Fire-Power by Shelford Bidwell Dominick Graham

Author:Shelford Bidwell, Dominick Graham [Shelford Bidwell, Dominick Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War I, World War II
ISBN: 9781844152162
Google: pDDAAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2004-10-01T01:42:08+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Policies, Theories and

Weapons

An Army cannot be run according to the rules of

etiquette.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

WHEN General Sir George Milne became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1926 one of his first actions was to draft a memorandum requesting the Secretary of State for War to define the tasks for which the Army existed. This seems to have been perfectly logical. At that time all plans for modernising the Army were constrained by the financial situation of the country, which precluded any policy involving lavish re-equipment, and the Ten Year Rule, which stated that military plans should be based on the assumption that the country would not be involved in a major war for the next ten years; the starting year of this decade being advanced from year to year so that the undefined threat always lay ten years ahead. All the same, the Army vote was a substantial fraction of the national expenditure, and without a proper definition of the Army’s rôle it was not easy for the Army Council to plan for its best use.

The constitutional position of the CIGS has always been perfectly clear. Although selected on the basis of being one of the ablest officers in the Army, he is only a member of the Army Council functioning as a board of management, whose chairman is the Secretary of State for War, through whom its advice reaches the government. The CIGS is at best only the first among equals, although by virtue of his responsibilities, which included war plans, ‘doctrine’, intelligence, training and all the organisational matters embraced under the title of ‘staff duties’, in short, all warlike affairs, as compared with the supportive roles of his fellow Army Councillors, his post was the most influential one. (In practice the status of the CIGS varied according to his relationship with the government of the day.) A CIGS was therefore precluded from pressing his own ideas as distinct from the collective opinion of the Army Council, but there was nothing ultra vires in any member of Council posing a question to his own chairman, the only member of the government he was allowed formally to approach. In the event, the members of Council, on the initiative of the Quartermaster General, objected strongly and the question was withdrawn. It was, perhaps, not possible for the government to give a definite answer at that date, but the absence of one was to make the process of modernising the Army difficult, to say the least.

The real reason, or reasons, for the blocking action of the other Council members, apart from the flimsy procedural objection, can only be a subject for conjecture. It may have been the fear that too rigid a definition might later tie the hands of Council; politically there is a lot to be said for vague or no terms of reference. They may have been, as is not unknown in such bodies, testing the nerve and authority of a new chief. They may have suspected that Milne nursed dangerous radical ideas.

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