My Inaugural Lecture: ‘Merrie England’: 21st Century Military History

Economic Statecraft and Strategy

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1930s, British Foreign Policy, Economic Statecraft, money, Political economy, Putin, Russia, Strategy, UK Strategy, Ukraine, War

Here’s a link to the paper I submitted to the House of Commons Liaison Committee inquiry, ‘Scrutiny of Strategic Thinking in Government’, October 2023:

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/124953/html/

21st Century Strategy

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government, Putin, Russia, Strategy, War

Jonathan Boff, 20 December 2022

This paper offers some preliminary thoughts on making strategy in the twenty-first century. It focusses on the British example, because that is the one I know best, but I hope that there may be lessons here that apply to other Western powers up to and including the USA. It does 3 things. First, it starts with some high-level thoughts about conflict today and some of the problems of making strategy we face. It argues that the real lessons of our recent strategic failures, in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, but also in Libya, Syria and, it increasingly appears, the Sahel and Somalia, are, that although the nature of war itself has not in fact changed, we need to change the way we think about it. We need to think about conflict less as the rational ‘continuation of politics by other means’ and more as a realm of ‘radical uncertainty.’ We have spent too long worrying about the mechanisms and processes by which we make strategy, and not enough time working out what’s really going on here. In particular the model which sees us pursuing permanent national interests through an ends-ways-means framework with pre-defined and carefully delimited roles for civilian politicians and civil servants, and for officers of the defence force, no longer applies. The world of permanent national interests, existing above and beyond the political process, no longer exists in most contexts. Consequently, the model of civilian control of the military we unconsciously adhere to, whereby statesmen identify the ends, and make available the means, while generals choose the ways, no longer apply.Secondly, the paper will introduce two Russian doll case studies – one fits inside the other – of how the British government tried to frame integrated strategy with mixed success during a previous period of sub-threshold competition, leading up to and then during the First World War. These case studies demonstrate some of the problems involved with making strategy, and in particular the need to find a balance between sometimes competing interests. They also display different ways of confronting those problems, and in fact rather different results. Then, thirdly, the paper will try to pull out some of the lessons which emerge, about integration, cohesion, exit plans and the need to approach strategy as a political art.

Let us begin, therefore, by thinking about the character of war and strategy, and let’s start with the ‘grey zone’. It is a phrase we hear a lot, but it’s a concept that I must confess I have a few problems with: I don’t think it’s new; I’m not sure its boundaries are very well defined; and I worry about mission creep. But, nonetheless, it contains two important truths: 1) competition between powers takes multiple forms, of which war is only one; and 2) making strategy in the modern world is no longer a job solely for generals, admirals and air marshals. It requires an integrated approach. We in the West have, since at least the 1950s, subscribed to a model of civil-military relations which leaves policy to the politicians, strategy to the generals, planning to their staffs, and execution to the soldiers, sailors and airmen in the front line. That model described pretty well how the UK and USA had fought the Second World War, and laid down a template for civilian control of the military which served us pretty well during the Cold War. The scale and immediacy of the existential threats the West faced during the twentieth century meant we were engaged in conflicts of unlimited ends, pursued with unlimited means in unlimited ways. The national interest was clear and unconditional, which simplified decision-making, promoted national unity, and aligned right with might.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, things became more complicated at two levels. First, the idea that the national interest is clear and the ends of policy are uncontroversial, if it were ever true in Churchill’s Britain, say (which it wasn’t, by the way: history has just flattened out the arguments which occurred), no longer holds. There never was, and never is, an objective permanent national interest, waiting to be discovered, which we will all unite around just as soon as we find it and see it for what it is. The national interest is always subjective and contested. National interests emerge only from political debate, and since that debate never ceases, circumstances are always changing, and our ways and means are fluctuating, our ends are never finally fixed. This is especially the case in the complex multipolar international environment, shorn of the simplifying and unifying dynamics of the Manichean century just past, that we inhabit. Secondly, and partly as a consequence, the assumption that ends are separate from ways and means, if that were ever true, is so no longer. Existential threats justified unlimited mobilisations of resources, and unlimited applications of violence, for the achievement of unlimited ends, which the lower stakes of today do not. It is impossible in our less dangerous world to define ends without understanding what ways and means make possible, just as the ends one hopes to achieve must affect the means we make available, and the methods we employ. Ends, ways and means are intricately bound up with each other in complex reciprocal relationships and feedback loops, some of them hard to predict, and all of them open to challenge and debate.

This chimes with the diagnosis for our difficulties in, for instance, Iraq and Afghanistan, laid out in the rich literature from the Chilcot Report to Ben Barry’s recent book.[1] Underlying everything, much of this analysis suggests, was an end, ways and means problem: most of what went wrong can be explained by some mixture of setting the wrong objectives, choosing the wrong methods, and/or allocating insufficient or inappropriate resources. If the diagnosis is correct, however, I’m less sure about the cure that is proposed. The solution, we are told, lies in a clearer definition of ends and better integration of ends, ways and means. We can, in other words, do better next time by coming up with better civil-military processes and by addressing the large wicked problem the same way we always do: by breaking it down into smaller, simpler, sub-problems which we hope can be resolved, delegating them to specialists, and betting that the parts will fit back together at the end.

We are in danger of learning the wrong lessons from recent strategic setbacks for the West. The underlying problem we’re missing, I think, is not that war itself has changed, but that we need to change the way we think about it. We need to move away from Clausewitz’s famous view that war is ‘an instrument of policy, which makes it subject to reason alone’. That makes us think of war too mechanically.[2] The idea that war is ‘the continuation of policy by other means’ has an obvious attraction to the politicians or civil servants involved in strategic decision-making, but it is a rather top-down, mandarin, and bloodless perspective.[3] It bears little relation to how most humans through history have experienced war. For the ordinary human, cowering in a cellar under enemy bombardment, for instance, the politics of war feel very distant and distinctions between limited and unlimited wars seem nothing more than semantics when you’re wondering if your son will make it back from the standpipe past the snipers. We need instead to pay more attention to another leg of Clausewitz’s famous trinity: ‘the play of chance and probability within which the creative spirit is free to roam.’[4] The defining characteristic of war is not policy, but what economists and mathematicians call ‘radical uncertainty’.[5] People caught up in a war have no idea, and no way of knowing, what the future holds. In this state, as Keynes put it ‘there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.’[6] We’re not managing risk, as is sometimes claimed.[7] We are living with uncertainty. And that requires a very different, intuitive rather than mechanically rational approach. We need, as Suzanne Raine argues, to spend less time ‘answering the question “What is going to happen next?”’ and more trying to understand ‘what is happening now and what we need to do to change what happens next. Instead of trying to predict the future, we should be embracing uncertainty and using analysis, monitoring, warning and action to bring about a different version of the future (ideally one we recognise and like). We want the gloomy prediction to turn out to be wrong. We should focus on how we shape the future we want, rather than trying to achieve the impossible which is to forecast the future.’[8]

Strategy today requires an integrated view which sees all the parts of the puzzle at once, and making it is an unending process. You can’t do it every five years, stick a plan on the shelf, and forget about it. Instead, we need a robust ongoing process for thinking about and debating strategy. The common complaint that periodic defence reviews tend to be ‘led by resources rather than requirements’ instead of the other way around, rather misses the point.[9] There is no correct order for the consideration of ends, ways and means. The three cannot be disentangled. They must all be considered together. The idea that politicians alone make policy, informed by objective specialist advice from the military and civil service, is as unrealistic as the dream of carving out apolitical operational or tactical spaces within which soldiers can get on with their business free from political interference.[10]

Seeing war primarily as the domain of radical uncertainty, rather than of political calculation, would have some significant practical advantages. It would help us remember the effect on ordinary humans of the decisions we take, and so would reinforce the ethical foundations of our strategy, for example. Limited wars allow us to merge values and interests as existential conflicts do not. This is important in itself and helps generate the moral authority which is vital to maintaining support both with the domestic public and in the modern international community.

