more than a knowledge of the principles of painting will, without steady practice
and natural aptitude, enable an artist to paint a picture’. 62 Milne had told the
annual general staff conference in 1927 that ‘the interpretation [ofField Service
Regulations] as you get on in the service, especially as regards senior officers of the
General Staff, must be left to you to a great extent’. 63
Fuller, on the other hand, distanced himself from Henderson’s legacy. 64 He was
not satisfied with an approach to the study of war which depended so much on
history to the exclusion of the future, and which stressed the art involved in the
application of the principles rather than the science on which those principles
rested. In 1926,The Foundations of the Science of War, the most ambitious of all
his books, aimed to marry the wisdom of the past to the speculations surround-
ing the future by the use of scientific methods, not least because, ‘as regards
war,...everything is changing. We are faced by air warfare, and mechanical war-
fare on land, and submarine warfare at sea, and chemical warfare everywhere’. 65
The book rested on a system of principles and on Fuller’s belief in war’s threefold
order. Both ideas were developed in more pragmatic and less abstruse fashion in
1931 inLectures on F. S. R. II, Fuller’s commentary onField Service Regulations.Its
introduction said thatField Service Regulationswas ‘pre-eminently a guide to
action, in which a common doctrine is laid down that in no way should be
considered a rigid dogma’. Doctrine was a word whose use Fuller had repudiated
in 1914, but he now employed it in a way that was both flexible (so meeting its
standard criticisms in British circles) and modern. Moreover, Fuller divided ‘the
controlling objects in war’ into a threefold hierarchy, political or ‘grand strategi-
cal’, ‘strategical’, and tactical. His definitions of tactics and strategy were fairly
traditional. The latter was ‘the art of moving armies towards the battlefield in
such a way that when the battle takes place it will be fought at the greatest
advantage; consequently strategy is the foundation of planning, which is the
main duty of the general’. 66 However, when such a definition was put alongside
that of grand strategy, which used not only military force, but also economic
pressure, financial disorganization, and propaganda, Fuller was effectively asso-
ciating strategy with operational art.
This point became even clearer in the following year, when Fuller’sLectures on
F. S. R. III (Operations Between Mechanized Forces)tackled the issue of future
warfare. He juxtaposed a revolution in land warfare created by new technologies
and the unchanging principles of war to argue that the sum total would be
evolutionary, ‘not a new type of war, a war totally unrelated to the present type,
but a new form of war, a form arising out of the petrol engine which has greatly
accelerated movement and enhanced carrying power’. His definition of strategy
reflected the transitional quality of his thought. Now it said nothing about battle,
pointing no longer to strategy’s tactical pay-off, but to its political outcome: ‘The
aim of strategy is to clinch a political argument by means of force in place of
words’. Into the gap which he had thus opened between strategy and tactics, he
put operational art. Thanks to the advent of more mobile and flexible forces,
‘generalship can be developed into a high art, and battles into works of art and
not merely daubs of blood’. In formulating his plan, the general of the future
114 The Evolution of Operational Art