The Bramall Papers by Bramall

Author:Bramall [Bramall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Memoir, Historical
ISBN: 9781526725653
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2017-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

Book 4

Evolving Future Strategy: Constraints on Violence, Dynamic Diplomacy and Intervention Operations

Introduction

Bramall was in a unique position to give deep and penetrating thought to the way Great Britain’s military strategy ought to evolve and to offer some guidance on the methods and tactics which would need to be used to ensure that the country’s political aims were fully met. Quite apart from being closely involved in a wide spectrum of conflict situations from Total War to dynamic diplomacy and peace keeping, Bramall had taught all arms tactics at both the Army’s School of Infantry and Staff College, and in 1968 had been especially picked by the Chief of the General Staff67 to write the British Army’s first post-war Doctrine.

In 1970 Bramall, then a Brigadier, attended the last course at the Imperial Defence College (later renamed as the Royal College of Defence Studies) and wrote a much-acclaimed thesis entitled ‘The Application of Force in the Future’. He concentrated his analysis on the immediate past and likely developments within the next decade, but it has an acute, one might even say uncanny, relevance to the later decades of the twentieth century and even to the start of the twenty-first. This saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the single super-power situation, various interventions in the Falklands, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and a general heightening of international tension through fanatical Muslim opposition to Israel and the nations of the West, the rise of Al-Qaeda and ISIS and the invasion of Iraq.

Bramall was to continue to make contributions to higher military thought when immediately after the Falklands War he took over as C.D.S. in October 1982. He inherited Armed Forces and a Defence Programme which were in good shape. The former were immensely respected throughout the country for their fighting qualities and the organisational abilities which had enabled them to win a taxing campaign so far from home in the Falklands; although the latter was no longer sufficient to give an expectation of correcting some alarming equipment weaknesses and by the end of the decade restoring operational balance. The Falklands War had started to make people realize that our defence needs and spending could not be confined to what were still the only four pillars of our strategy – nuclear deterrence, the Central Front in NATO, the North Atlantic and Home Defence. The world, and the nature of the threats we faced, was changing, and this would put a premium on dynamic, hopefully pre-emptive diplomacy and the closest co-ordination between the FCO and the MoD, often lacking in recent times, improved intelligence gathering, high grade and better briefed defence attachés, loan service attachments and training courses and economic and/or military assistance, all designed primarily to help friends help themselves and impose constraints on those that threatened them. In the background, to support that diplomacy, there must be flexible, strategically mobile military forces capable, usually with others, of imposing an ambiguous threat or a

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