But the practical implications, of changing the emphasis of how we view war, from an extension of the calculus to a world epitomised by radical uncertainty, are not straightforward. It calls for a different approach to strategy; a re-engineered machinery to generate it; making sure that those involved in that machinery are adequately prepared to play their part, able to see problems in the round, to deploy highly developed intuition, and to tolerate sky-high levels of ambiguity; and we will need engaged citizens who are fully educated about the constraints on strategy, and the opportunities and threats it brings.

So much for high-level lessons from twenty-first century war. I’d like to explore now two closely entwined examples of strategy formulation in sub-threshold competition: specifically, the rivalry between Britain and Germany in the early years of the twentieth century. The first, very briefly, is the famous naval arms race. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain occupied a very similar position to that which the United States does now: she was the only global superpower. One of the pillars on which her position was built was maritime super-dominance, with a navy stronger than the next two Great Power rivals put together. Further, 55% of the world’s ocean-going merchant vessels sailed under the British flag; British yards led the world in naval engineering and built 60% of the world’s shipping; and Britain enjoyed a near-monopoly of ship chartering, insurance, and indeed the financing of world trade, through the City. In 1898 Admiral Tirpitz persuaded the Kaiser to begin a huge naval construction programme designed to build a fleet capable of mounting a threat to the Royal Navy. This was not just an attempt by Germany to challenge the UK’s battleship supremacy at sea, but a technological, industrial, financial, and indeed cultural, competition for power and prestige which transfixed the world.[11] It was the space race of its time.

At first sight, the moment seemed inviting for the Germans. British imperial confidence was on the ebb, undermined by the sense (correct) that her economic lead was being rapidly eroded by the growth especially of American and German industry, by the huge effort it had taken to suppress the Boers in the second South African War 1899-1902, and by the speed with which military technology was changing and the spiralling cost of the weapons needed to sustain the empire. To build the most advanced battleship in the world, Warrior, cost £330,000 in 1860; £1 million in 1899; and Dreadnought, launched in 1906, cost £2.5 million – all in a world of generally stable prices or even deflation. By 1902, however, the Admiralty had spotted the German threat; the government began a diplomatic offensive to reduce commitments overseas. They appeased the USA and signed alliances with Japan, France and Russia. In 1904 First Sea Lord Sir ‘Jackie’ Fisher radically reconfigured the navy to save money and modernise. He commissioned a radical leap forward in battleship design with Dreadnought, a ship built and brought into service within 14 months which was bigger, faster, more heavily armed and armoured than anything afloat and which instantly made every warship afloat obsolete.

Fisher’s genius was to see that taking the technological lead in this way would increase, rather than reduce, British superiority, in two main ways. First, the strength and sophistication of British shipbuilding was such, and industry and Admiralty so closely interwoven, that Britain would always be able to build better ships cheaper and faster than any rival. Secondly, Britain was better able to mobilise the financial resources required to build more ships than Germany and maintain her lead. German dreadnoughts took three years to build, rather than under 2; cost 30% more than British ones; even so the quality was compromised; and capacity constraints lead to subsequent ships of the same class costing more rather than less. German naval spending more than doubled between 1906 and 1914, while Britain’s went up only 28%. Britain, where income tax was well established and the need for the navy thoroughly understood by the electorate, was able to fund that increase through direct taxation (indeed, she was able to fund the first old age pensions and national insurance, at the same time, too). Germany had a less flexible fiscal base and an army, rather than navy, tradition. Consequently she was forced to finance the extra expenditure by borrowing: the national debt doubled by 1914. Defence spending drove the resignation of the finance minister in 1912 and created a need for fiscal reform which threatened the fragile constitutional equilibrium between the Reichstag and the individual German states. By 1913, these problems, were becoming too much. The programme was suspended and money was diverted to the Army. Britain had seen off the German naval challenge.

What had the Germans done wrong? Lots, but let me pick out just three things. First, rather than targeting areas of British weakness, they challenged them head on in a domain where the British not only had significant competitive advantages but had over 200 years of experience and a determination not to be beaten at their own game. Secondly, German objectives were a mush of competing ideas, inconsistently pursued, with insufficient effort put in to build public support for what was being attempted. And thirdly, – and this is closely related – decision-making was highly fragmented. Bismarck had created a system of government for Germany, based on ‘divide and rule’, which only he could operate. His departure left the Kaiser as the only person able to make it pull together. But Wilhelm II lacked Bismarck’s genius, (and that’s being polite), and was incapable of sustained scrutiny of what his ministers were up to, much less of directing a consistent strategy. Strategy formulation rapidly degenerated into courtiers manoeuvring around the throne.

Why did Britain succeed? There were several reasons: the strength and sophistication of British ship design and the shipbuilding industry; close links between that industry and the Admiralty; superior scientists and engineers; deeper financial resources and public support. British strategy was consistent and thought-through, although interestingly that was the product, not of formal decision-making structures – there was no Naval Race Cabinet Committee – but of shared strategic culture between a small socially cohesive group of decision-makers with deep and shared historical knowledge.

That’s the big picture. I’d like now to go into a little more detail into the second, related, case study from the same period of sub-threshold competition: Britain’s attempts to formulate strategy for economic warfare in the event of war with Germany, a very complex problem which shows British strategy making in a rather different light.[12]

The use of the navy to blockade an enemy’s ports and strangle her trade had long been an accepted usage of war and a weapon in the British armoury. During the long struggle against Napoleon, for example, grass had grown in the streets of Bordeaux. When around 1902 British planners began considering the possible need to do something similar to Hamburg, however, they found the question highly complex. The Declaration of Paris in 1856 had laid down some rules about blockade, including permitting the seizure of enemy contraband if an effective blockade was in place. Unfortunately, however, there were no internationally agreed definitions of ‘effective blockade’ or ‘contraband’. The old Napoleonic-style blockade, with squadrons of ships patrolling just off the enemy coast and intercepting enemy merchantmen, was clearly impossible, given new technologies such as torpedoes, submarines, and underwater mines. Would it be legal, however, for Britain to close off the Straits of Dover and the Shetland-Norway gap and call that a blockade? Likewise, old definitions of contraband, restricted pretty much to weapons and ammunition, no longer held. Something as innocent as cotton was vital to the manufacture, not only of children’s pyjamas, but of explosives, for instance. Was food to feed German factory workers making munitions contraband or not? A vast amount of Germany’s trade passed, not through Hamburg but along the Rhine and through Rotterdam or Antwerp, both ports in neutral counties. Could goods bound for Rotterdam but possibly intended for German end-use be seized? After the failure of the second Hague Conference in 1907, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, himself had sponsored a follow-up meeting which had reached agreement on some of these questions with the Declaration of London in 1909. Many nations had signed but few had yet ratified it by the time war broke out. Amongst those who hadn’t was, embarassingly, the United Kingdom herself. More broadly, what should the British attitude to international law, which was still very much an emerging concept in the early 1900s, be? And perhaps more fundamentally still, what were the legitimate limits to state intervention in private property and trade? The government of the day, after all, was Liberal with a capital L, and this was the zenith of laissez-faire liberalism with a small l, too.

