Alliance and the British Way in Warfare

Abstract

The British Way in Warfare was the title of a book by Basil Liddell Hart published in 1932.¹ It was an elaboration of ideas first propounded a year earlier in a celebrated lecture on ‘Economic Pressure or Continental Victories’ to the Royal United Services Institute. Like many of his generation, the more Liddell Hart reflected on his own encounter with war (he had been gassed and wounded at the Somme), the more he became convinced that such folly must not be repeated. This required transforming the very conduct of war. With equal conviction he believed that he had hit upon some answers. These appeared as general principles of strategy — the ‘indirect approach’ — and a particular policy for his own country — ‘limited liability’. He claimed that he was doing little more than distilling the essence of a long-standing national approach. This was ‘the British Way in Warfare’.

First published in Review of International Studies (April 1995)