Air University Review, November-December 1967

The British Approach to Strategy:
Perspectives for the U.S.

Lieutenant Colonel Ray L. Bowers

The military posture of the United States today rests primarily upon this nation’s strength in sea and air power. It is through command of the sea and air that America extends military power to far-flung corners of the globe, containing and balancing the power of her cold war enemies-enemies whose natural strength lies in land fortes. Our sea power and air power reach into the Congo, the Middle East, the Dominican Republic, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Behind these global activities stands the ultimate deterrent, our strategic nuclear forces, which are themselves expressions of America’s power in sea, air, and space.

Our current world position holds striking resemblance to that of Britain—the nation of sea power—during the past several centuries. Britain represented a technically advanced and relatively wealthy society, confronted with Continental enemies who possessed superior strength in manpower and in land warfare capabilities. Again and again over the decades, Britain succeeded in making her strength felt in conflicts with Continental foes. Her methods constituted the classic weapons of a nation of sea power; in retrospect they serve to suggest the possibilities and the pitfalls of similar strategies for the future.

The current global military involvements of the United States are relatively new in American policy, and thus our strategic thought cannot draw on a historical continuity rooted in our own experience. The American public as well as our strategy-makers—soldiers and statesmen-are thereby at a disadvantage in attaining the deeper view and historical perspective required of them. It is useful, then, to condition our view to the essential continuity of America’s current strategic problems from the past by examining the classic and traditional British approach to war.

the continuum of air warfare from naval

During and after the Second World War, the United States became the heir to Britain’s historic command of the sea. American military policy reflected as well a strong preoccupation with the air weapon, a recent intruder as an instrument of global power. During the eight years beginning in 1950 (a period which included the ground fighting in Korea), 68 percent of the nation’s military spending went to the Navy and Air Force.¹ Thus, although the mass citizen army vanished along with the notion of universal peacetime conscription, the nation’s ability to deploy strength globally has remained strong. How, then, does the intrusion of air power validate the picture of American strategy as analogous to Britain’s historic approach to war?

Both sea power and air power have been the natural tools of the more technically advanced nations; both take strength from a society tuned to technical things. Both are concerned with bases and lines of communication. In both arenas, conflict lacks fixed fronts and is concerned with achieving command of the medium. It is no coincidence that Mahan’s doctrine of the command of the sea found reflection in the English title of Douhet’s book, The Command of the Air. Both air power and sea power yield access to distant regions; both possess the mobility and striking power to exert force over great distances. Both can make a show of force, unmistakably supporting the nation’s diplomacy. The expanding possibilities of strategic and tactical air transport suggest past strategies of sea power. The ability of air forces to strike directly against enemy land communications constitutes a new and reinforcing capability. Thus, the far-reaching sea power and air power of the United States today and the strategic considerations underlying their employment may be viewed as similar to Britain’s past global use of naval power.

Britain’s historical sea power strategy

A nation’s historical approach to war is a product of three broad circumstances: the nation’s geographical and strategic situation, the prevailing attitudes and characteristics of its society, and the ideas of its military theorists and leaders. Generally speaking, the first of these factors—particularly the happenstance of location—has been the most fundamental in influence, itself coloring the other two. The states of Continental Europe, for example, because of the contiguity of dangerous enemies, have been obliged to give close attention to doctrines and readiness for land, as opposed to sea, warfare. Poland failed to organize herself effectively for war despite strong neighbors, and as a result Poland vanished from the map throughout the nineteenth century and again in 1939. Poland’s example underlined for Prussia and modern Germany the significance of strength for land warfare. Regular involvement in Continental wars caused France and the Austrian Empire to give first attention to problems of land rather than sea warfare. Modern Russia and China became almost exclusively powers in land warfare because of their interior situations, vast populations, dependence on land communications, and technical backwardness handicapping development of sea power. The Japanese crushed emerging Russian sea power at Port Arthur and Tsushima Strait in the war of 1904-5, as they had crushed that of China ten years earlier.

Nations outside the Eurasian mass—Britain, Japan, and the United States—in their security from land invasion, have historically developed naval strength as the first instrument of national power. In Britain and the U.S., this has been accompanied by strong distrust of militaristic tendencies and aversion to large standing armies, conditions which have strengthened democratic political development; but in Japan, antimilitarism and democracy are recent conditions of uncertain endurance. In wars, these sea power nations have generally been successful against enemies that stress continental land forces. Of the three, the British experience has been by far the most prolonged and consistent.