These questions affected multiple stakeholders: shipping companies; shipbuilders; Lloyd’s of London and the City more widely; exporters; importers; the colonies and dominions; foreign nations likely to be neutral, such as Holland, Denmark, and, most importantly, the United States. And, of course, a range of different government departments. Just to add to the complexity, some of these groups disagreed with themselves, never mind each other. The navy was split, for example, between those who saw the value of economic warfare, and those who thought blockade was only of any use if it forced the German fleet out of harbour to fight.

I won’t bore you with all the committees, sub-committees and reports which flew around as this matter was debated in the first decade of the C20th, but it’s worth a quick look at two examples which highlight the difficulties. First, it was obviously important to determine Germany’s vulnerability to blockade. This was the responsibility of the Naval Intelligence Department’s Trade Division (which until recently had been run by a certain Captain Robert Falcon Scott) but they lacked detailed understanding of the canal and river trade which linked the Rhine basin to the sea. The best way to learn about this seemed to be to ask the British consuls in northern Europe, so the Admiralty forwarded a questionnaire to the Foreign Office and asked them to pass it on. Most of the responses were that there was sufficient spare capacity that Germany would be able to manage, as long as the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam remained open to her. This went down well at the Foreign Office, which had serious reservations about the idea of blockade, but the reports did not contain much hard data, so the Admiralty rejected them. One particular report, from Francis Oppenheimer at Frankfurt, however, which also concluded that Germany could survive, contained a wealth of statistics and was harder to ignore. That didn’t stop the Admiralty, who pointed out that Oppenheimer’s assumption that any war would involve only Germany and Britain, overlooked the likely involvement of allies on both sides and so under-estimated the disruption to Europe. The navy rejected the Foreign Office’s conclusion and commissioned their own report, which duly came out in favour of blockade.

The second example is the most important committee of the several which met: the Desart Committee of 1911-12. This was a committee of the great and good, hand-picked from across the UK government by the Prime Minister, with an extremely complex job. Let me give you just one example of the committee’s work. The Admiralty was keen to stop British-flagged ships from trading with Germany. But would that drive the British merchant fleet out of business, while neutral ships took over the trade? Could the navy stop neutral ships? What would happen to exporters who relied on sales to Germany? This applied double to members of the Empire such as India, for whose jute Germany was a vital market. What would happen to the UK’s trade deficit, and so her ability to buy food from overseas? Would the City maintain its near-monopoly of finance and insurance if the carrying trade moved offshore?  What would the reaction of the United States and other neutrals be? Even if all those interests could somehow be balanced, execution would be problematic. Who should be in charge of the blockade? The Admiralty? It controlled the means of coercion, the Royal Navy, of course, but expertise in regulating the shipping industry, and the contacts with business, lay with the Board of Trade. Further, any blockade would require information on the whereabouts and destinations of ships and cargoes, intelligence gathered via British-owned submarine telegraph cables but collated, not in Whitehall at all, but in Lloyd’s of London. The law officers would want to make sure everything was legal, and the Foreign Office had the job of keeping world opinion on side. 

Clearly, a wide range of groups would have to work together to formulate and execute policy. There was plenty of room for bureaucratic friction and confusion, and the ministers involved included egos on the scale of Winston Churchill: who was President of the Board of Trade but wanted the job of First Lord of the Admiralty. On policy, the fundamental divide was between the military, who wanted a hard line, banning all trade with Germany and interdicting neutrals to the maximum extent necessary; and the business interests represented by the Board of Trade, and the Treasury, to whom blockade involved an unwarranted degree of interference in the economy, and in private business and property in general, and that of the City in particular. The compromise reached – after 18 months of argument – was that physical trade would be stopped, with the City left exempt in case it collapsed. The final 475-page report of the Desart committee was eventually accepted by Asquith and the Cabinet in December 1912. A decade of horse-trading appeared to be over.

When war actually broke out in August 1914, however, it became evident that what had looked like agreement was actually only the beginning of negotiation. The City pre-empted every plan by collapsing before a shot was fired and had to be rescued by the government. As for the blockade, existing plans were ditched, pre-war disagreements immediately resurfaced, and policy was made up in haste by tired and frightened men. The Admiralty’s hard-line was undermined by the Foreign Office and Board of Trade, not only in arguments behind closed doors, but on occasion by them making up their own, considerably more relaxed, policy as they went along. They made promises to the Americans, for instance, which horrified the naval men. To prevent Cabinet splits, the prime minister delegated control of foreign trade and economic warfare to not one, but two, different subcommittees, one closer to the Admiralty, the other to the Board of Trade. The result of this chaos was that from August 1914 until March 1915 the blockade was highly limited and the impact on Germany appears to have been relatively small.

In the spring of 1915 Germany turned to unrestricted submarine warfare and expectations of a short war faded. The decision was made to tighten the blockade, but under Foreign Office pressure it was to be cargoes, not vessels, which were to be controlled. When a single ship might carry multiple cargoes, tracking each one and where it was going was a huge data management task for which the rickety governmental machinery was nowhere near ready. The whole system relied on Holland and Denmark telling the truth about the final destination of goods they imported. The blockade remained far from effective. Only when three further developments came together did it gain teeth. The first was a hardening of attitudes and a realisation that this was now an unlimited war. Secondly, a unified Ministry of Blockade was established in February 1916, expressly to improve information flow, tighten up the administrative machinery and eliminate sources of friction and confusion. The third was the entry into the war of the United States in April 1917. This removed the need to tiptoe around neutral sensibilities and allowed the allies greatly to tighten their grip.

The point, however, is that the blockade example seems to show a failure of British strategy-making. From the Admiralty perspective (which many historians have tended to adopt), it looks like twelve years of debate and argument within the civil service and Cabinet failed to resolve fundamental policy differences, clarify departmental responsibilities, or create a machine capable of waging effective economic war. Not until nearly three years had passed did Britain manage to commit to the logic of unlimited war and pull together such an effort. If you’re looking for uncluttered chains of command, rationally conceived strategy articulated with the clarity of gin, and seamlessly integrated execution, you won’t find them here.

If we step back a bit, however, one could argue that British, as opposed to Admiralty, strategy in fact ended up working rather well. Britain successfully steered a very tricky course between exerting pressure on Germany and alienating the United States and ended up with the best of both worlds: Germany blockaded and the US as an ally. The political process – messy, annoying, intuitive and sometimes personal – worked, almost despite itself.

