”. The practice was “based above all, on mobility and surprise—apt to Britain’s naval conditions and aptly used to enhance her relative strength while exploiting her opponent’s weakness”. Britain’s ‘natural condition’was maritime and ‘her relative strength’ was naval; mobility and surprise were however, not least in this context, associated with land warfare, even if they arose from Britain’s domination of the seas. “This naval body had two arms; one financial which embraced the subsidizing and military provisioning of allies; the other military, which embraced sea-borne operations against the enemy’s vulnerable extremities”.4 So according to Liddell Hart, the British way in warfare was a marriage of maritime power, economic strength and expeditionary warfare. Developed in the aftermath of the First World War, it reflected Liddell Hart’s reaction to that experience, and argued in essence that Britain, instead of creating a European mass army for deployment on the continent, should fight to the last Frenchman.

5The trouble was that the British way in warfare did not reflect reality. In the twentieth century Britain’s historic practice was not what Liddell Hart prescribed. France’s military losses in the First World War were almost twice those of Britain, but Britain still created a mass army and delivered it to Europe. By 1917–18 the army was comparable in size with that of France and it could legitimately argue that it was doing at least as much of the fighting. Indeed this development was precisely that to which Liddell Hart took such strong exception. Britain put a mass army on the continent again in 1939 and in 1944, and it left it there after 1945; elements of it were still there when the twentieth century closed. Liddell Hart’s model of the British way in warfare was derived from the eighteenth century, not his own. Moreover, it ignored the bulk of British military experience in the previous century, between 1815 and 1914, which had no relationship to Europe at all, and was directed to the acquisition and protection of empire.5

6Strategic culture, and British strategic culture in particular, may therefore have a dodgy pedigree, but a central question is whether— despite that—Britain has made a distinctive contribution to strategic thought. It has. That contribution may indeed be shaped by Britain’s geography, its island status and its empire, as well as by its history, but its importance lies not in its relationship to strategic culture, with its presumption of continuity, but to strategic thought proper. To be fair to Liddell Hart, that is exactly where he sought to place it. As he wrote of British military practice in an earlier book, The decisive wars of history, published in 1929, “there is grounds for enquiry whether this military policy does not deserve to be accorded a place in the theory of the conduct of war.”6 That book, which he regularly revisited and revised throughout his life (unlike The British way in warfare), became Strategy: the indirect approach. It has had an influence beyond the confines of the United Kingdom and yet it is shot through with themes derived from his reading of Britain’s history.

7Strategic thought requires a capacity to interrogate strategic practice, to reflect on the experience of the application of theory, and to do so in a way which produces ideas which are applicable beyond historical boundaries in terms of widening our understanding of war and the utility of war. Such an approach embodies the possibility of change, not just the straitjacket of continuity. Britain has made such a contribution, but its most original author was not Liddell Hart, who in this respect was no more than a plagiarist and populariser, a man who lifted ideas from others without acknowledgement.7 The real originator of a distinctively British approach to strategy was Julian Corbett, and his principal insights are to be found in Some principles of maritime strategy, published in 1911.8

8Corbett made a number of essential contributions to strategic thought which built on Clausewitz, whom he admired and quoted extensively, but which took the understanding of strategy far beyond Clausewitz’s (to our ears) narrow definition of it, “the use of the battle for the purposes of the war”. Indeed Corbett was notorious in 1911 precisely for his scepticism about the importance of battle at all. He argued that command of the sea was a chimera, and that rather the aim was the command of its communications, both to enable and protect trade, and also to facilitate an invasion of enemy territory by the army. To do at least some of this a navy might have to disperse its assets, not concentrate them. It could not follow that fleet action was the principal goal of naval strategy. The notion that a battle squadron of the fleet was intended for battle only, he wrote, was “an idea of peace and the study”.9

9Corbett’s central and distinctive departure point was of course clear in his title: it was maritime. The great nineteenth-century thinkers, being continental Europeans, concentrated their attentions on armies which were determined to defend or to cross land frontiers. Corbett set out less to address naval warfare than to put it into the context of mainstream strategic thought, and he did so in a way that was much more productive (and still carries more current relevance) than did Alfred Thayer Mahan two decades earlier. Privately Corbett criticised Mahan for what he called his “continentalist” modes of thought, by which he meant the determination to attack the enemy’s battle fleet and to put that at the centre of naval strategy.10