The English preoccupation with naval strength, begun in the reign of Elizabeth I, became established as a conscious and permanent approach to strategy during the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, maturing in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) against France. Shaken by early defeats in the Mediterranean and in North America (Braddock’s defeat), the British cabinet turned to William Pitt, the Elder, who soon emerged as supreme director of the nation’s war energies.

Allied to Frederick the Great of Prussia and holding important territorial possessions in Germany, Britain might have elected to dispatch large land armies to the Continent. Many Britishers, including the King, supported such a course of action. Aware of Britain’s limited capability in manpower to decisively influence land campaigns on the Continent, Pitt turned toward less direct strategies. He would aid his Prussian ally with financial subsidies and token fighting forces, but England’s principal energies would be directed elsewhere—toward developing and exploiting Britain’s naval might, to win world empire in North America, India, and the Caribbean.

Under Pitt, the tide of war turned to favor the British. The French New World bastion of Louisbourg at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence fell before determined British action in 1758. Wolfe’s subsequent amphibious campaign against Quebec, a thousand miles up the Saint Lawrence, assured the conquest of North America for the British. Meanwhile in the West Indies, British expeditions seized valuable French possessions—Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Dominica. On the opposite side of the globe, French forces in India witnessed the blocking of their support from home, while English supplies and reinforcements increased. Pitt’s global strategy also included successful attacks against French stations in Africa, conquest of prized Spanish Manila, and several hit-and-run assaults on the French coast itself. Command of the seas was absolutely vital to all these campaigns; it had been achieved in 1759 by two decisive victories over French fleets, at Lagos Bay off Portugal and at Quiberon Bay on the French coast. To the last, the English remained aloof from the grand campaigns on the Continent; and Pitt’s strategy won world empire for Britain.²

The French Revolution at the end of the century served to revitalize French arms. Under the brilliant Napoleon, France defeated her Continental opponents, uniting all of Europe by 1807 against British economic strength. French sea power, however, had been crushed through a succession of British naval victories, culminating in the triumph of the incomparable Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805. For a decade thereafter the giant of the seas and the behemoth of the land each remained supreme in its own realm, neither able to bring the other to ultimate defeat.

Upon the outbreak of conflict in the 1970s, Britain promptly put into effect her traditional naval-oriented strategy, opening a series of overseas campaigns, notably in the Caribbean, entirely peripheral to the campaigns on the Continent. Britain’s colonial and commercial activities prospered increasingly with the elimination of French sea competition. Having learned the futility of warring without Continental allies during the war of the American Revolution, Britain now engineered a series of coalitions against France, financing Prussian, Austrian, and even Russian armies with the fruits of British commercial prosperity. Meanwhile French schemes for direct invasion of the British Isles floundered at the coastline before the reality of English sea power. Napoleon’s Continental System, an economic boycott against English trade embracing most of Europe after 1806, hurt him more than Britain, straining the economics of the Continental states and turning their peoples toward nationalistic anti-French restlessness. Weaknesses in the Continental System helped bring Napoleon to his enervating involvement in the Peninsular War and to his disastrous campaign in Russia.³

Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and Portugal, and his subsequent difficulties in stamping out the people’s resistance there, provided an opportunity for British intervention. Wellington’s small Anglo-Portuguese army on the peninsula, deployed and comfortably sustained for six years by British sea power, fought one of the classic campaigns of military history. The large French armies found their overland communications ruined by extensive partisan activity, and they were unable to live off the countryside because of the poverty of the region—attempts to do so only further enflamed the fierce Spanish resistance. Scattered over wide areas in order to police the insurgent countryside, the French armies never could concentrate sufficiently to crush Wellington. The Peninsular War, conducted in a peripheral theater where Britain’s sea communications were easier than the enemy’s by land, epitomized the British approach to war. The years of involvement in Spain drained France’s strength and helped lead toward her final defeat. By the close of hostilities in 1814, Wellington’s army had pressed across the Pyrenees and into southern France.⁴

The final convulsion—the campaign at Waterloo, found sizable British ground forces at last committed in the central theater. Wellington’s 94,000 absorbed Napoleon’s heaviest and most desperate blows on the final day. Significantly, however, only a third of Wellingtons men were British; the rest were Dutch and German allies.