And it worked because it dealt with the world as it found it, not as it wanted it to be. That gave it the flexibility to adapt to circumstances as they changed, while still operating within the broad outlines of a shared strategic culture which accepted the importance of defeating Germany. If this meant suspending or overriding free market principles, so, reluctantly, be it; but a sense of proportion was maintained and limits imposed on what was permitted. War remained too important to be left to the generals – or, in this case, the admirals. Even when opinions hardened all around, and the war became unlimited, the Minister for Blockade appointed was not an Admiral nor even one of the more hawkish politicians, but Lord Robert Cecil, previously a Foreign Office minister, and temperamentally a pacifist, who became one of the architects of the League of Nations.

We see in the contrast between these two case studies, the naval race and blockade policy, a fascinating paradox. In the first instance, the naval race, Britain, working almost entirely through informal connections and unspoken assumptions, pulled together an integrated strategy which succeeded brilliantly at the immediate task of defeating Germany in sub-threshold competition. Ironically, however, at the macro level, the effect was to help drive Germany, frustrated in the grey zone, back above the threshold and to resort to violence. (Maybe we are better off leaving some rivals below the threshold, and it sometimes makes sense to let a weaker rival feel he’s winning somewhere?) While, with the blockade, the strategy, despite being formulated with a high degree of formality, ended up being ad hoc, improvised and, for the first half of the war at least, unsuccessful in achieving its immediate objectives; while ironically it worked very well at the macro level of winning the war.

The history of the UK and Germany in the early twentieth century is highly complex and I’ve butchered it with over-simplification. But let me finish up by drawing out three lessons which seem, to me anyway, relevant as we think about making strategy in the twenty-first century.

First, integration is important, but it’s only a beginning. It’s not something we can buy off the shelf. We can’t just declare ‘we are integrated’, set up a committee, and expect instant results. We need also genuine cohesion. We don’t need committees when interests align; and when they don’t, no committee is likely to help. What we need to build is a culture, founded on shared principles, broad education, and experience of working together, which can reconcile diverse perspectives and divergent approaches, work through robust disagreements, and work towards agreed goals.   

Secondly, we need to accept that those goals may not always, today anyway, be ambitious ones. General Petraeus’s famous question, ‘Tell me how this ends’, may not always have an answer, and we need to be comfortable with that. The consequences of our actions are not always predictable, both because we possess only imperfect knowledge and inhabit a complex world, and because the enemy, famously, also gets a vote. Rather than trying to build perfect plans, or even perfect decision-making machines, we need to be creating robust structures and processes for making strategic choices which can embrace uncertainty and see it as an opportunity for creativity, rather than fearing it as a threat.

And my third and final point is that we need to accept that making strategy is not only an art rather than a science, but a political art at that. Rather than try to police an artificial and impossible frontier keeping the civil and military spheres of action apart, we need to accept that there are places – and not just in the ‘grey zone’ – where the two bleed into each other. In such cases, accepting the place of politics in strategy formation will not only help us build more flexible and robust ways of making the decisions we must, but will also allow for better civilian control of the military and help protect the democracy central to our way of life.

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[1] ‘Report of the Iraq Inquiry: Executive Summary’, HC 264, 6 July 2016, paragraphs 788-98, pp. 109-10, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/535407/The_Report_of_the_Iraq_Inquiry_-_Executive_Summary.pdf; Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron, Hew Strachan (eds), British Generals in Blair’s War (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), especially Strachan’s conclusion: pp. 327-46; Adrian L. Johnson (ed.), Wars in Peace: British Military Operations since 1991 (London: RUSI, 2014); Christopher L. Elliott, High Command: British Military Leadership in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015);Theo Farrell, Unwinnable: Britain’s War in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (London: Bodley Head, 2017); Patrick Porter, Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Ben Barry, Blood, Metal and Dust: How Victory turned into Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq (Oxford: Osprey, 2020). See also, for an oblique view, John Kiszely, Anatomy of a Campaign: The British Fiasco in Norway, 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). There are plenty of more journalistic accounts, of course, and some books so mad and bad that one can only hope that the authors at least found them cathartic to write. 

See also: Hew Strachan, ‘Strategy and the Limitation of War’, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 98-118; idem., ‘Strategy in Theory, Strategy in Practice’, Journal of Strategic Studies 42:2 (2019), pp. 171-190; idem., ‘Strategy and Democracy’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 62:2 (2020), pp. 51-82; Hew Strachan with Ruth Harris, The Use of Military Force and Public Understanding in Today’s Britain, Research Report, RAND Corporation, 2020, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA213-1.html ; and Hew Strachan, ‘Clouds of War and Strategic Delusions’, Standpoint (March 2020), pp. 18-19. Others voices singing a similar tune include Peter Ricketts, ‘How British Foreign Policy lost the Art of Grand Strategy’, New Statesman, 26 February 2020, while Lawrence Freedman identified similarities in British strategy-making over Iraq and COVID-19: ‘Strategy for a Pandemic: the UK and COVID-19’, Survival 62:3 (2020), pp. 25-76.The theme extends back at least to the House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee reports of 2010 and 2011 on ‘Who does UK National Strategy?’, HC 435 https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-administration-select-committee/inquiries/uk-grand-strategy/, and perhaps to Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman, ‘Blair’s wars and Brown’s Budgets: From Strategic Defence Review to Strategic Decay in less than a Decade’, International Affairs 85:2 (2009), pp. 247-61

[2] Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Michael Howard and Peter Paret, eds and trans.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 89. The German word Politik, translated by Howard and Paret as ‘policy’, could equally well be rendered as ‘politics’: luckily the difference does not affect my argument here.

[3] Clausewitz, On War, p. 87

[4] Clausewitz, On War, p. 89

[5] John Kay and Mervyn King, Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making beyond the Numbers (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2020), pp. 12-16

[6] John Maynard Keynes, ‘The General Theory of Employment’, Quarterly Journal of Economics (February 1937), reprinted in Donald Moggridge (ed.), The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes Volume XIV The General Theory and After Part II Defence and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1973]), pp. 113-4

[7] Andrew M. Dorman, Matthew R.H. Uttley and Benedict Wilkinson, ‘The Curious Incident of Mr Cameron and the United Kingdom Defence Budget: A New Legacy?’, Political Quarterly 87:1 (2016), pp. 47-53; General Sir Nicholas Houghton, Annual RUSI Lecture, December 2014, https://www.public-sector.co.uk/article/0e348ac1834fb21ddac90001ceb1d1e9

[8] Suzanne Raine, Superforecasting will not save us – Engelsberg ideas

[9] Douglas Barrie, ‘UK Defence Review: Repent at Leisure’, Military Balance blog, 31 January 2020, https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2020/01/uk-defence-review

[10] Strachan, ‘Strategy and the Operational Level of War’

[11] Christopher M. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 11-48; Jan Ruger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); G.C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 17-48; Holger Herwig, Luxury Fleet: The Imperial German Navy 1888-1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980); Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism 1860-1914 (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1980); Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era 1904-1919 Volume 1 The Road to War 1904-1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1961)

[12] The fullest modern exploration of blockade policy can be found in Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), but it must be used with caution: he does not have the evidence to support his assertion that the UK had a plan to bankrupt Germany. A shorter but more balanced summary is Alan Kramer, ‘Blockade and economic warfare’, Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War Volume II The State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 460-88. See also Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)

Putin and Ukraine: What if it’s not about Ukraine?

