peculiarities of strategic culture, which Hamilton Smith had highlighted in 1846,
but Henderson knew that he could not. Although Henderson defined strategy in
terms that belong on the operational spectrum, he was well aware of ‘the
importance of the close concert between strategy and diplomacy’, and was
cognizant of the challenges created ‘when the ocean intervenes between two
hostile states’. 24 So the intellectuals of the British army had to face two ways—
towards Europe for its military thought, and towards the British Empire for its
national strategy.
In December 1905, just over two years after Henderson’s death in March 1903,
Jackie Fisher, who had become First Sea Lord the previous year, called for
reductions in the army’s budget, arguing that ‘our national life depends absolute-
ly and solely on the Navy’ and that ‘the Army was no use without it to save the
Empire from ruin’. 25 Henderson had already responded to the case of the so-
called blue-water school by asserting that ‘A state...which should rely on naval
strength alone could look forward to no other than a protracted war, and a
protracted war between two great Powers is antagonistic to the interests of the
civilised world’. He believed that, in the event of European war, Britain would
have to have the capacity to intervene, to adopt the offensive, and to mount
amphibious operations: ‘An army supported by an invincible navy possesses a
strength out of all proportion to its size’. The British army’s role was, therefore, an
expeditionary one. ‘The military operations of a maritime state’ involved not only
the capture of ‘colonies, naval arsenals and coaling-stations’, but also ‘timely
diversions, by attracting a large portion of the enemy’s fighting strength on the
mainland’ to aid ‘the armies of an ally’. 26
This was what Liddell Hart after the First World War would call the British way
in warfare. Nor was Henderson a lone voice in British military circles. Charles
Callwell publishedThe Effect of Maritime Command on Land Campaigns since
Waterlooin 1897 and he reworked it as Military Operations and Maritime
Preponderancein 1905. Others would follow—most famously Julian Corbett,
whoseSome Principles of Maritime Strategywas published in 1911, and George
Aston, a Royal Marine, whose books includedLetters on Amphibious Wars(1910)
andSea, Land, and Air Strategy(1914). But there was a further complication,
which Liddell Hart would overlook when he formulated the British way in
warfare, but which neither Henderson nor Callwell did. The British army might
be called upon to mount an amphibious landing in the event of war with a
European power, but it also faced the daily certainty of colonial garrisoning
against a bewilderingly different array of opponents in radically diverse climates
and geographies. The army could not know whom it would fight next or where it
would do so. 27 Strategy at the level of national policy created uncertainty for
military thought; it demanded flexibility and adaptability. British military thin-
kers wrote more about tactics than strategy for a number of pragmatic reasons.
The first was no doubt to do with comfort zones; they felt at ease with the level of
war at which they had begun their careers as subalterns. The second was also a
reflection of modernity; technological and industrial change, the railway and the
rifle, meant that the conduct of war was being changed from the bottom up. The
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 103