The Limitations of Military Power

The Chichele professorship of the history of war at Oxford is just eighty years old, but the work in this academic area at Oxford predates that at any major university in the English-speaking world. As a subject of major academic interest, military history with strategic and defence studies have only in relatively recent years spread more widely, with a fully established centre at King’s College, London, and a number of more recently created university posts in the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore and South Africa, as well as in Canada and the United States. With the rapid proliferation of the subject in universities today, the story of the study of war history at Oxford provides some longer-range perspective in the way in which one university dealt with the subject, within the broader context of general academic development, the parallel contributions of the service colleges and the changing experience of the forces themselves.

We would be heartened beyond measure to know that war had become wholly a matter for history. Regrettably it is in rude health, with major wars, insurgencies and civil conflicts raging in many parts of the world. The persistence and increasing destructiveness of war serve to emphasise the weight of the responsibilities carried by all of us who attempt to give future policy-makers and their necessary critics a fuller understanding of the challenges before them.

It is popular in 1990 to say that counter-insurgency is not a military problem. It is widely believed that poor social and economic conditions and ineffective, corrupt governments are the causes of insurgencies, and if these conditions are remedied, the insurgencies will go away. However, people, not situations, make insurgencies, though poor conditions provide a fertile environment for dissatisfied people to launch insurgencies. Insurgents want political power and are willing to fight long and hard for it. Because of their small and simple beginnings, they must grow, and therefore tend to wage protracted struggles. The founders need to recruit, train and indoctrinate cadres as the backbone of their growing insurgency. They have added violence to peaceful means to achieve their political objectives of overthrowing a government or of gaining independence from it. They wage a total war, though on a low but increasingly intense level of violence, using not only the military but also political, psychological and economic tools to win. As the insurgents increase in numbers and capabilities, they create insecurity in the countryside and make the maintenance of law and order, as well as the provision of government services, difficult and dangerous if not impossible. To counter such an assault, most if not all government agencies, including the military, must be mobilised. Security becomes a primary concern, as the government must assure it in order to function effectively and provide needed services to its people. The military is the only institution able to effect security once insurgency has broken out.

By the onset of this century, there had developed a form of bureaucratic organisation in international agencies that subsequently became the parent of modern international political organisations. On one hand, permanent staffs were created which carried out the purposes of agencies and gave them a sense of permanency and coherence. On the other, the staffs and their functions became separated from the governing bodies of the agencies, while some form of council set policy for the organisation. This policy-making process later was described as ‘conference diplomacy’.

As a limitation upon the power of states, nothing has proven to be more pervasive and enduring than geography. Indeed, when explaining the direct and indirect influence of geography upon statecraft and strategy, the terms of geographical reference can become so all-embracing that there is danger of a deterministic element creeping in to ambush the unwary.¹ With particular, but not exclusive, reference to limitations upon the power of states, this chapter explores several major aspects of the influence of geography upon choice of, and performance in, grand strategy.

The British way of using military force to preserve civil order remained remarkably unsystematic for two centuries after the first Riot Act. During that time almost no official effort was made to relate the disparate notions of ‘disturbance’, ‘tumult’, ‘riot’ and ‘disorder’ into a coherent concept of emergency. Indeed, it may be that such coherence was more or less consciously resisted as alien to the English legal and administrative mind alike. In the later nineteenth century the common-law rule of strict necessity — that the executive had the duty to repel force with force, but with only the precise amount of force necessary — was buttressed for another generation by Dicey’s persuasive formulations.¹ The deliberate imprecision of the legal view was highlighted by the Liberal lawyer-statesman R. B. Haldane (then Secretary of State for War, later Lord Chancellor) in his evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on the Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbance in 1908. The law, he said, rested on the judgment of each officer charged with preservation of the peace, who had to tread a narrow path between two precipices — ‘he has to get along and he does get along’.²

In his study of British grand strategy before the Second World War, Norman Gibbs was careful to note that the limitations of military power included finance and the productive capacity of industry.¹ He also dismissed the myth that British weakness in the 1930s was simply the result of ‘supposed dictatorial obstinacy’ on the part of Neville Chamberlain.² However, Gibbs was inhibited, as the author of an official history, when dealing with political personalities, and, in particular, he could not directly confront the legend of Winston Churchill as the Cassandra of the period.³ What follows may be seen as a footnote to Gibbs, in that this chapter is an attempt to compare how Churchill and Chamberlain coped with the limitations of military power. The focus is on their attitudes to the defence of Britain’s widely scattered Empire, for it was there that the imbalance between limited military power and extensive commitments was greatest.

It is an interesting fact that Hitler’s attitude towards Britain bears the same ambivalent mixture of love and hatred that was so characteristic of Kaiser Wilhelm II. While there is a reasonable explanation for the latter’s attitude — family ties and admiration for the British way of life on the one hand; jealousy and offended pride on the other — it is hard to find such explanations for Hitler’s attitude. Indeed, already in the early 1920s he wrote in chapter 13 of the second volume of Mein Kampf that in Europe only two countries may come into question as possible allies for Germany, namely, England and Italy. It seems that the reason for this conception is that in the National-Socialist race theory Britain belonged to the favoured Nordic Race (while Fascist Italy provided an example of a totalitarian regime). This, however, seems to be a rather unsatisfactory explanation. Some years ago, I asked Professor Alan Bullock for an explanation. In his answer to my letter he maintained that obviously Hitler’s admiration for Great Britain was mainly due to the British imperial record, above all in India. Bullock had found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and in his famous Table Talk’ many hints to confirm this. Hitler obviously considered his own plans for the creation of a new Eastern Empire as analogous to the British achievements in India and the Far East.

British gunboat diplomacy in China, so redolent of the Palmer-stonian era, survived well into the twentieth century before being apparently laid to rest with the signing of the Sino-British agreement in January 1943. This symbolic act scrapped the remaining vestiges of those extraterritorial rights enjoyed by the British in China for more than a hundred years and brought the whole controversial system of the unequal treaties to what was thought by many to be a very timely end. When bolstered by the Moscow Declaration of December 1945, in which the great powers pledged themselves to a policy of non-interventionism in China and neutrality in the civil war between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the prospects for a revival of British gunboat activity in China appeared to be all but non-existent. Yet within three years of this historic foreign ministers meeting in the Russian capital, the British had decided to renege on their undertaking and revert to an admittedly limited use of their former extraterritorial privileges in Chinese waters.

One of the more visible legacies of the recent war in Vietnam has been an ongoing controversy over the lessons that should be drawn from it. Virtually since the fall of Saigon in April 1975, scholars, journalists, government officials and other foreign affairs pundits have debated over the ultimate conclusions that should be drawn from the conflict and how its ultimate outcome should be interpreted in terms of the future conduct of US foreign policy.