Tags

foreign policy, Putin, Russia, Strategy, Ukraine

Perhaps we have all been looking at Putin and his actions in Ukraine the wrong way around. We have all been assuming that his priority was foreign policy, with his objectives a mix of widening the security cordon between Russia and the West, extending his vision of Greater Russia, and finding ways to undermine NATO. That’s the basis on which we have built a policy of all possible aid (short of direct military intervention) for Ukraine, vocal deterrence of further aggression, and a regime of economic and financial sanctions designed to punish Putin and his regime and dissuade it from further adventurism.

Seen through that lens, 1) his willingness to risk isolation from the global economy and the confiscation of the assets of the Russian state, corporations and his cronies, 2) the purges already underway of army generals, the secret services, and political opponents, and 3) the cult of personality on display at the Moscow Luzhniki Stadium rally of 18 March: all these have looked like the price Putin has been willing to pay, or tools he has been prepared to exploit, to sustain the effort to achieve his objectives in Ukraine.

But what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s all been about domestic politics all along? What if the war was only ever designed to create the conditions for him to complete a domestic agenda of eliminating any remaining potential rivals, stamp out the last vestiges of opposition, and establish himself as the charismatic leader of all the Russias? To use the logic of Nineteeen Eight-Four,it doesn’t matter who’s fighting whom as long as they’re always fighting.

That might explain Putin’s willingness to take the risk he has. It might even explain the curiously half-hearted, poorly planned and under-resourced military invasion. And it would certainly explain the continuation of the operation long after the chances of a swift victory appear to have evaporated. It would hardly be the first time in the history of Russia or autocracy in general that domestic political considerations have driven the foreign policy bus.  

I’m not enough of a Kremlinologist to argue that this interpretation is correct. But it seems worth considering as a possibility.

And if it is right, then the implications for Western policy are important:

• The West has very little to offer Putin in this scenario beyond serving as a useful enemy…
• …So we will be unable to get him to pull out of Ukraine until he wants to and traditional methods of deterrence may not prove effective.
• The good news is that there’s not much incentive for Putin to escalate further unless he’s handed a golden opportunity on a plate;
• But we are in this for the long haul. We may want this to be a short, sharp crisis but it’s much more likely to prove a long drawn-out ulcer on the international body politic.  

Putin, Russia’s Foreign Exchange Reserves, and the Short War Illusion

Summary: Putin’s approach to Russia’s foreign exchange reserves tells us that we will need to find measures other than economic sanctions to deter Putin in the short-medium term and contain him in the long term.

Russia had about $630 billion of reserves (foreign currencies and gold) before the Ukraine crisis. The purpose of such reserves is generally seen as twofold: a) to provide a fund to support the value of your currency if it becomes subject to unwelcome selling, b) to pay for imports in an emergency.  The sanctions imposed on Russia after her invasion of Ukraine have led to at least half of that being frozen in Western commercial and central banks and raised questions about Russia’s ability to do either:

Sanctions on Russia’s central bank reveal fatal flaw in sanction-proofing strategy | Fortune

Losing $300 billion or so overnight sounds like a disaster, and the very distinguished Prof. Barry Eichengreen argues that countries may learn the lesson from this that such hoards have less utility than previously predicted and in future choose to hold smaller reserves: The Monetary Consequences of Vladimir Putin by Barry Eichengreen – Project Syndicate (project-syndicate.org)

Others have described this as a colossal ‘blunder’:      https://twitter.com/PhillipsPOBrien/status/1501466255060090884?s=20&t=OVqJlxLr7M5YF38Nyi6_cA

And maybe that’s all it is. Maybe Putin’s just stupid.

Now, there are 4 possible explanations for Putin’s readiness to sacrifice $300 billion:

1) He is stupid and didn’t see this asset freeze as a risk. That doesn’t seem very likely. It’s certainly not a safe assumption on which to build future policy.

2) He saw the risks of an asset freeze but didn’t think the decadent West would impose one over ‘little Ukraine’. He’s been proved wrong here: Western willingness to oppose him has been on a scale few would have anticipated.

3) He saw the risks but thought he could forestall damage by presenting the West with a quick fait accompli, which would be punished by only fleeting sanctions. The war seems to be going slower than he’d probably hoped, but it’s too soon to be sure that Putin has fallen for the ‘short war illusion’. He wouldn’t be the first person in history to do so, if he has. Nor would he be the first to feel himself boxed in and forced to act now, even with long odds against success, knowing that waiting longer will only increase his chances of failure (cf. Germany 1914, Japan 1941), but if that’s where he thinks he is, he won’t be able to stop and we have much bigger problems ahead.

Or

4) He saw the risk, anticipated the danger and does not care.

Option 4) prompts the further question: why does Putin not care?

There are 3 possible answers:

A) Forex intervention: He anticipated RUS being shut out of international financial markets and the de facto (or indeed de iure) suspension of trading in all Russian assets, including the Ruble. If the forex market is to all intents and purposes closed, there’s no need for foreign exchange reserves to support your freefalling currency. (All that is currently operating is a kerb market with very thin volumes where the quoted USD/RUB rates are unrepresentative at best – and at worst, he can claim if he needs to, the propaganda of Westerners and bandits.)

B) Emergency Import Purchases: He doesn’t need many dollars to buy essentials from overseas. Other than Western luxuries and some electronics, RUS is remarkably self-sufficient: in food, in energy, and, most especially, in military hardware. It’s hard to access data on the Russian daily $ war spend on a cash basis (i.e. the real $ cash burn rate) but perhaps it is so low that Putin’s remaining $300 billion odd of reserves will enable him to carry on for a long time.

C) Flows not Stocks: A variant of 2: he didn’t care about the reserves because he knew that war is so expensive that you can never have enough. (This is not a new thought. Even Imperial Germany – one of the most militarist states in history – realised this in the run-up to the First World War and the UK had run through hers in less than two years of the Second). 

It does not matter much what combination of these three he adheres to. What does matter is that in all three cases the underlying reason for him not caring is that he is prepared to subordinate economics to his political and military concerns.

Implications:

1) Economic sanctions in themselves have limited value as a stick against Putin.

2) That does not mean, however, that they are useless and it was a mistake to impose them. They are a very effective way of demonstrating that the West is united in condemnation of Putin’s behaviour and have sent a loud signal to that effect. With time, they may even start to have real bite, and intensifying sanctions remains a good method of signalling. We need to make sure that our expectations of their efficacy are not exaggerated, though, and in particular we need to continue the search for deterrent mechanisms that will speak a language Putin understands.    

3) Equally, carrots which play to Western strengths such as offering greater economic integration are unlikely to have much appeal to Russia, at least until she has made the transition to a post-Putin regime which cares about the well-being of its people.

Russia gets it wrong… again

Tags

1914, bank of England, economics, interest rates, money, Putin, ruble, Russia, Ukraine, War

In Russia this morning the Ruble – where it is trading at all – has depreciated dramatically, down 30% at one point and there are reports of queues at ATMs around the country.

The Central Bank of Russia has responded to the weakness of the Ruble on the foreign exchanges this morning (Monday 28 February) with a massive hike in interest rates from 9.5% to 20%.

This is a schoolboy error which will solve none of Russia’s problems and indeed is set to deepen her economic ones.

