CAPTAIN Herbert Richmond produced a damning indictment of pre-war naval planning when he wrote that, while ‘the brain of Jupiter had indeed produced an Athene fully armed, it was no one's business to be sure that the poor lady could use her spear’. Richmond believed that the Navy, obsessed with matériel questions, had overlooked the need for a suitable planning organisation or the creation of coherent war plans. The War Staff as created in January 1912 failed to provide such a role, and was simply ‘the repository of inferiorminds and supine wills’. Although ProfessorMarder was not quite so critical, he still noted Captain Alfred Dewar's view that, ‘We had the opportunity but not the intellectual capital to float a staff.’ As will be shown below, such an opinion underestimated the significant work that theWar Staff did in the two years before the war broke out. Recent work has also underplayed the degree to which both in strategic concepts and in quality of personnel theWar Staff represented continuity with the previous NID. The Edwardian Admiralty was more in control of events at a time of rapid and significant technological change than traditional accounts have thus far suggested.

It is equally important to identify the function that the Staff was expected to perform in the period 1912–1914. One of the reasons that it has come in for such criticism is that officers, such as Dewar or Richmond, foresaw a different role from the one it initially fulfilled.