10Corbett saw maritime warfare as superimposed on naval warfare, because, as he put it, man lives on the land and therefore the issue is how sea power is brought to bear in man’s principal medium of existence. Maritime strategy, he wrote, “determines the part the fleet must play in relation to the action of land forces; for it scarcely needs saying that it is almost impossible that a war can be decided by naval action alone”.11 Its prime function was to sort out relations between the army and the navy in a plan of war. The army’s initial role might be to assist the fleet to get command of the sea as a preliminary to achieving effects on land; alternatively the fleet’s task might be to forward military action, and to enable an island power to sustain a military contingent overseas.

11It is Corbett’s focus on maritime strategy which distinguishes him from Liddell Hart. The latter, despite his arguments about the British way in warfare, never devoted sustained attention to war at sea. The conclusion to his history of the First World War, The real war, first published in 1930, two years before his development of the idea of the British way in warfare, anticipated it by asserting that the Royal Navy, thanks to its blockade of Germany, had done more to win the war for the allies than any other factor. “The fundamental cause of the Armistice”, he wrote, was “Britain’s sea power, her historic weapon, the deadliest weapon which any nation wielded throughout history.”12 And yet neither the chapters of the book itself nor its bibliography reveal any sustained engagement with economic warfare or maritime strategy. Their focus is almost exclusively on the operations of land warfare, and Liddell Hart’s own enthusiasms and expertise were concentrated on the army. Paradoxically, a man who studied the conduct of war on land wanted to contain and limit the British army’s own practice of it.

12Corbett’s focus on maritime strategy led to four original contributions to strategic thought more generally, which continue to resonate to the present day. First, he introduced the idea of limited war. The orthodox view takes Robert Osgood as the father this body of thought. Osgood’s Limited War (1957) was inspired by the recent example of the Korean War to show that the superpowers could confront each other in war without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons and without the effects spilling outside a defined geographic area. Osgood does not seem to have been aware of what Corbett had said about limited war, although Corbett—like Osgood—had used Clausewitz’s distinction between two sorts of war as his departure point. In his note of 10 July 1827, published as a preface to On War, Clausewitz had differentiated between a war “to overthrow the enemy—to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent” and a war that ends in a negotiated settlement.13 Clausewitz said little directly about limited war itself in the main body of his text, but Corbett developed the thought. Part of his thinking was moral. The less important the object, the less value a state attaches to it, and so the less the means to be applied to its achievement. Morality therefore had a utilitarian value, reflected in economy of force: as Clausewitz too had recognised, not all war was “absolute” war. But the principal justification for limited war was geographical. The distinction between the two sorts of war was more organic for maritime empires. Corbett argued that “limited war is only permanently possible to island Powers or between Powers which are separated by sea, and then only when the Power desiring limited war is able to command the sea to such a degree as to be able not only to isolate the distant object, but also to render impossible the invasion of his home territory”.14

13Limited war explained why Britain, possessing only a weak army, had been able to expand its empire at the expense of greater military powers. It also explained the value to Britain of what Corbett called “wars of intervention”.15 These could include wars in which Britain committed a force limited in size in a country in which it had no vital interest in order to aid the chief belligerent—what Corbett described as wars of ‘limited interference in unlimited war’. The latter was of course what Liddell Hart would call the British way in warfare, which was itself in essence a form of limited war. As Liddell Hart wrote in The decisive wars of history, a policy of limited war “is, indeed, bound up with the history of the British Empire, and has repeatedly proved a lifebuoy to Britain’s allies and a permanent benefit to itself”.16 Corbett wrote in terms which anticipated Liddell Hart by two decades: “What may be called the British or maritime form is in fact the application of the limited method to the unlimited form, as ancillary to the larger operations of our allies—a method which has usually been open to us because the control of the sea has enabled us to select a theatre in effect truly limited.”17

14Our modern use of the term “wars of intervention” is couched in rhetoric which is derived from international law and the international humanitarian law. Intervention in another state requires in most cases a United Nations Security Council resolution, and its justification often resides in the responsibility to protect innocent individuals from genocide or war crimes. So the political context is not that of coalition warfare between European powers, as it had been in the eighteenth century (a period which influenced Corbett’s thinking as much as it did that of Liddell Hart). However, as in the eighteenth century, Britain in the first decade of the twenty-first was still projecting limited force at a distance, using air power as well as sea power, in conjunction with allies and in what was an ancillary mode. Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were all wars of intervention: all were also—for Britain—limited.