The CBR is using a nineteenth century approach to central banking crisis management to resolve a twenty-first century problem. It is ignoring over a hundred years of history and demonstrates that the CBR has not done even basic historical homework to set itself up to meet the challenges Putin has imposed on his country. Russia is repeating a mistake initially made – but quickly identified and overturned – by the Bank of England on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

A classical way for a central bank to support a currency in trouble is to hike interest rates to attract foreign capital and (the other side of the same coin) to make it more expensive for speculators to run short positions against, in this case, the Ruble. This is a very traditional response and one which generally works well in normal circumstances. When the Bank of England was faced with similar pressure in the days just before the First World War, with stock markets around the world in freefall or suspended, gold reserves draining away and the threat of a contagious banking crisis destroying the City of London, the Bank raised rates from 3% to 10% in 48 hours (30 July-1 August) and announced that banks would remained closed until Friday 7 August while the Treasury, Bank and City establishment came up with a rescue plan.

As Maynard Keynes and other advisers warned, however, these were not normal circumstances or traditional times. With financial markets literally dis-integrated, there was no point in raising UK interest rates because foreign capital would not be able to flow to Sterling anyway. Indeed, higher rates would only exacerbate the domestic credit crunch already underway as people hoarded cash and the banking system tottered. The correct response was to flood the UK system with liquidity, washing away any worries about the availability of cash, and to demonstrate confidence by returning interest rates to normal levels. UK banks reopened on Friday 7 August and within 24 hours interest rates were back to 5%, where they remained throughout the next four+ years of war.

With its actions this morning, the Central Bank of Russia is repeating the 1914 mistake. The banking sanctions imposed over the weekend by the UK, USA and EU, amongst others have effectively cut Russian financial markets off from almost all the rest of the world. Hedge funds that were short the Ruble cannot close out their positions, and banks cannot buy Rubles and earn 20% even if they want to. The CBR hike is most likely only to exacerbate the credit crunch which some observers see already developing in Russia and thus deepen the economic damage imposed on Russians by Putin’s overseas adventurism. Whether that will be enough to persuade Putin to back down, however, or to encourage his kleptocrats to push him aside, is another question.

The most important point to emerge from this, however, is perhaps a broader one which the West needs to be careful about. Here is further evidence of lack of foresight, proper planning and preparedness for this crisis on the part of the Putin regime. It is thus of a piece with the military shortcomings highlighted by experts such as Sir Lawrence Freedman https://twitter.com/LawDavF/status/1498060833997443072?s=20&t=HeP_CmywaZedHE8NWVo4Bw , BA Freidman and Michael Kofman https://twitter.com/BA_Friedman/status/1498097876970450946?s=20&t=HeP_CmywaZedHE8NWVo4Bw

The scary thing is that dysfunctional opponents with deficient decision-making machines are the most difficult ones to handle. Kaiser Wilhelm II is just one, and not even the most egregious, example of that from German history alone. Putin getting it wrong makes him more dangerous, not less.

(NB: the best book on the 1914 financial crisis for now is Richard Roberts’s Saving the City OUP, 2013).

Financial Blockades: A User’s Guide

Tags

banks, blockade, money, Putin, Russia, sanctions, trade

Financial Blockades: A User’s Guide, based on British experience during the First World War

Jonathan Boff, 25 February 2022

Recent discussion about imposing financial sanctions on Putin’s Russia, and in particular about how best to exclude Russian banks from Western financial markets and payments systems, reminded me of the British experience of blocking German access to assets held overseas, and finance more generally, during the First World War.

Jump to the last para if you are interested only in the lessons for today.  

On the outbreak of war in 1914, trading with the enemy was prohibited, the assets of German and Austrian banks in London were sequestered, and German individuals and firms were shut out of the stock exchange and other British financial markets.  

In 1916, however, Great Britain decided further to tighten the blockade of the Central powers. Finance was part of this. It established a Finance Section to the Ministry of Blockade. Led by Sir Adam Block, a former diplomat and expert on international lending, its objective was to ‘cut the enemy’s financial lines of communication, and to dis-arrange and hamper, so far as possible, the financial system adopted by the enemy in the circumstances of the war.’ In particular, its mission was to make it difficult for Germany to access money in the USA, which at the time was still neutral.

Its methods were:

1) to detect and block German financial channels, and

2) to detect and prevent particular transactions.

The first was best achieved by shutting neutral banks which might be acting as ‘back doors’ for German interests out of London banking facilities.

To accomplish the second, the Finance Section informed British banks of suspicions and enabled them to avoid such transactions, rather than by punishing them for transgressions caused by ignorance.

Three of the largest UK banks seconded their foreign exchange experts to help, with support from the Bank of England and a range of other committees representing the City establishment. The section worked closely with banks to identify suspicious channels and transactions, while the banks sent weekly returns of transfers and balances to the Finance Section. They also made regular reports on forex markets overseas. The postal and telegraph censors, and the cable and wireless companies themselves, forwarded intercepted messages they thought suspicious.

From June 1916 all banks were required to name counterparts to all foreign transactions and British banks were instructed to ask their neutral correspondents to sign undertakings not to act for the enemy, with a ‘black list’ of transgressors drawn up. From September 1916 foreign exchange transactions without an underlying commercial transaction were prohibited in both Britain and France.

These measures shut neutral banks working for Germans out of London but they continued to be active buyers of US dollars in New York, on a scale greater than seems necessary for legitimate neutral imports. Nonetheless, the Mark depreciated on the foreign exchanges by about 10% between July and October 1916 as these sanctions bit.

In December, the work of finance section was extended to impose a similar financial blockade on Greece.

Also in December 1916, American banks began to take a harder line on German institutions. German and Austrian banks were told to stop using their accounts at National City Bank of New York, a forerunner of today’s Citibank. The firm of Kuhn Loeb warned the Hamburg concern of M.M. Warburg that it could no longer extend credit. (Kuhn Loeb had previously been considered Germanophile and indeed had family links to Warburg, so its change of approach is especially striking.)

Nonetheless, throughout late 1916 neutral purchases of dollars in New York continued at a high level, hitting a record in January 1917. Danish banks were particularly active, presumably on behalf of German interests with possible foreknowledge that the U-boats were about to resume unrestricted submarine warfare: a move which was likely to bring the USA into the war.

The British Finance Section advised the US government on ways to impose a financial blockade once diplomatic relations were cut and sent W.M. Stevenson of Lloyds Bank to help them do so.

America joined the war in April 1917, closing Germany and the Central Powers out of the last remaining and only financial market that mattered. Until the end of the war, however, the Finance Section of the Ministry of Blockade continued to monitor financial markets and to endeavour to prevent German activity in Latin American or other markets.

Relevant points for 2022 include:

1) the need for first-rate financial intelligence

2) the value of public and private sectors working closely together, and of civilian experts being co-opted into the effort

3) the greater ease of monitoring and interdicting transactions, rather than assets

4) indirect regulation, using the banks one can control to exclude bad actors that one can’t, is the most effective approach, and it depends on good information, and on good information flow

5) the need to be willing to punish transgressors. (A Dutch bank found guilty of working for the Germans was blacklisted and excluded from all transactions in London and New York).

6) the importance of allies working together, both to prevent a united front and to close the  loopholes which an enemy will inevitably find.

