The Press MONDAY, MARCH 18, 1936. A Ministry for Defence

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21733, 16 March 1936, Page 10

The Press MONDAY, MARCH 18, 1936. A Ministry for Defence

The announcement that Sir Thomas Inskip has been appointed Minister for Defence and will have a place in the Cabinet shows that the British Government is at last beginning to take notice of the clamour for the better co-ordina-tion of the three defence services. Until recently the attitude of most Englishmen towards the agitation for a more efficient defence organisation has been not unlike the attitude of prohibitionists towards the agitation for reform of the liquor trade. That is, they have been much more interested in getting rid of armed forces than in making them more efficient. Since the outbreak of the war between Italy and Abyssinia and the attempt to restrain Italy by means of sanctions, public opinion has undergone a profound and rapid change; and it is how clear that the nation as a whole has accepted the need for stronger defence forces. But With this change has come a revival of interest in defence organisation and a realisation that . administrative reform is quite as necessary as increased expenditure. It is significant that, when the supplementary defence estimates were before the House of Commons last week, the Government’s failure to specify the heads of expenditure or to bring forward proposals for the better co-ordination of the three services, was attacked even by its own supporters. Moreover, recent events in the. Mediterranean have provided a concrete example of the faults of the present system. It is now generally realised that the unwillingness of Great Britain and France to make sanctions really effective was due to the revelation that Great Britain’s military position in the Mediterranean was weak. Malta has been virtually abandoned as a naval base because of its nearness to Italian aerodromes; the harbour at Alexandria has been found too shallow; and lack of railway communications has made the Italian concentration in Libya a formidable threat to the British forces in Egypt. The financial “starvation” of the services, about which so much has been heard lately, cannot be accepted as the ortiy reason for this disquieting Situation. Another reason, it may be suspected* was the lack, among those who control the services, of a common strategic outlook. Besides this gap between one service and another, there is evidence of a lack of coordinatioh between military policy and foreign policy. From time to time during the last 10 years, for instance, the British Government has assured Prance of its unwavering allegiance to the Locarno treaties, by which it is pledged to give military assistance to France in the event of a German attack; Mr Baldwin has even gone as far as to declare: “ Our frontier is the Rhine.” Yet during the Whole of this period Army chiefs have been declaring that the Army is not organised for a war in Europe but for “ the pur- “ pose of maintaining order in the British “ Empire in other words, mainly for the defence of India. The root cause of this dislocation between one service and another and between thfe services and those branches of government which control foreign policy is fairly obvious. It is the absence of any authority capable of dealing with military policy as one problem and not three problems. Each of the services Is directly represented in the Cabinet, which has neither the time nor the expert knowledge to act as a co-ordinating authority. In practice, each service is a self-governing unit, its financial fortunes depending on the ability of its Minister to prevail upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There is also a Chiefs-of-Staff Committee, nominally presided over by the Prime Minister and actually of little real importance. Finally, there is the hopelessly unwieldy Committee of Imperial Defence, with its scores of sub-committees. It has no executive authority, an entirely inadequate expert staff, and no systematic method of working. In the 30 years of its existence it has made little real contribution to the problems of Imperial defence. The establishment of a Ministry for Defence has been proposed many times since 1918 and has, for obvious reasons, been fought tooth-and-nail by the Admiralty and the War Office, their usual contention being that the co-ordination of the three defence forces is too great a task for any one man, particularly as that man would necessarily be a civilian. And it is certainly true that the mere appointment of a Minister for Defence will not necessarily be a stpp forward. Everything depends on whether the Minister is to be given real authority over.the services and allowed to develop under him a staff of experts which will enable him to exercise that authority wisely. There is some consolation in the thought that Sir Thomas Inskip is not the man to waste his time in a position where he cannot be effective. The weakening of the autonomy of the services made necessary by co-ordination will in itself be beneficial, since all of them in some degree, and the Army in a very large degree, suffer from lack of informed criticism and from the domination of routine methods. If a war were to break out to-morrow, nothing is more certain 4han that the British Government’s first task would be, what it has always been in previous wars, to modernise the War Office. “Though outward “ appearances may have changed,” wrote Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, recently, “in “ design, in idea, the Army has slipped past “1914 and is virtually back to pre-Haldane “days.” The criticism may go too far; but it has been repeated, in substance, by so many military writers in the last year or so that there is at least cause for uneasiness. It should perhaps be added that the development of a unified and efficient system of defence implies something mqre than the creation of a central co-ordinating power, Defence in Great Britain is still organised on the assumption that war is a business for professional soldiers and sailors, although it is clear, even from the experience of the last war, that in the next great conflict there Mil be no civilians. The Ministry for Defence must be. ready, if and when the time com&i, to organise the whole resources of the , iVI