During the century after Waterloo, Britain’s naval and commercial strength yielded vast prosperity and power. Her control of the seas permitted deployment to the Crimea in 1854-56, to fight a peripheral war along the fringes of Russian strength. Otherwise, Britain remained aloof from the Continental wars of Germany, Austria, and France, although she willingly used her warships to block Russian control of the Straits at Constantinople in 1878. In both the Crimea and the Straits, Britain was practicing a policy of containment toward imperial Russia, using naval strength to check the land power most dangerous to the Continental balance.

the twentieth century

The First World War constituted for Britain a drastic departure from her traditional strategy. Following prewar understandings between Sir Henry Wilson and the French military planners, Britain’s army moved into France at the outbreak. Repeated Allied offensive efforts in the west led to the deployment on the Continent of the hulk of Britain’s newly trained manpower. Planners became obsessed with the front in France, following the writings of Clausewitz that stressed destruction of enemy strength in a single, direct, grand engagement. Proposals for peripheral ventures of the historic type were emotionally resisted by the field commanders on the Continent, British as well as French. Yet until the war’s final year, every attempt at smashing the deadlock in France only intensified the bloodbath. The feeling that no forces should be spared from the decisive western theater contributed to the tragedy of missed opportunities surrounding the Dardanelles undertaking of 1915, and the momentous consequences sought by this classic peripheral venture of sea power went for naught.⁵ Admiral Fisher, who himself urged amphibious operations in the North Sea and the Baltic, expressed the frustrated traditionalist view:

    25 January 1915

    It has been said that the first function of the British Army is to assist the fleet in obtaining command of the sea. This might be accomplished by military cooperation with the Navy in such operations as the attack of Zeebrugge or the forcing of the Dardanelles . . . .
Apparently, however, this is not to be. The English Army is apparently to continue to provide a small sector of the allied front in France, where it no more helps the Navy than if it were at Timbuctoo.⁶

During the thirties the brilliant young writer B. H. Liddell Hart led the reassessment of the war in Britain. In the first chapter of his book, The British Way in Warfare (1932), Liddell Hart pointed out the historical inconsistency of Britain’s wartime policy. Was the Kaiser’s Germany any more dangerous to Britain than Napoleonic France had been? If not, why had Britain poured out her strength in “wholehearted abandon,” sacrificing a generation of her youth and her global economic leadership? At first British military leaders reacted coolly to these painful questions, but gradually they began to divide toward partial acceptance of Liddell Hart’s view.⁷ The approach of Britain’s military leadership to the strategy of the Second World War was to be unmistakably colored by the reacceptance of the traditional British view.

In 1942 and 1943 the question of an early cross-Channel assault brought the British strategic approach into focus. American leaders pressed for firm agreements on specific planning dates for the Continental invasion, while British strategists responded unenthusiastically and sought enlarged activity in the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean constituted a peripheral theater, one which many American planners denounced as a strategic dead end but which suggested to the British an importance like that of Spain in the Napoleonic wars. Germany was to be progressively weakened by strategic bombing, blockade, and constriction of the ring about her, prior to the final assault. Grim memories of the First World War strengthened British caution; Churchill feared a Channel “red with the blood of British and American youth.” The Americans, who needed early and firm commitments in order to organize their mass-production economy toward the vast logistics requirements of the buildup, seemed unnecessarily rigid to the British, who preferred a more flexible and opportunistic approach to future plans. Churchill denounced the unsophisticated American view as a “logical, large-scale, mass-production style of thought.” As late as the Teheran Conference in November 1943, Churchill was talking about delaying the cross-Channel assault in order to stage new amphibious ventures in the eastern Mediterranean; Stalin’s firm opposition finally served to close the matter.⁸