(Reference: War Trade Department, Trade Clearing House, Ministry of Blockade: Finance Section, 1916-19, The National Archives, Kew: FO 902/37-41)

The Decline and Fall – or Irresistible Rise – or Fall and Rise – of Military History: Sources

Periodically we experience a spasm of concern that military history is dead or dying. There’s not often much evidence advanced to support that hypothesis, nor much for this being a new problem (if indeed it is even a problem at all). I have views on this question, but the purpose of this blog entry is not to express them. It is merely to list some relevant literature which those who are interested in this topic might like to look at. Most or all of these articles and books were recommended to me by others: So a big Thank You to them. I can claim no credit at all. This is not an exhaustive list and it makes no pretence at balancing all the issues or viewpoints involved. To be honest, I’m not even going to pretend that I’ve read them all. But you might find them useful.

The starting point for every discussion on this should be Michael Howard’s essay, ‘The Use and Abuse of Military History’, in his The Causes of Wars and Other Essays (London, 1983, but much reprinted since).

Jeremy Black, Rethinking Military History (Abingdon, 2004)

Contributions by Michael Howard, Brian Bond, John Terraine and others in Juliet Gardiner (ed.), What is History Today (Basingstoke, 1988)

Peter Paret, “The History of War and the New Military History” in Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton 1992)

Michael Geyer, ‘War and the Context of General History in an Age of Total War’, Journal of Military History 57: 5 (October 1993)

John A. Lynn, ‘The Embattled Future of Academic Military History’, Journal of Modern History 61:4 (October 1997)

Paul Kennedy, ‘The Fall and Rise of Military History’, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 3 (Winter 1991)

Tami Davis Biddle and Robert M. Citino, ‘The Role of Military History in the Contemporary Academy’, Society for Military History white paper, SMH White Paper | The Society for Military History (smh-hq.org)

‘New Military History’ Panel, AHA Colloquium, 12 January 2021 New Military History – Bing video

Robert M. Citino, ‘Military Histories, Old and New: A Reintroduction’, American Historical Review 112 (October 2007)

Wayne E. Lee, ‘Mind and Matter – Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field’, Journal of American History (March 2007)

‘War in Historical and Contemporary Perspective’: Conference at KCL, June 2017, War in Historical and Contemporary Perspective Conference Report – Defence-In-Depth

Nick Satantakes blog: ‘The State of Military History’, In the Service of Clio: Blog CCXXVIII (228): The State of Military History (Part 1) (sarantakes.blogspot.com) and following

Matthew Ford, ‘Chilcot and the Politics of Britain’s Military History’ Chilcot and the politics of Britain’s military history (shef.ac.uk)

Please feel free to suggest other readings in the Comments below

Cheers

Jonathan

“Steady the front line! There is no retreat from here”

This Rapid Response, by my friend and colleague Gordon Muir and me, was published by the BMJ (British Medical Journal) on 16 April 2020: https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1324/rr-13

Dear Editor

As an ex-Army medic, I have felt disquiet in the past over health workers being described as “frontline staff.” The “front line” has always for me conveyed a tangible risk of harm or death, as in the armed forces, police or fire brigade. No longer – NHS staff are now being infected with, and dying of, COVID-19 infections directly acquired from patients. Experience from other countries suggests that some staff, such as anaesthetists, ITU staff and ENT surgeons, are at greater risk. Early data from other countries indicates that high level PPE can mitigate the risk of transmission of high viral loads. In the UK, many doctors, nurses and other staff are deeply concerned they are not being offered the correct level of protection. They are now dying, some not having had appropriate PPE, although whether that was a contributory factor we do not yet know.

Returning to the military theatre, during the 2003 Gulf War and its aftermath, many British soldiers believed that they had been sent to battle with inadequate equipment. There were particular concerns over body armour and communications. Belief was widespread that the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, had resisted requests for funding this equipment. This claim was later repeated by retired senior officers (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11190527), but roundly denied by Mr Brown. However, the lack of trust and the belief that the “military covenant” had been broken by the Blair/Brown government was tangible. The average soldier might not have argued with going to fight in a (hopefully just) war, but was unhappy to have extra and avoidable risk of injury or death laid upon him or her without good reason. Many soldiers and their families believed that comrades had died (as in the six Military Policemen killed in Basra in 2003) due to penny pinching (https://news.sky.com/story/iraq-rmp-ambush-red-cap-families-may-sue-mod-…).

We risk this perception in the war against COVID-19

There is huge will to help among NHS staff, but a great deal of unhappiness over the perception of a lack of both PPE and testing. The rapid diagnosis of politicians with COVID-19 stands in stark contrast to the absence of testing for the great majority of front line clinical staff with symptoms. PPE is provided on a seemingly haphazard basis – many in my own hospital have been purchasing their own masks from overseas. A Scottish Health Board has issued guidelines for protection of operating theatre staff in contradiction of Intercollegiate surgical guidelines. NHS workers feel they are accused of using “too much” PPE by managers and politicians. Whether there is a real increased risk or not, in the absence of any high level evidence it is hard to see why healthcare leaders should resist providing equipment and testing which those at risk believe may save their lives.

Again to return to military philosophy, and with the help of my military historian colleague Dr Jonathan Boff, it is often the case that soldiers will put themselves at greater danger if they believe that the cause is just and that their commanders are honest and share their fate. Good training, good kit, motivation and discipline are essentials. The NHS should understand this, and should be at pains to show it is protecting and valuing its staff in such crises.

The quotation in the title is a slight misquotation of Sir Colin Campbell, Commanding Officer of the 93rd Regiment (Sutherland Highlanders) at the battle of Balaklava. In 1854 the original “Thin Red Line” of the Highlanders was facing an overwhelming cavalry charge, Sir Colin Campbell did say to his men: “Needs be you must die where you stand.” The reply came: “Aye, Sir Colin. If needs be, We’ll do that.” Some died, but the battle was saved. Great leadership and a shared sense of purpose can make humans endure the impossible.

We will weather COVID-19; the NHS should be stronger in many ways afterwards. I hope that those in charge will in future crisis listen attentively to those who put themselves and their families at risk. Increased trust will lead to better cohesion, which must in future benefit our patients.

Authors:

Gordon Muir
Consultant Urologist and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Surgery
King’s Colllege Hospital and King’s College London

Dr Jonathan Boff FRHistS
Senior Lecturer in Modern History
University of Birmingham

1940? 1914? Why History Matters

The Real Reason Historical Analogies are Interesting

The Queen’s address to the nation last night was shot through with imagery and language evoking the Second World War. She concluded with an almost direct quote from one of the most iconic songs of the era: ‘We will meet again.’ The Queen, of course, is one of the daily decreasing band of people old enough to remember what we still call ‘the war’. But being too young to have lived through it has not stopped politicians and commentators from drawing parallels between now and, especially, 1940. We need, we are told, a bit of the spirit that carried the nation through Dunkirk and the Blitz.

