Foreword

by General Sir Michael Walker GCB CMG CBE ADC GEN

Over 40 years of soldiering I have experienced many military courses, both as a student and as a speaker. I know how difficult it can be to understand properly why a military commander used a particular set of tactics, even when explained by the best classroom, or when read in a book.

Both privately and as part of military courses, I have also had opportunities to visit battlefields all over the world. To my mind, it is only when you are surrounded by real features in the inclines, the horizons, the dips and bluffs - amongst which commanders had to take their decisions - that you fully appreciate their thinking at the time.

Classroom technology is improving. Simulated environments have added new dimensions to understanding the lie of battlefields on a screen. But I maintain that there is no substitute for seeing the real thing, and therefore I encourage any initiative that enables people to experience the terrain where historic conflicts have been played out.

This is important because the tactical concepts used by commanders today are the result of many centuries of evolution - of trial and error, of success and failure. During the First World War, for instance, the vulnerable waves of troops on the Western Front gave way to fractured, more tactically complex forms of advance, developed to deal with the wide, open, flat expanse of No-Man's Land, and the automatic fire on each side.

For people to develop the ability to use tactical concepts imaginatively and flexibly, whether on land, in the air or at sea, they need to be familiar with what has contributed to the development of those concepts. Although technology develops, human nature remains much the same.

Therefore, we need to learn how the human instinct operates in military environments. Traditionally limited to Army training, ‘battlefield studies' are now widely recognised as having merit for all three Services. The ever more joint campaigns, with the Navy, Royal Air Force and Army increasingly integrated into a seamless whole, makes understanding joint tactics all the more important.

A rounded understanding of today's amphibious landing concepts, for instance, is enhanced by recognising the tactical challenge of the 1915 Gallipoli landings, involving close cooperation between the Army and the Navy. There are similarly useful lessons to be drawn from the Second World War, as with Dunkirk, Normandy and the Dieppe Raid; and, study of air power in the Battle of Britain, Gulf War One and the Kosovo Campaign is never wasted.

So I have urged military colleagues to take every opportunity to see the ‘battlefields', and to absorb the critical lessons that have shaped the British Forces of the 21st Century.