would have to embrace the high tempo of the action, and would have to realize
that ‘the idea of the plan must be flexible, that it must embrace a number of
alternative actions’. And to tempo and unpredictability, he added depth. The
formal methods of attack and defence would be abandoned, as attacks would
need to threaten the defence from all directions and the defence would have to
respond accordingly. ‘The reason for all this’, Fuller concluded, ‘is that battles in
the future are likely to become more and more area operations and not merely
positional ones’. 67
Fuller went on to use the word operations in conjunction with manoeuvre,
reverted to the phrase ‘tactical operations’ a few pages further on, and fell back on
‘grand tactical problems in mechanized wars’ in his discussion of the defence. 68
But the point is clear enough. Fuller was groping towards an articulation of what
later generations would call operational art, was putting it in the context of war as
a whole, not of a ‘British way’, and was ready to see this as a basis for doctrine. Nor
was he alone. Basil Liddell Hart’sThe Decisive Wars of History: A Study in History
had been published in 1929. This was the book which in its later editions would
be calledStrategy: The Indirect Approach, a reading of the history of land warfare
which, as Liddell Hart himself put it when describing Epaminondas’s victory at
Mantinea in 362 BC, lay ‘on the borderline between strategy and tactics’ but in
which an ‘arbitrary division is false’. Liddell Hart described ‘pure strategy’, which
he distinguished from grand strategy and its relation to policy, in terms which
stressed movement and surprise, and which sought strategic dislocation through
the mystification of the enemy. 69 Both of them eschewed the word ‘operations’,
but Fuller with his interest in ‘grand tactics’ and Liddell Hart with his in ‘field
strategy’ or manoeuvre were converging on the same issue from different per-
spectives. 70
THE SECOND WORLD WARBoth Fuller and Liddell Hart enjoyed close connections with senior officers in the
British army, and both were able to exercise considerable influence on its think-
ing—to a much greater extent than either of them was prepared to acknowledge.
This leverage was increased by the army’s lack of doctrine, which meant that those
who thought about their profession were naturally drawn to both Fuller’s and
Liddell Hart’s writings. 71 And yet the British army of the Second World War is
widely, and probably rightly, criticized for failing—not only in the battles of
1940–2, but also in those of 1944–5—in the exercise of operational art. Why was
that the case?
The first answer is the intemperate nature of Fuller’s own advocacy, his
damning of those who disagreed with him as stupid and ignorant, and his
determination to write in prose that seemed pretentious and obscure. Although
British Strategycan be read as a counter toThe Foundations of the Science of War,
the point should not be laboured. Maurice’s book did not attack Fuller by name,
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 115