Doctrinelisted the principles of war in an appendix). 100 Its discussion of the
operational level of war was bracketed with the strategic in a brief section
pregnantly headed ‘the significance of land warfare concepts for maritime doc-
trine’. 101 Naval commanders in battles at sea reckoned to find themselves in
situations where the tactical and the strategic collapsed in on each other. In
1914, at the outset of the First World War, John Jellicoe, on his appointment to
command the British Grand Fleet, had issued Grand Fleet Battle Orders, which
were essentially tactical instructions. On 31 May 1916, at the Battle of Jutland, his
decisions, however tactically determined, could have decided the course of the
war. Shortly after 6.15 p.m., Jellicoe had crossed the ‘T’, putting the Grand Fleet at
right angles to the German High Seas Fleet, which was still in line ahead, thus
bringing overwhelming firepower to bear through manoeuvre. Despite holding
the tactical advantage, Jellicoe had then turned away because of the dangers to
Britain’s long-term control of the North Sea’s exits if the fleet had suffered heavy
losses to torpedoes. The operational level of war had little explanatory value,
except as a term to explain the mix of both tactics and strategy that shaped
Jellicoe’s decisions.
Nor was the antithesis between attrition and manoeuvre of any meaning.
‘Historically and from the standpoint of modern doctrine, a navy does not have
a choice between manoeuvre and other styles of warfare’,The Fundamentals of
British Maritime Doctrinestated: ‘Manoeuvre warfare theory is the intelligent use
of force and is a logical development of the “principles of war”’. 102 Ships, like
aeroplanes, manoeuvre in order to bring fire to bear, the one depending on the
other. In his discussion of war on land, Simpkin had acknowledged that
the antithesis between attrition and manoeuvre was only theoretical, that ‘once
fighting starts, the two theories become complementary’. 103 But the army, its
thinking shaped by its need to escape the dilemmas of relative weakness if faced
by the Warsaw Pact, increasingly saw attrition, whose use rested on superior
resources, as vicious, and manoeuvre, where wit might compensate for brawn, as
virtuous. And the other two services denied their own best instincts to follow the
army’s lead. The first edition of the joint defence doctrine, published in 1997,
embodied this polarization, defining manoeuvre warfare as a ‘warfighting philos-
ophy that seeks to defeat the enemy by shattering his moral and physical
cohesion—his ability to fight as an effective, coordinated whole—rather than
by destroying him physically through incremental attrition’. 104
In the same year, the three services’ Staff Colleges were united to form the Joint
Services Command and Staff College, located first at Bracknell (where its com-
mandant was Timothy Granville-Chapman) and then at Shrivenham. The Higher
Command and Staff Course could no longer focus on the corps counter-stroke
on the central European front, not least because for many of those now on the
course such issues would have been irrelevant, even if the Cold War had still been
in full swing. But the search for common denominators meant that the cutting
edge created by conceptual difference disappeared from the debate. Manoeuvre, a
word with clear connotations in land warfare, associated with mobility and with
lines of operations, and manoeuvre warfare, which was itself now described as
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 125