War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

superiority had been gained. However, these two fundamental principles were by no
means self-evident truths to military experts in the 1930s.
The military and strategic meaning of the mechanization RMA would only be revealed
by historical experience. The next four chapters are about mechanized warfare waged on
the grandest of scales for the most total of political objectives.

Questions

1. What were the principal uncertainties that military planners needed to resolve
   in their decisions on mechanization in the interwar years?


2. What were the main competing ideas on the proper use of tanks?


3. How did technological developments from 1918 to 1940 affect the military
   promise in different forms of air power?


4. How did strategic and military culture, as well as considerations of geostrategy,
   influence different countries’ choices in mechanization?

Further reading

U. Bialer The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932–1939
(London: Royal Historical Society, 19 8 0).
J. S. Corum The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and German Military Reform(Lawrence,
KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992).
G. Douhet The Command of the Air(New York: Arno Press, 1972).
A. Gat Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 199 8 ).

122 War, peace and international relations

Key points

1. There was a mechanization RMA between the two world wars.


2. The technologies of mechanization were common to all major states, but their
   strategic contexts, cultures and therefore investment decisions differed.


3. There were uncertainties about the roles of tanks that only the experience of
   war could resolve. Some theorists believed that tanks should be employed all
   but independently, en masse. Others believed that tanks should be a component
   in a combined-arms team.


4. When technology is changing fast, doctrine is controversial, money is scarce
   and the date of a future war is unknowable, it is inherently difficult to make
   prudent investment choices.


5. The air power menace to the civilian population, London in particular,
   frightened British politicians in the 1930s and encouraged the policy of
   appeasement.


6. All navies were imprudently confident that in sonar they had a good enough
   answer to the challenge of the submarine.