that the mental agility which ‘manoeuvrism’ contained could be exercised down
to brigade level. Frequently, it had not been, often because brigadiers were not
clear whether they did have the authority so to act, but sometimes because that
flexibility of thought had also been lost. When the single service staff colleges were
amalgamated, the word ‘command’ was inserted in the new collective title, the
Joint Services Command and Staff College. But can a college do both at the same
time, and can the same campus also deliver ‘defence management’, while keeping
the ‘manoeuvrist approach’ alive within operational art?
The interpretations of the Australian and American scholars mentioned above,
even if questionable as history, can however help the armed forces of Britain
answer these questions as they confront the future. Doctrine, Palazzo argued, ‘is a
construct of a particular time, a response to a particular strategic situation, and a
solution to a set of particular operational problems’. 114 But if the fear prevails that
doctrine will become dogma, located in the last war not in the current one or the
coming one, an army is left without any intellectual purchase on the challenges of
armed conflict. Palazzo was, of course, right about the problems of doctrine, but
the answer is not that embraced by the British army until 1989: to neglect
doctrine. Instead, doctrine has to be constantly re-examined, so that its intellec-
tual, theoretical, and more abstract qualities are tied to realities in a continuous
and iterative process. To do that well, the army has to be what John Nagl called a
learning institution. 115 Learning is not simply absorbing instruction and com-
pleting courses; that is training, and, although the army has frequently confused
the two, they are not the same. Learning involves debate and dispute, so that
teaching and enquiry are linked, doctrine is internalized, and its implications
understood and ‘owned’ by those who have to practise it. Finally, the fact that
operational art in wars of intervention and stabilization flourishes more at the
political than at the tactical end of the operational spectrum requires an integra-
tion of civil and military authority which trumps the norms of conventional
civil–military relations in democratic states. This was Deborah Avant’s point in
relation to Malaya. 116 To produce British armed forces that are comfortable as
learning organizations and aware of their political roles may not be easy, but they
are the essential ingredients in the generation of operational art in the early
twenty-first century.
NOTES- Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham,Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and the
Theories of War, 1904–1945(London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), 2. I am very grateful to
Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely and Colonel Richard Iron for reading and
commenting on this piece, even if they do not agree with everything in it. I have
also benefited from conversations over many years with Lieutenant General Sir Alistair
Irwin and Major General Jonathan Bailey. - Ibid, 295.
- Ibid, 294.
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 131