In retrospect, the British reluctance about OVERLOAD, the cross-Channel invasion now seems less definite than it did to American strategists at the time; many of the British reservations were based on sound appraisal of factors not always fully assessed by the Americans. Sometimes British military officials viewed the Prime Minister’s far-ranging strategic imagination with as much irritation as did the Americans. When in early 1944 Churchill pressed for an “Asiatic-style North Africa operation,” the heads of the three British fighting services threatened resignation in opposing this “Bay of Bengal” strategy. One critic of Churchill attacked the “traditional” approach, writing that before 1939 “the British public was trained to put faith in every conceivable means of winning wars save by fighting battles and beating the enemy.” Meanwhile Britain’s traditional practice of subsidizing Continental allies was suggested in World War II by her eagerness to aid the Soviet Union with material and financial aid, a willingness shared by the Americans. After the war Churchill’s defenders could show, perhaps speciously, that the United Kingdom suffered only a third as many military deaths in the Second World War as in the First, attaining an equally complete victory despite the early collapse of her closest ally.⁹

the British way

In summary, the British have historically used a variety of techniques in seeking to employ their supremacy in sea power to defeat Continental land powers. Taken together, these techniques constitute a “British way in war” that has been consistently followed save during the war of 1914-18. Generally the British have sought indirect measures of strategy and have avoided deployment of mass armies in Continental campaigns. Four principal techniques appear salient, all of which have rested upon the fundamental command of the sea assured by the Royal Navy:

(1) Use of naval superiority to blockade enemy commerce and to maintain or expand one’s own commerce.

(2) Use of wealth from commercial activities to subsidize allies, sustaining their strength for land warfare.

(3) Peripheral land-sea ventures in theaters more easily accessible by sea than by the enemy’s land communications.

(4) Limited participation in large Continental campaigns, contributing physical and psychological stiffening, especially when the enemy has been weakened by the attritional effects of the first three.

This formula served Britain well and brought her power disproportionate to her numbers. Her victories have usually been won at relatively small cost in manpower.

The principal twentieth century intruder into Britain’s hegemony of the seas, the United States, has practiced each of the four techniques at various times. This nation’s strategies during the nineteenth century wars with Mexico and Spain and during the Civil War rested heavily upon naval superiority. During the Second World War this country generated enormous power for land warfare, so that our readers approached the strategy of the European war mainly from this viewpoint. The needs of the Western Front during our involvement there in 1917-18 had even more thoroughly obscured any strategy oriented to sea power.¹⁰

lessons for the United States

Actually, the Americans have since 1950 followed clearly, if perhaps unconsciously, the British example. Our presence on the peninsula of Southeast Asia suggests the British posture in Spain and Portugal at the time of Napoleon. In each case, the British and the American, access by the nation controlling the global sea (and/or air) routes was easier than the laborious land communications of the enemy. Meanwhile, each of these peripheral strategies rested upon a bedrock of ultimate power: in the one case Britain’s battle fleet of ships-of-the-line, and in the other, the strategic nuclear forces of the U.S. Navy and Air Force.

There are difficulties in correctly applying the historical British experience to the American strategic situation of today. The American problem of maintaining an almost nonexistent balance of power in continental Asia has been staggering, whereas the British could usually find in Europe several competitive states of roughly equal dimensions of strength. Thus the British technique of subsidizing Continental allies has been less successful for the Americans, and this country has felt obliged to intervene with significant land forces on the Asian periphery twice since 1945.

It may be that study of the war against Japan holds particular significance for contemporary strategists. The victory in the Pacific represented the successful application of overwhelming preponderance in sea and air power, although Japan scarcely represented the kind of continental land power posed by China now. In Europe, Allied sea and air strategies were blurred by the decisive role of land fighting on the Russian front and in the west after D-Day. Perhaps the situation during the later stages of the Korean fighting presents the most meaning for example for the future. American sea power sustained deployment in Korea of land forces to maintain a defensive stalemate on the ground, while U.S. air forces punished lines of communication and other air pressure targets, inflicting attrition and preventing enemy buildup for major offensive operations despite his numerical preponderance. The similarity to Wellington’s essentially defensive methods in Spain was notable. Another Chinese intervention against American power along the fringes of the Asian continent in Southeast Asia might be met by even more successful strategies, following the British pattern. Our methods could include: (1) sustaining a defensible perimeter on the ground through sea and air transportation, (2) intense air attack against selected targets, including enemy land communications made vulnerable by their length, by the needs of the enemy’s enlarged ground forces, and by the absence of sanctuary, (3) subsidy of Asian allies to help in the ground fighting, and (4) the threat of offensive amphibious sea and air operations to unbalance the foe and weaken his concentrations.

This would be no panacea formula promising quick success without the agony of bitter ground fighting. Only the scope and not the intensity of land warfare would be limited. The notion of invading and occupying a large part of the Chinese homeland would be beyond consideration.

