The remarkable effectiveness of the British army from Crimea to the Boer War reflected an institutional culture almost perfectly adapted to Victorian soldiers’ social origins, the tasks they were called upon to perform, and the colonial arenas in which they were asked to perform them, but also a culture increasingly out of step with its own society and evolving military technologies, methods, and challenges. Instead, fortified by the army’s success at its colonial tasks, and despite efforts by politicians and even some of the army’s own brightest intellectual lights, it survived – one might almost say defied – one institutional reform after another, until in South Africa in 1899, a string of calamitous defeats at the hands of what amounted to well-armed farmers upended both the army’s confidence and that of the British people in its professional competence. The institutional soul-searching that followed finally began transforming the British Army from what had become in many ways a military anachronism into a modern fighting force. That transformation came just in time to enable it to survive the bloody opening engagements of World War I and in the process help avert the rapid and decisive defeat of the Allied armies in France.

The thirteen essays in this volume originated in one explicit question and one implied belief. The question is how a national government, or an alliance, formulates and executes an effective military strategy. The belief is that doing so materially improves the likelihood of prosecuting war to a successful conclusion, or, better still, of averting it altogether. Both question and belief reflect widespread agreement among contemporary observers of US national security policy that, since the end of the Cold War, the US has been bereft of a coherent defense strategy, thereby incurring penalties ranging from the misallocation of defense resources to counterproductive military commitments. As the project’s sponsor noted, “There is little attention paid to assessing the state of the competition, or evaluating strengths and weaknesses in ourselves or our potential opponents, and still less effort to develop genuine strategies that exploit the enduring strengths we bring to the competition.” In his Introduction, Williamson Murray points out that official declarations of strategic intention abound. But the conviction persists that, however useful they may be as wish lists, they have been much less useful in disciplining resource and commitment decisions. The cases examined here seek to illuminate how others – including we ourselves – previously have done better.

On 15 July 1815, wearing the uniform of a chasseur of the Imperial Guard, Napoleon Bonaparte surrendered to Captain Frederick Maitland, commanding the British ship-of-the-line Bellerophon, blockading the French Atlantic port of La Rochelle. His surrender concluded a war that, with one brief interruption, had consumed Britain for 22 years, and that ended by propelling her to a position of preeminence among the world’s great powers that she would retain for more than a century.

There was no reason for British leaders to expect that happy result when, on 1 February 1793, France’s Revolutionary government declared war on Britain and Holland. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that the British government went to war against France with considerable reluctance. Politically, the French Revolution had divided the country, fracturing even the reformist Whigs. Economically, Britain was still recovering from the injurious effects of her unsuccessful effort to suppress the American rebellion. Nor was there any great feeling of obligation toward France’s deposed Louis XVI, the same Louis XVI who had helped defeat that effort. Conservatives such as Edmund Burke might rail against the revolution’s excesses, and Britons like most other Europeans were shocked by Louis’ execution and that of his queen. But few were interested in fighting to restore what even many British conservatives recognized as a corrupt and despotic Bourbon monarchy. All in all, as one writer put it, “So far as Britain was concerned, every consideration of national self-interest warned her away from involvement in French affairs.” As the context of the war, the character of the enemy, and the interests at stake mutated during the conflict, however, so also did British war aims and her approach to achieving them. The struggle against Napoleonic France thus offers a useful context in which to examine the wartime evolution of military strategy.

On a crisp morning in December 1905, a British general by the name of James Grierson and a French major by the name of Victor Huguet had what both later claimed was a chance encounter while horseback riding in London's Hyde Park. Grierson, however, happened to be the British War Office's director of operations and a passionate Francophile, while Huguet happened to be the French military attaché in London. Whether accidental or not, that encounter was followed by another less accidental meeting the following day, and a few weeks later by the inauguration of informal but officially sanctioned Anglo-French “staff conversations” that would continue off and on until the outbreak of World War I in August 1914.

Those conversations, and their contribution to Britain's subsequent decision to participate in a great power conflict on the European continent for the first time since the defeat of Napoleon a century earlier, continue to fascinate diplomatic and military historians. Most agree that, whatever their direct impact on that decision, the conversations themselves reflected a fundamental transformation of British foreign policy, the culmination of more than a decade of mounting concern about the British Empire's continued security and prosperity and the strategic arrangements needed to sustain them.

Readers who have navigated all seven of the cases examined in the preceding pages might be pardoned for doubting whether grand strategy, in the sense of the consistent execution over time of a preconceived strategic design, is even possible, let alone likely. Certainly none of those cases reveal such a pattern. “In fact,” as Professor Murray notes in his introduction, “those who have developed successful grand strategies in the past have been very much the exception…a strategic framework, much less a grand strategy, has rarely guided those responsible for the long-term survival” of the state.

Instead, on the evidence of our cases, grand strategy is much more likely to be imputed retrospectively by admirers and critics than developed and applied self-consciously by the statesmen whom they typically credit or blame. At least two of the statesmen examined in the preceding essays explicitly acknowledged that reality in strikingly similar analogies: Britain's Robert Lord Salisbury likened the business of managing foreign policy to “float[ing] lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat-hook to avoid collisions,” while his great Prussian contemporary, Prince Otto von Bismarck, similarly insisted that “man cannot create the current of events. He can only float with it and steer.”

Both certainly were too modest. But history confirms that even in war, in which its explicit formulation is most likely, grand strategy almost never will be executed as conceived. The fortunes of war are too chancy and adversaries too unpredictable to underwrite such prolonged consistency.