BAGNALL AND BRITISH MILITARY DOCTRINEThe external pressures forcing the British Army of the Rhine to think about the
operational level of war were political and strategic, and rested, above all, on the
nature of the Soviet threat and the eroding acceptability of an early recourse to
nuclear weapons. But there were also internal and independent drivers. Nigel
Bagnall, the commander of 1 (British) Corps between 1981 and 1983, had begun
his service as an infantry officer with the Green Howards, serving in Malaya,
Cyprus, and Borneo, but he had commanded an armoured regiment, the 4th/7th
Dragoon Guards. His career thereafter was focused more on the threat of major
war in Europe than on withdrawal from empire. Like Kitson, he had also had an
opportunity to reflect on his experiences as a Defence Fellow at Oxford Univer-
sity. His studies of the German army’s defensive battles on the Eastern Front in
the Second World War suggested that inferior NATO conventional forces could
check superior Soviet forces with armoured counter-strokes, using manoeuvre to
trade space for time, and so achieving the offensive at the operational level while
implementing a strategic defence. He knew too that 1 (British) Corps’ battle
would have to be coordinated with that of its neighbour, 1 (German) Corps, a
task made easier in 1985 when he took over command of Northern Army Group
(NORTHAG), a joint command of which the Belgians and the Dutch were also
part but in which the British and the Germans were the leading players. 83
Bagnall now embraced and preached the operational level of war, and his
intellectual inspiration for this was the German army. To that extent, the British
army mirrored, but was independent of, comparable trends in the army of the
United States. The Americans, smarting from their defeat in Vietnam, had
resolved not to learn from it but to turn their backs on irregular warfare and
counter-insurgency. Focusing on major war in Europe, they used doctrine as one
means to re-establish their sense of professional self-worth, and in the 1982
edition ofField Manual 100–5: Operationshad endorsed the use of manoeuvre
in preference to attrition, stressing the operational level of war more than the
tactical. For the Americans, too, the Germans were the models, although they—
like Bagnall—failed to notice that the Wehrmacht’s successes in 1940–1 were less
the reflection of doctrine than of improvisation. 84 Blitzkriegas an operational
method was a product of the defeat of France in 1940, not a cause; moreover, in
1941–2, once Germans became wedded to it as a system, it failed them in the
Soviet Union. 85 Operational art had not made good the inadequacies of bad
strategy for Germany, but the lack of a clear distinction between operational art
and strategy in the military thought of the time—and in the period immediately
after the war—obscured that. The essence of German staff training had revolved
around the application of solutions to practical problems. Helmuth von Moltke
the Elder and Alfred von Schlieffen, the dominant Prussian chiefs of staff between
the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War, had
taught operational skills through war games, staff rides, and map exercises which
rested on the specific conundrums posed by the defence of Germany’s frontiers.
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 119