All that would be needed, perhaps, is an astute national leadership strong enough to overcome the inevitable impatience of the public for quick results regardless of costs or hazards and calling for either withdrawal or major “escalation” as alternatives. The idea of containing and balancing enemy power, not eliminating it, must, in my opinion, be viewed as an acceptable objective. The British in history have usually been patient for success. It was the Americans who wished to stage a cross-Channel assault in 1942 and 1943; it was the Americans who planned invasion of Japan for 1945-46 despite the clearly accelerating effects of Allied sea and air power. Unless the United States accepts not merely the outward patterns of the British approach to strategy but also the state of mind required for consistent application of that strategy, our vigorous world policy might end either in retreat or in total war.

The British have shown that a technologically advanced society, favored by geographic location, may by sound strategy contain and balance the awesome strength of Continental enemies. Britain did this generally without fighting major Continental land wars. America’s global strategy parallels the British model, but it remains for Americans consciously to recognize and accept our inheritance from the historic British way in war. The reward is a perspective toward problems of global strategy, a perspective which may point to a permanent approach to world power, along with the necessary resolve to apply such an approach with consistency.

United States Air Force Academy

1. A. Goldberg (ed.), A History of the United States Air Force, 1907-1957 (Princeton; Van Nostrand, 1957), p. 117.

2. G. B. Potter and C. W. Nimitz. Sea Power (Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1960), pp.51-65; A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 (12th ed.; Boston; Little, Brown, 1890), pp.291-329; B. H, Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), pp.25-38.

3. Potter and Nimitz, See Power, pp.108-86; A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1894), vol.2, pp 372-11.

4. D. J. Goodspeed, The British Campaigns in the Peninsula, 1808-1814 (Ottawa: Army Headquarters, 1958); N. D. Eaton, “Spanish Military Contributions in the Peninsular War” (unpublished M. S. thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1956).

5. Cyril Falls, The Great War (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959); John Terrains, Douglas Haig, The Educated Soldier (London: Hutchinson, 1963), pp. 71-78, 123-39, 146-47; Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, pp. 412-31; W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918 (London: Odhams, 1938), Vol. 1, pp. 46l-689.

6. Quoted in Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 1, pp.583-84.

7. B. H. Liddell Hart, The British Way in Warfare, pp. 13-17, 38-41; Liddell Hart, Memoirs, 1895-1938 New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), Vol. 1, pp. 284-85; Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914-1918 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930), pp. 41-43.

8. L. J. Meyer, “The Decision to Invade North Africa, (TORCH) 1942,” R. M. Leighton, “OVERLORD versus the Mediterranean at the Cairo-Tehran Conferences, 1943,” and Maurice Matloff. “The Anvil Decision: Crossroad, of Strategy, 1944,” all in K. R. Greenfield (ed.), Command Decisions (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959); Arthur Bryant. Triumph in the West (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 25-124; R. M. Leighton, “OVERLORD Revisited” in American Historical Review, vol.68. No.4 (July 1963), pp. 919-37; W. S. Churchill, The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), pp.346,432-51, and Closing the Ring (1951), pp. 572-75; D. D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Garden City: Doubleday, 1948), pp. 193. 198-200; K. R. Greenfield, American Strategy in World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1963), pp. 24-48 Trumbull Higgins, Winston Churchill and the Second Front (New York; Oxford University Press, 1957).

9. Higgins, Churchill and the Second Front, pp. 188, 199; Bryant, Triumph in the West, pp. 25-124.

10. Note Theodore Ropp, “Three Views of American Policy” in Duke Alumni Register, August 1966; Ropp, “Anacondas Anyone?” in Military Affairs, XXVII, 2 (Summer 1963).

Contributor

Lieutenant Colonel Ray L. Bowers (USNA; M.A., University of Wisconsin) was Associate Professor of History, U. S. Air Force Academy, from 1958 until his assignment to the 345 Troop Carrier Squadron, Far East Air Forces, in 1967. He flew as navigator-bombardier, 47^th Bombardment Wing (B-45), United Kingdom, 1952-55. He participated in the testing of the B-66 aircraft at Edwards AFB in 1955-56 and served with the 17^th Bombardment Wing (B-66) during 1956-58, successively as aircrew member, air targets officer, and wing special weapons officer. Colonel Bowers’ articles have been published in Military Review, Aerospace Historian, and Naval Institute Proceedings, as well as Air University Review (May-June 1966).

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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