Foreword
by Lieutenant-General Jonathon Riley CB DSO PhD MA
Director General and Master of the Royal Armouries
I
am often asked whether or not, during the many campaigns in which I
have taken part and in recent years, commanded, I have found the study
of history to be of any use at all. I always reply with an emphatic
“yes” – and I usually highlight the business of the staff ride or
battlefield tour as the most useful medium.
The first reason I give for taking this position is the role of historical study in maintaining institutional memory at a time when, it is said, that history is accelerating. Since the end of the Second World War, we have amassed around 100 times more information than in the rest of human history up to that time. We think of human knowledge as always increasing, “What is now proved”, said William Blake, “was once only imagined.”
Human beings of course cannot inherit knowledge or experience through our genes; we therefore have to be told things. In times gone by this was done through oral history – story-telling. It was, too, a very important part of my early military life, particularly in remote stations like British Honduras, as the means by which the regimental folklore, history, traditions and ethos were transmitted from one generation to another. But clearly, the battlefield tour, with or without the presence of actual veterans, is an excellent way of transmitting this experience.
For the military, it is not simply a question of transmitting the story, but of learning the lessons. In the British Army, there is a whole industry based on this requirement. Returning commanders from operations are interviewed, and reports compiled. In theory these are used to inform the development of future doctrine, training, equipment procurement and so on. But are they not more often consigned to the shelves to gather dust? Brigadier Ian Johnstone has said that “a lesson is only learned when it results in a change of doctrine, practice or equipment. Until then it is only identified.” How true.
Then there is the business of understanding and analysing command. Considerable care is needed when doing this in an historical context: the responsibilities and required competencies of a commander have changed over the years, and one must be careful not to judge commanders of bygone times by modern standards. Our understanding of strategy, the operational art, and battlefield tactics are different. Complex, modern, war – sometimes referred to as “4th Generation War”, or “Three-Block War”, was far in the future even during the Second World War.. Nor is it right to judge any field commander with the benefit of hindsight, because he made his decisions based on the information available at the time: our lives and experience go forward, following what Steven Hawking calls “the arrow of time”; we are able to review those experiences by looking back, but we cannot change them. What always comes over on a battlefield tour, though, is an understanding of why a commander made a particular decision, leading to a particular outcome – because only when one stands where he stood can one know what he could or could not see, and what information he did or did not have. We can thus understand how and why decisions were made without in any way sitting in judgement.
Finally, there is the matter of scale. Since the end of the Cold War
we have lost the experience of operating in Army Groups and in most
European countries, our armies get ever smaller. In Afghanistan, the
NATO force – ISAF – had contributions from forty countries, of whom
only nine have armies larger than ISAF. In Regional Command South, only
Britain and the US have armies bigger than the force in that command.
This has implications for the level of education, training, experience
and understanding of commanders and senior staff officers since many
contributors have no standing divisional or corps level of command,
little doctrinal understanding of combined operations, and even less of
complex counter-insurgency or counter-terrorism. The historic
battlefield tour remains therefore a key educational tool in
maintaining the understanding of operations at very large 
scale. To go into the future on the assumption that all our wars are going to be small ones is, to me at least, not a safe one.
Jonathon Riley CB DSO PhD MA
Lieutenant-General
Master of the Armouries
