Why was the British army so ill-prepared to fight the second world war?

Conflict comes highly recommended. Two former chiefs of the defence staff, Generals David Richards and Nicholas Carter, praise it for identifying key lessons from the past appropriate to the future. A former MoD strategic adviser, Sir Hew Strachan, says it will ‘challenge the professional and enlighten the generalist’. The US marine corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis, ‘the warrior monk’, says it is ‘a clear-sighted assessment of war’s future’. And the late Henry Kissinger called it ‘an exceptional book, written by two absolute masters of their profession’.

Kissinger had been General David Petraeus’s champion since the latter’s fall from grace as head of the CIA following the exposure of an affair in Afghanistan with a subordinate officer, the wife of a former officer. As a past national security adviser and secretary of state, he features large in the book. Air and naval endorsements are evidently yet to come.

‘It is important to establish what this book is not,’ say the authors: ‘It is not intended as a comprehensive history of all conflict since 1945’, impossible in a single volume. That said, other than the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air, it seems remarkably comprehensive. But although, the authors maintain, ‘strategic concepts have evolved faster since the second world war than at any comparable period in history’, still the Prussian general and military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz gets prime billing, quoted as early as the fourth paragraph: ‘Warfare [is] politics by other means.’

Clearly the authors know what Clausewitz meant, as evidenced by what follows in the book, but this is not an entirely faithful rendering of ‘Der Krieg ist eine blosse Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln’. The first publication in English (1873) of Clausewitz’s On War, by Colonel James Graham, translated ‘[War is simply a continuation of politics] mit anderen Mitteln’ not as ‘with [the admixture of] other means’, but ‘by other means’, allowing the inference that politics ends where war begins.