Here are a few examples (sorry if some of these are behind a paywall):

Mail on Sunday https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8112779/Top-psychologist-says-Britons-rediscover-Blitz-spirit-cope-self-isolation.html ; Guardian Editorial, 15 March 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/the-guardian-view-on-the-uks-covid-19-response-confused-and-hesitant ; Jamie Johnson, Daily Telegraph, 17 March 2020 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/17/coronavirus-blitz-spirit-uks-sanctions-compare-second-world/; Jonathan Ford, Financial Times, 25 March 2020 https://www.ft.com/content/5945c61a-6dc7-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

Inevitably, some of the big guns of Second World War history responded by pointing out the many differences between 2020 and 1940: Richard Overy, Guardian, 19 March 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/19/myth-blitz-spirit-model-coronavirus ; David Edgerton, New Statesman, 3 April 2020 https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2020/04/why-coronavirus-crisis-should-not-be-compared-second-world-war

Another eminent professor, Adam Tooze, went further in the Washington Post on 25 March 2020, pointing out that historical analogies only take us so far and that much of the current crisis is brand new: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/25/weve-never-been-here-before/

Now, frankly, to me the current crisis looks to have more similarities with 1914 than with 1940. To mention just a few:

The First World War, rather like today’s pandemic, had been widely predicted for years, but had been the subject of relatively little preparation, certainly compared with the Second World War. By September 1939, the outbreak of hostilities came after years of rising tension. As early as 1936, the underwriters of the Lloyds of London insurance market, world-leading experts in calculating risk, refused to insure property against war damage. Governments around the world were staffed by a generation who had themselves lived and fought through 1914-18, who knew exactly what to do, and did it. The Emergency Powers (Defence) Act of 1939, which granted government sweeping powers to prosecute the war, was a direct descendant of 1914’s Defence of the Realm Act. Of course, not everything went right at first in 1939-40; of course, there was a lot of improvisation and muddle. But the idea that nothing went right until Winston Churchill became premier in May 1940 and blew a dynamic wind of change through the war effort is a product primarily of Churchill telling the story the way he wanted it told, first. No subsequent historian has yet been really able to overturn the paradigm he established.

The financial crisis of 1914 saw the whole UK banking system on the verge of collapse. It was only saved by a massive injection of liquidity, a widespread moratorium on debts which lasted for months, and a complete suspension of the stock exchange for nearly half a year. Nothing so dramatic ensued in 1939, or even when Britain herself was under threat of invasion in 1940. Parallels have often been drawn between 1914 and the crash of 2008, but actually there is a much closer analogy with 2020. 2008 was a typical cyclical financial crisis, with roots essentially in banks lending too much against ever weaker collateral until the bubble burst. In 1914 and 2020 the banks were/are not themselves to blame: real-world events, over which they had no control, pose(d) the threat to their liquidity. Until now, the interventions of governments around the world have insulated the banks from the worst of the crisis, the seemingly inevitable rash of emerging markets defaults now seems likely to test them again.

In 1914, famously, Britain saw a ‘rush to the colours’. On 6 August 1914 Lord Kitchener appealed for volunteers to join the army. Within a little over a month, nearly half a million had stepped forward, most of them after the gravity of the situation in France became clear. The scale of the influx completely overwhelmed the state’s ability to absorb them. Uniforms, weapons, accommodation: all were lacking. Many had to be sent straight home again. It took months to untangle the mess. The inrush of 750,000 ‘NHS Volunteers’ within a few days has clearly far exceeded expectations, and the ability of the RVS to process them. So far the media has (thankfully) refrained from criticising the chaos presumably reigning behind the scenes. But their restraint won’t last for ever, just as it didn’t in 1914. In any case, there was, thanks to the spring 1939 adoption of conscription, no similar ‘rush to the colours’ during the Second World War.

Those are just three areas where 1914 seems to me a closer analogy than 1940. But, frankly, I’m not really interested in which parallel best fits the situation we find ourselves in. No fit will be perfect, and the point of history is not to provide a check-list to tick off as we navigate through the storms of life, but to teach us how to analyse the kinds of problems we may face.

The more interesting question, it seems to me, is ‘Why are we reaching for 1940? What does that tell us about ourselves?’

It’s clearly a normal human reaction, when faced with a new situation, to try to fit it into some previous pattern. That’s how our cognition works. The question, though, is why 1940?

The first answer is, that it’s quick and easy. The Second World War remains an important reference point in our culture. Many of us grew up hearing about it from grandparents. How many wet Sunday afternoons were spent watching old black-and-white movies of derring-do, stiff upper lip and roll-neck sweaters? Or, for generations younger than mine, having your own WWII adventures in computer games such as Call of Duty? Even those who’ve never read a book about the war have absorbed more knowledge than they realise by sheer osmosis. In 2017 Christopher Nolan could make a war film and name it simply ‘Dunkirk’, confident in the audience’s ability to recognise at once what it was about. The same, even after the recent centenary, simply does not apply to the First World War, or, indeed, to any other historical event. The only exception reinforces the rule: every time we need to stand up to a dictator, the analogy is always to Appeasement and Munich: precisely because it’s part of the same Second World War cultural capital.

If we pull the 1940 analogy apart a bit, more interesting answers emerge, too. The imagery 1940/Blitz Spirit/Dunkirk calls to mind is of a terrible existential threat to us all. To face it down will require us to pull together as never before, to bear sacrifices we’d never imagined, and to keep up our morale through it all. We are all in it together. We have nothing to offer but blood, sweat, toil and tears.

There are three important but subtle subtexts at work, too. First, this is not our fault. We didn’t start this fight. The Nazis (virus) are to blame. So we are innocent victims and right is on our side. Secondly, things will probably get worse before they get better. And, thirdly: but we will, eventually, win. In that sense, 1940 is a reassuring parallel to draw: we’ve done it before, and we can do it again. That, after all, is what the Queen was saying.

There are two other important aspects, too. One is, I think, potentially dangerous. It is a common misreading of 1940 that after the fall of France, Britain stood alone against Germany. That’s historical nonsense, but it’s widely believed. It recently formed part of the Brexit narrative, for instance. The idea that Britain can somehow defeat the COVID-19 virus on her own is patently childish: but at points over the next few weeks and months, no doubt nationalist voices will see British pluck behind every victory, and foreign backsliding behind every setback.

The other is that victory in the Second World War, according to the progressive version of events, resulted not merely in a restoration of the status quo, but in the foundations being laid for a better world. The Beveridge Report, the Butler Education Act, and eventually the establishment of the National Health Service are all typically seen as the fruits of victory. There will come a time when we will need to start thinking about what we want the post-virus world to look like. We’re not going to be content with going back to things as they were before, even if we could.

By contrast, the way we remember 1914 offers neither such danger nor such hope. Although I’d argue that the threat posed by Imperial Germany was little less existential than that of Hitler, the British home front never came under obvious direct attack in 1914-18 in the same way as it did in 1939-45, so there was less need for ‘Blitz spirit’. The origins of the First World War remain hard to understand, so it’s less obviously a Manichean struggle between light and dark, as the Second sometimes seems. And it’s less clear, in the popular myth at least, who won, or indeed that any long term good emerged from it all.

I’m not saying that the characterisation of either war is accurate. But that is how they are seen in the public mind, and that, I think, is why we’d much rather see ourselves reliving the experience of 1940 than 1914. We’d like it to be a ‘finest hour’, which not only saves the world from ‘the abyss of a new dark age’ and leads it into ‘broad, sunlit uplands’, but which does so, as our grandparents did not always have the luxury of doing, while preserving our civilisation and humanity.