Introduction

Summary

The starting point for this study of British defence policy between 1904 and 1969 is the tendency for the costs of new weapons systems to rise more rapidly than the national income. Three main insights are offered. First, British defence policy was based upon technological innovation. Second, reductions in the size of the armed forces to accommodate new weapons systems in defence budgets were not evidence of a decline in power. Third, British grand strategy, incorporating economic as well as military responses to external threats, was much more ambitious than is commonly believed.

I first approached the relationship between economics and strategy in my book British Rearmament and the Treasury, 1932–1939, which showed that Treasury attempts to influence strategy reflected concern about Britain's ability to sustain a long war, and were related to trade and industry as well as money. Since then there have been a number of case studies of interaction between economics and strategy. For example, David French and Avner Offer have described how British strategic planning before 1914 assumed that naval blockade would cause the German economy to collapse, while Britain's access to raw materials and her industrial power would enable her to supply continental allies with munitions. David Edgerton has challenged assumptions about British military backwardness by putting forward a broad-arching thesis of Britain as a pioneer of technologically focused war, possessed of a powerful military-industrial-scientific complex that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century and was cut back only in the late 1950s and the 1960s.