The Market for Strategic Ideas in Britain: The “Sandys Era”

Britain and the United States have long taken an intense mutual interest in the methods by which they arrive at a defense policy and the two countries have frequently borrowed from each other's experience. In the last few years the British scene has been worthy of special attention because Britain has faced, in a peculiarly acute form, the universal military problem of limited resources and extensive commitments. Recently Conservative governments have tried to resolve this dilemma by plunging heavily for certain strategies and weapons: as a Minister of Defence told the Commons, “We have to pick the winners out of the stable.”To set a crude financial ceiling and leave the selection of strategy and design of forces wholly to bargaining among the services is frequently regarded as an invitation to aimlessness. An obvious and tempting remedy is to compel the services to conform to a single, coherent and supposedly economical strategic doctrine. This solution carries its own risks of neglecting important aspects of the total problem and of discouraging flexible response to experience. Such a risk is especially serious in a field, such as military policy in peacetime, where there can rarely be conclusive practical tests of policy. Thus the more one searches for comprehensive strategic answers, the more important it is to enquire whether strategic ideas are debated in a market wide and open enough to offer every possible assurance of conceiving and evaluating alternatives. The recent course of British policy is of interest in this respect.