anticipated a problem which would grow in significance for British military
thinkers the more they addressed issues of operational art and tried then to
render them into doctrine. ‘A British military writer’, he opined, ‘may view
the questions involved in the term “great operations” (“grande tactique” of the
French) either as they are based on the general principles of the science, in the
light they are viewed by continental strategists, or, narrowing the subject, take it
up on the insular position of the empire and the local conditions which result
from it’. 14
Thus, three embryonic points can be made about British military thought by
the mid-nineteenth century. First, the word ‘operations’ in the precise sense used
by Jomini had acquired currency: Lieutenant Jervis W. Jervis even published
A Manual of Field Operationsin 1852. Second, operations occupied a position
that related to both strategy and tactics: Hamilton Smith subsumed most of his
discussion of operations under strategy, but he still associated them with grand
tactics, and that point could be made with even more force about Jervis. Third,
but less certainly, the distinction between what was required of a European
Continental army and what would be required of a British army—what today’s
analysts would call ‘strategic culture’—was beginning to impinge. As Hamilton
Smith recognized, in strategic terms the British army was always likely to be
operating offensively as it would form an expeditionary force to land in Europe or
elsewhere, and it was precisely for that reason that his discussion privileged
offensive operations before defensive. The defence of the British Isles, defensive
operations in a strategic context, was the navy’s job, not the army’s.
HAMLEY AND HENDERSONFor most of Hamilton Smith’s contemporaries, the specifically national variables of
‘strategic culture’ did not mean that ‘operational art’ as it was understood in Britain
should differ from ‘operational art’ as it was interpreted in France or Prussia. His
own wholesale lifting from Jomini undermines any claim that here in prototype
was ‘a British way in war’. Because strategy was believed to be a science, determined
by the application of principles, it had a universal quality, capable of rising above
the specifics of geographical position just as it surmounted change over time. E. B.
Hamley’sThe Operations of War, first published in 1866 and last reprinted and
updated in 1922, depended on just such assumptions for its success.
Hamley, another Royal Artillery officer, thought Jomini the ‘prince of strate-
gists’. 15 Appointed the first professor of military history when the Staff College
was established at Camberley in 1857, he quickly realized that the study of
military history by the average officer was unlikely to prove productive, unless
that officer possessed a theoretical framework which enabled him to interpret the
wars about which he was reading. The inspiration behindThe Operations of War
was firmly didactic and positivist. Like Jomini, Hamley believed that there were
constant principles to be applied in war, and that operations were a matter of
100 The Evolution of Operational Art