discussion. Led by technology rather than debate, its view of war neglected the
social and political conditions which could shape war’s conduct, as opposed to its
causation. With no peer in sight, the United States was thinking about war
without an effective enemy, and so was losing contact with the essence of war
itself, its clash of wills.
The answer to the first question, that on doctrine’s universal applicability, also
helped resolve the second, that on the survival of the operational level of war. If
the operational level provided answers that were applicable to all wars, then the
British armed forces had to embrace its imperatives. With the end of the Cold
War, NATO created the Ace Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC). The British army
fought hard to be given control of the ARRC headquarters, so that it could keep
intact its planning skills and the capacity for corps command. In 1992, it was
rewarded by the appointment of Jeremy Mackenzie, deputy commandant and
then commandant of the Staff College in the early days of the Higher Command
and Staff Course, to be the ARRC’s first commander. Successive chiefs of the
general staff, despite the deployment of the British army to Northern Ireland and
to the Balkans, maintained that the capacity to fight a major war was the
benchmark for all other activity; low-intensity operations, counter-insurgency,
and peacekeeping would be accommodated within the envelope of war fighting.
‘We must not settle back to thinking small, no matter how reduced our army is to
become’, the inspector general of doctrine and training, Lieutenant General Sir
Garry Johnson, told the Royal United Services Institute in 1991: ‘We must
continue to think and teach at the operational level and across the spectrum of
warfare from high to low-intensity, and if at all possible to maintain forces
capable of operating without reinforcement at this level’. 94 The vocabulary of
the Central Front was shoehorned into the new circumstances.
Some of this transfer was sensible and pragmatic: to argue that the operational
level of war was not just applicable to large-scale armoured conflicts, and that it
applied not just to the corps level of command, as did another alumnus of the
Higher Command and Staff Course, Alistair Irwin, was fair enough. 95 Opera-
tional art was now linked to campaign planning, whatever the unit level at which
theatre command was exercised, because that was the point at which military and
political effects interfaced. Thus, in 2000, a brigadier, David Richards, com-
manded the UK Joint Task Force in Sierra Leone. Furthermore, manoeuvre
now became the way of looking at all sorts of wars, just as applicable in ‘opera-
tions other than war’ as in the large conventional battles for which it was
developed. 96 Before the First World War, Henderson, Haig, and Robertson,
when faced with not dissimilar dilemmas, adopted a comparable approach, a
generic view of war, resting on principles applicable across all wars, but adaptable
to each. The army’s response in the 1990s was ‘balance’ across ‘the spectrum
of warfare’ (as Johnson had called it but which came to be called ‘the spectrum of
conflict’). In practice, this meant that, although the army was committed to the
equivalent of wars against uncivilized enemies, it was structured and equipped—
and even more importantly intellectually prepared for—war against a ‘first-class
enemy’.
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 123