15Corbett was viciously attacked for his ideas about limited war in his own day, especially in the face of the threat from Germany before 1914. Spenser Wilkinson, the first professor of military history at Oxford, in Corbett’s terminology a “continentalist” who, like Mahan, favoured fleet action, used his review of Some principles of maritime strategy in the Morning Post to warn naval officers of the dangers of reading the book.18 However, unlike Liddell Hart, Corbett was not being definitive or dogmatic: he did not argue that limited war was applicable to all Britain’s wars. Here he could call in evidence his second major contribution to strategic thought: his distinction between what he called minor strategy and major strategy. Minor strategy was what most of his contemporaries, following Clausewitz’s definition, understood by strategy: the use of the battle for the purposes of the war. Today we would call this the operational level of war. Corbett identified major strategy as above this. In 1923 J.F.C. Fuller, another Briton, would call major strategy grand strategy, and this title— which Corbett himself used on occasion19—has stuck. Liddell Hart in particular took it up and developed it.20 Major strategy encompassed all the levers of national power, economic, social and political as well as military; it included relations with allies, the need to prepare for war in peacetime and, once at war, to coordinate operations in different theatres of war.

16Today we more often call “major strategy” simply “strategy”, and so use the latter word in a very different and much broader sense from what Clausewitz or Jomini meant by it. Again Corbett’s point has contemporary resonance. Three British parliamentary committees addressed the issue of strategy between 2009 and 2012, the House of Commons Defence Committee, the House of Commons Public Administration Committee and the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the National Security Strategy. The second of these, whose report was published in 2010, enquired whether Britain still ‘did’grand strategy, asking if not, why not, and, if it should do it, how it should. The answers to the questions were negative, but successive governments made at least some progress in satisfying the parliamentary demand. In 2008 the Labour government under Gordon Brown drew up a National Security Strategy, and in 2010 the coalition government of David Cameron formed a National Security Council.

17The third significant contribution which Corbett made to strategic thought was his recognition of the role of law in shaping strategy. Significantly Clausewitz had said almost nothing on the subject. Corbett was trained as a lawyer and was called to the bar. In 1909, by which time he had been lecturing on the Naval War Course at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich for seven years, Britain faced a critical moment in its capacity to use sea power in a future war. The declaration of London sough to curtail belligerent rights at sea in war, especially by tightening the definition of contraband and addressing the doctrine of continuous voyage. The latter covered the legal right to seize contraband carried in neutral ships to a neutral power but due for onward transmission to a belligerent. For Britain, if it were neutral in a future war, measures designed to keep the list of contraband short and to prevent the application of continuous voyage, would be advantageous. Its maritime supremacy and its merchant tonnage would ensure that it would reap commercial benefits as a cross-trader in war. However, if Britain were itself a belligerent, the reverse would apply. Its capacity to use its power at sea to wage economic warfare by establishing a blockade would be limited. Corbett threw his weight behind the move not to ratify the declaration of London in 1909, and eventually the House of Lords followed his course and rejected it.21

18Corbett saw that law was central to British strategic thought. He appreciated that the fact that Britain possessed the maritime strength to do what it wanted to do on the high seas did not in itself warrant it putting international law to one side. Instead the reverse applied: Britain was required to respect the law and to apply it precisely because of its naval preponderance. Moreover, by doing so, Britain was better able to shape the law to suit its strategic priorities. His discussion of blockade was shot through with legal analogies and legal cases.

