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In this episode, members of the US Army War College interview Sir Hew Strachan, British military historian.
Stephanie Crider
Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, the companion podcast to the US Army War College Strategic Competition Center. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
Hew Strachan
I could have said a few words about arms races in the lecture, but I thought it was best left to this discussion because what strikes me about arms races is they very rarely actually lead to war. We see them as inherently dangerous things that it creates a volatile rather than a stable situation.
But the reality is, of course, that very often they act as deterrence in their own right and that the competition is itself dictated by the industrial competition. I think arms races are a sort of post 1850 phenomenon in the sense that it implies technological innovation and industrialized warfare. It’s hard, I think, to no doubt an ancient historian will disagree with me and say that there is there are arms races in earlier civilizations, but I don’t think that’s actually terribly helpful, quite frankly, because the pace of technological change is sufficiently slow. That although the stirrup, the move from bronze to iron or whatever may be a change, it’s not sufficient of a change.
Whereas the point about arms races in the industrial age is that actually there’s a degree of direct competition, you are measuring yourself against another country in terms of your ability to generate weapons. And in the lecture, I mentioned a couple of rivalries in passing, which I think illustrate the point for me. The first is the challenge that Britain thinks it faces from France in the middle of the 19th century, the fear that with a Napoleon back on the French throne, that there will be renewed warfare within Europe. And, indeed, the manifestation of that after the Crimean War, when France and Britain have gone to war together against Russia.
With the construction of La Gloire, the first essentially iron, still wooden ship but iron, one of, no, it’s fully iron, fully iron construction. Anyway, Britain responds with the Warrior, an experimental ship which takes its technological innovation in terms of the development of iron building of ships, a stage further. And that arms race is then extended right up until the Entente of 1905.
You know, Britain is looking at France, France is looking at Britain in terms of their relative naval capabilities, and it is, I think, above all, at sea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that you get arms races because the margin, relative margin of technological advantage can have devastating effect. Tsushima, in 1905, in the Russo-Japanese war, it shows that in spades that the Japanese Navy has the edge at every possible level.
And at sea, that marginal difference seems to be able to have a truly decisive effect. So being one step ahead of your rival does seem to matter. But the Anglo-French naval arms race goes nowhere. It actually ends in Entente, and the Entente doesn’t come out of the arms race. It’s not that they’re so frightened of each other to do that. The Entente comes out of the need to sort out wider political issues to do with essentially who controls the Mediterranean, who has control of North Africa.
How they do that is to settle colonial imperial rivalries, of which maybe the arms race is a manifestation. But it is not a solution to the arms race itself. And the other naval arms race, of course, which is much more genuinely a naval arms race, I suppose, is the Anglo-German naval rivalry from 1904, 1905 onwards, precipitated above all by the launch of the dreadnought, and by Britain settling as differences with France, which means that Germany realizes that it is Germany that is in the, in Britain sites, and it is.
Although Britain maintains its trying to sustain a two-part standard, it can fight the next two naval powers in the world at the same time. It doesn’t, in all intents and purposes, is focusing solely on Germany. And this is the area of greatest military technological innovation at the time. I mean, these warships are cutting edge technologies with enormous sophistication in terms of their communication systems, their firepower, their speed.
These are all in combination. But where does that go? Well, of course it has practical application in the First World War. But the Anglo-German naval arms race does not cause the First World War. The argument that the world goes to war in 1914 because Britain and Germany are rivals, think of Paul Kennedy’s Anglo-German antagonism, that this is what causes the war is simply unsustainable.
At the beginning of 1914, Churchill, as First Sea Lord, says, “the situation actually looks calmer in relation to Germany that any time in recent history.” He’s pretty upbeat at that point. And Beckmann Harvey, the German chancellor, when he initiates talks between Britain and Germany to limit naval building, does so thinking it will be a way of loosening the ties between Britain on the one hand and France and Russia on the other.
That’s one of the reasons they don’t work, is that he’s actually trying to widen it beyond the issue of naval construction. And when the crisis breaks in July 1914, Churchill already has the reserve fleet on standby. They’ve been doing their exercises and he decides not to demobilize that, but to keep them in, in essentially “in being” so they are ready if this crisis ends in war.
But at no stage is the threat of the use of the Royal Navy used in the unfolding of the crisis itself, because for Germany, that really seems immaterial. At that juncture, they’re thinking of a land war. This has begun in the Balkans. And by the same token, you know, famously, of course, there are joint exercises going on between the Royal Navy and the German Navy just as the crisis begins.
The… and the last stage of the crisis is the outbreak of the war between Britain and Germany. And Britain is the one, of course, that essentially is the aggressor, because Britain actually issues the ultimatum to Germany to get out of it, to get out of Belgium. But this the Anglo-German arms race in itself has not generated this war.
You know, there are other examples, the most obvious one being the Cold War itself, with the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in constant competition at every level, nuclear, conventional, over a protracted period. There is no war. And when the Soviet Union hits crisis, there is still no war. Both powers are able to negotiate their way out of this. Despite the fact that Reagan used that arms race to try, in many respects, to undermine Russia’s ability to sustain that.
But even that it is saying its military capability. So, in the end, my argument will be: states go to war for more serious reasons than arms races, that actually they go to war for deep political reasons and arms races are symptomatic of that rather than causes of right.
Echevarria
Right, Symptomatic. Absolutely. Okay. So, Mike, you had a question.
Michael Lynch
Dr. Michael Lynch from the Strategic Studies Institute. I’d like to tie the answer that you just gave to the lecture that you just had. And how do you see the quote unquote arms race between allies? For instance, Britain has always been a naval power and now most recently fielded two aircraft carriers and has even sailed those aircraft carriers as independent strike groups. How do you see that challenge to remain on a par with a larger hegemonic ally like the US?
Strachan
It’s for Britain. I think the revolution military affairs of the 1990s is very interesting in this respect, because I remember so often British officers saying to me, “we have to be able to match the United States because we want to be interoperable with the United States.” In other words, what you’re doing is competing in order to say, “we’re still in the game and we’re still a good ally.”
That may come from being a subordinate ally in that context. And certainly the fear was that the pace of technological innovation in land warfare, at any rate, in 1990s was so great that actually the United States would discount its allies rather than see them as central. So that seems to me essentially the competition.
There is another dimension to it, of course, to which is arms sales. And the moment Britain is perhaps too hedged about by too many constraints in how it conducts arms sales. But to see the UK and France, for example, as competitors in the export market for military equipment, would be a helpful way of viewing that. It doesn’t mean that this is incompatible with being an ally. But what it does do, of course, is mean that you’re not necessarily converging, finding convergence in terms of equipment that there is, if you like, wasted effort in that rather than complementarity.
But if you then allow the hegemon in that situation to provide all the weapons, then if the hegemon decides to not support you, then you could find yourself in deep trouble.
Jadwiga Biskupska
Jadwiga Biskupska, Harold K. Johnson visiting chair of military history. I was hoping you’d indulge me in letting me shift the geography a little bit. I’m an Eastern European historian, so we’re heading to Eastern Europe. And I buy your argument that arms races are not necessarily a good, easy trigger for modern war, though it’s obvious why historians, wh...
