conventional capability to make it credible’, and ‘a visible capacity to wage war if
it fails’. 92 The end of the Cold War confronted the operational level of war with
two challenges. First, did it embrace an approach that possessed universal appli-
cability, that was relevant not just to a coalition conflict in Europe, but also to
other forms of war elsewhere in the world? In other words, were the principles of
manoeuvre warfare comparable with the principles of war espoused by theField
Service Regulationsand so transferable to all forms of war? Or had the army, in
pursuing Continentalism, in measuring itself against a ‘first-class enemy’, dis-
qualified itself from meeting other sorts of enemy in different environments?
And, secondly, was the operational level of war, which stressed scale and took the
corps as its basic formation, going to be able to survive the cuts in defence
expenditure, the ‘peace dividend’ of the Cold War’s end and already inaugurated
by the 1991 defence review ‘Options for Change’?
The first question seemed to be convincingly answered while the review was in
train. The British Army of the Rhine’s 1st Armoured Division was transferred,
effectively lock, stock, and barrel, to the Gulf to fight in the coalition war against
Iraq. It did so under the command of Rupert Smith, who had been an inspira-
tional director of studies on the Higher Command and Staff Course, and Patrick
Cordingley, a student on the first course, commanded one of the division’s two
brigades. The course of the land war in 1991 vindicated both the operational level
of war and its emphasis on manoeuvre. What had been designed to check a Soviet
conventional drive across the urban sprawl of north-west Europe proved as
applicable to the invasion of an Arab state in desert conditions. The lessons of
the Gulf War, therefore, seemed to point unequivocally forwards, not back-
wards. 93 And, if there had been doubters in the British defence community,
they would not have been heard. The most important consideration for the
British armed services was the need to be able to operate alongside the Americans,
and where they went Britain—like the other NATO allies—had little choice but to
follow. Some of the paths down which the Americans then led—the ‘revolution in
military affairs’, ‘effects-based warfare’, and network-centric operations—became
overstated in their presentation, and promised technologies which the British
would be hard pushed to afford, but doctrine was king, and American doctrine
was—albeit largely unobserved—becoming dogmatic. American doctrine in the
1980s had been developed in crisis—against the background of defeat in Viet-
nam, with an awareness of Soviet numerical strength, and conscious of the need
for better conceptual drivers as a means to compensate for both. By the end of the
1990s, it was posited on the basis of superiority, not inferiority, and rested not on
questioning and doubt but on increasing certainty and self-confidence. Although
it still paid due deference to manoeuvre, the United States’s ability to mass fire
effects gave attrition readmission by the back door, and could be justified by the
trite but true observation that manoeuvre and attrition were not alternatives but
two sides of the same coin. Armies manoeuvred to bring fire to bear, and then
used fire to be able to manoeuvre. Developed outside the pragmatic context of
imminent threats comparable with those faced by Germany before 1914 or NATO
in the 1980s, American doctrine became self-referential, a basis for orders not for
122 The Evolution of Operational Art