19When Britain went to war in 1914 it gave as one of its reasons for doing so the need to uphold international law. By its invasion of Belgium, Germany had infringed both the rights of small nations and the obligations of international treaties. The members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History declared in 1914: “We must fight Prussia; and we fight it in the noblest cause for which men can fight. That cause is the public law of Europe.”22 Once at war, Britain was therefore under a greater self-imposed pressure to observe the law. Admittedly the context was not the same as it had been in relation to the declaration of London: in 1914 international law did not have the power to prevent one sovereign state from going to war with another, but it did aim to modify the behaviour of one power in relation to another once war had broken out. So, whereas Germany could reasonably argue that Britain’s reason for going to war lacked legal sanction, Britain knew that how it chose to fight that war should observe a growing body of international law.

20International law was one component of the War Course on which Corbett had taught at Greenwich. Britain used the law to shape its conduct of hostilities and exploited its observance of the law and Germany’s disregard of it for propaganda purposes. Before 1917 the effects of Britain’s determination to harness international law for belligerent purposes were felt particularly in the United States. In its dealings with Washington, Britain’s manipulation of neutral rights rested on the advice of international lawyers, and it stressed German breaches of the Hague conventions and the atrocities committed by the German army in Belgium. Nowhere was the appearance that Britain was conforming to international law more important than at sea. Britain’s refusal to ratify the declaration of London and its imposition of orders in council to institute a blockade of Germany in 1915 enabled Germany to argue that Britain, not Germany, was the power which believed might was right. In some respects, therefore, the accusations levelled against German militarism were countered by German charges against British navalism. At the end of the war, therefore, J.A. Hall, naval officer and barrister, was at pains to argue that the British blockade “was a lawful and reasonable application of the historical principles of international law to modern conditions”.23

21Britain’s need to conduct a blockade at all rested on the fourth of Corbett’s contributions to strategic thought, the function of democracy in war. To end a modern war, Corbett argued, a state has “to exert pressure on the citizens and their collective life”.24 Clausewitz had recognised the role of the people in war in his manifesto of February 1812, when he hoped that at least Prussia and, ideally, the German nation as a whole would emulate the example of Spain and rise up against Napoleon and French tyranny. However, such ideas, with their empowerment of the people in relation to the monarchy, carried revolutionary implications. He made reference to the role of the people in his section on the ‘trinity’ in war in book I of On War, and to the nation in arms and its possible future effect on war in book VI, that on the defence. But after 1815, constrained by the king and his conservatism, he was more cautious in his utterings. His ideas on the mobilisation of the people found little resonance in mainstream strategic thought over the remainder of the nineteenth century. Most pre-1914 military writers focused their thoughts on the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces, and marginalised the effect of popular insurrection.

22In the First World War, however, Britain followed Corbett’s injunction. It appealed to the German people over the heads of their government. The blockade was the stick with which to beat them for their loyalty to the Kaiser. It was accompanied by British propaganda which lampooned him, while recognising that his subjects could be agents of democratic change. The blockade proved to be a blunt instrument, unable to distinguish between genuine contraband of war and food supplies destined for non-combatants. It was increasingly designed to starve the population of Germany, rather than to deprive the German government of supplies vital to the maintenance of the war effort. But it therefore also fed on the hope that the German people would be pushed into revolution, so overthrowing the Kaiser, installing a democratic government and seeking peace with the allies.

23On one reading of the events in 1918 that was indeed how the war indeed. In Germany this interpretation suited the army, anxious to argue that it had not been defeated in the field but subjected to ‘a stab in the back’ from a population starved into socialism. In Britain the stab in the back suited the advocates of sea power and underpinned the “British way in warfare”. Liddell Hart wrote in 1929, in an argument that he was to repeat but not develop in his histories of the First World War, that the blockade’s “existence is the surest answer to the question whether but for the revolution the German armies could have stood firm on their own frontiers. For even if the German people, roused to a supreme effort in visible defence of their own soil, could have held the allied armies at bay the end could only have been postponed—because of the grip of sea-power, Britain’s historic weapon”.25 So, somewhat improbably, German militarism and British navalism found themselves colluding in their explanation of how the war had been lost and won. In Britain, although the argument that the same process could be repeated next time round remained central to strategy in the inter-war years, it was the Royal Air Force which really appropriated the assumptions derived from Corbett’s strategic thought. Corbett had seen the effects of blockade as slow to take effect,26 and this need to develop a form of economic war which could achieve its results before they had been trumped by what happened on land drove much of the thinking on the subject in the 1930s. British intelligence sought to identify key commodities whose absence could cripple German production and so transform blockade from a blunt instrument into a rapier, agile and speedy.27 The Royal Air Force had it both ways. Bombing promised precision effects (which in practice it struggled to deliver), while being able to hit the civilian population if it missed Germany’s economic infrastructure. The latter, it was widely anticipated, would cause the sort of domestic chaos which reflected the sorts of hopes that many had pinned on naval blockade before 1914.28 In 1924 Liddell Hart followed Giulio Douhet in arguing that bombing cities would precipitate first revolution and then a speedy overthrow of the enemy’s government.29 The strategic bombing offensive as conducted by Bomber Command rested on the presumption that if the German population suffered enough it would overthrow Hitler, just as it was believed to have turned against Wilhelm II as a result of the blockade.

