This too was what gave unity to NATO thinking in the 1980s. The enemy could be
clearly identified, his own methods of fighting were the subject of constant
monitoring by the intelligence services, and the geography of the potential battle
zone was known and familiar. Bagnall stressed the need for flexibility within
doctrine but he could do so within the certainties provided by fixed parameters.
Bagnall completed his career as chief of the general staff in 1985–8, and left a
legacy that was both personal and institutional. The ‘Ginge’ group (so called in
reference to the colour of Bagnall’s hair, but never so called to his face) was an
informal gathering that cut across rank, but whose ways of thinking were
embraced by his successors, including Martin Farndale, who followed him as
the corps commander and at NORTHAG, and Peter Inge, his successor but one as
chief of the general staff who then went on to become chief of the defence staff.
The ‘Ginge’ group was duly succeeded by the ‘Pinge’ group. Institutionally, in
1988 Bagnall set up the Higher Command and Staff Course within the army’s
Staff College, and tasked it specifically with teaching the operational level of war
to the next generation of senior officers.
The Higher Command and Staff Course was unlike anything else seen by the
British army in the twentieth century, except possibly the annual conferences held
before the First World War in the immediate aftermath of the general staff’s
establishment. At its heart was syndicate discussion, the trusted tool of the Staff
College, applied here not only to explore concepts, but also to shape them.
Precisely because both operational art and manoeuvre were to all intents and
purposes new to British officers, their contours were unclear and the students
who studied them were pioneers: questions were as important as answers. The
debate itself produced a generation of officers for whom the operational-level war
became not just a means to promotion within their profession, but also an
embedded part of their mental processes. Between 1988 and 1991, these offi-
cers—from an army which had not necessarily seen publication as a passport to
advancement—published thirty-two papers. 86 Military history itself acquired a
legitimacy it had struggled to possess in military education over the preceding
twenty years, the Staff College even appointing a resident historian, Brian Holden
Reid, to teach on the Higher Command and Staff Course, and the intellectual
mavericks of the past, J. F. C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart, whose work had
anticipated the evolution of operational art, being reinstated on reading lists.
Figures from the margins of military life entered the mainstream, most notably
Brigadier Richard Simpkin, a product of the Royal Tank Regiment who had been
retired for nearly twenty years and a student of the army which had done most to
develop operational thought, that of the Soviet Union. 87 Simpkin’sRace to the
Swift: Thoughts on Twenty-First Century Warfare, published in 1985, contrasted
attrition theory, which he characterized as focused on the seizure of ground and
the inflicting of casualties through fighting, with manoeuvre theory, which
‘regards fighting as only one way of applying military force to the attainment of
a politico-economic aim—and a rather inelegant last resort at that’. Whereas
attrition, according to Simpkin, used ‘the same basic techniques...on a larger
scale up through the levels’, manoeuvre acquired special significance at the
120 The Evolution of Operational Art