24It did not. However, the contribution of democratised societies to the conduct of war remained important to strategic thought. Nuclear deterrence rested on the idea that the civilian population could be held to account for the behaviour of the states of which they were members. Indeed, increasingly, deterrence relied on sparing the governments of nations under attack so that they could negotiate, while hitting their peoples with devastating strikes against cities. The perspectives applied by both sides to the wars since 9/11 have reflected their democratisation. Al Qaeda and Islamic jihadist websites hold the peoples of democratic states accountable for the actions of their governments as they launch terrorist attacks. The United States’s strategy for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 rested on the potential separation of Saddam Hussein from those he ruled, just as the allied blockade and then bombing of Germany had endeavoured to divide the people first from the Kaiser and then from Hitler. If the allies toppled Saddam Hussein, the belief ran, the Iraqi people would welcome their invaders.

25So “war among the people” has a much longer pedigree than the recent impact of that phrase as applied by another British strategic thinker, General Sir Rupert Smith, suggests.30 And democratisation in war works both ways. Smith’s attention was on the need for armies to recognise that their fight must win the support of the population in whose midst they are waging war. But in democratic societies, elected governments need also to consider the views of their constituents in “wars of intervention”. In 2010 the British Prime minister, David Cameron, said that Britain would end its war in Afghanistan in 2015, and on 20 November made a point that he made several times subsequently that the British public expected a clear date for withdrawal and was right to do so. The impression he created was that domestic opinion in Britain was more important than the situation in Afghanistan itself.31

26The place of democracy in strategic thought is of course not to be seen as an exclusively British contribution to strategic thought: nor should the idea of limited war be seen any longer in this light, or the importance of grand strategy, or the place of law in strategy. All of them play their part in the formation of strategies of nations and of the coalitions to which they contribute. That is exactly why they cannot be subsumed under the heading of strategic culture. They are shared throughout Europe and in the western world more broadly, precisely because the geopolitical strategic assumption on which Clausewitz rested his strategic thought, that Europe was the cockpit of war, no longer applies. Like Britain, all Europe now projects military power at a distance, and it does so to achieve greater objects than its limited means suggest are commensurate with its efforts. Law is fundamental to how that military power is applied, and democracy or democratisation is a tool of war as much as the object for which war is fought.

27This conclusion does not mean that Corbett is today more influential in Europe than Clausewitz. Nor is it designed to set up Corbett as an alternative to Clausewitz: Clausewitz still matters if we are concerned to find a common strategic inheritance in Europe. Corbett’s work is shot through with Clausewitzian influences, and Corbett did more than any other British thinker of his generation to think through Clausewitz’s stress on the relationship between war and policy, as well as one of its most important consequences for strategic thought, the distinction between limited and unlimited war.

28 The central point to be extracted from Corbett’s debt to Clausewitz is that what mattered to both of them was the relationship between theory and practice in strategy. We must be wary of assuming that current strategic practices are the norm, that they have the continuity of strategic culture. There is no guarantee, and indeed little probability, that current strategic practices will apply in future wars. To interrogate our current practices, and so to understand them, we need strategic theory, not strategic culture. This was the dialectic that mattered for Corbett, as it had done for Clausewitz.