This episode is an interview with Professor Andrew Lambert about Sir Julian Corbett, the premier maritime strategist in the 20th century.
We discuss Corbett, Maritime and Grand Strategy, Churchill and the Dardanelles Campaign.
These are the questions that Professor Lambert discussed:
- Who was Sir Julian Corbett and how did Corbett develop his understanding of maritime power and its relationship with grand strategy?
- How did Corbett get to his place within the British establishment, to be working for Jackie Fisher?
- What were Corbett’s thoughts on the Dardenelles campaign?
- Mahan died in 1914, so he didn’t have the opportunity to reflect on his work post WW1 – what similarities and differences do you see between Mahan and Corbett?
- Churchill was quite bitter about Corbett’s assessment of the Dardanelles campaign. Did he learn from Corbett’s work during the interwar years?
- What influence did Corbett have on British strategy in WW2?
- Corbett was writing about the British way of war, how relevant is Corbett today for Britain and other countries?
- What lessons from Corbett are there for a small to middling Antipodean power, with a large landmass, low population density, long coastlines, poor maritime capabilities at the end of everyone’s supply routes?
- Corbett was trying to educate policymakers on Grand Strategy before and during WW1. How can we educate those making policy better today?
If you would like to know more about the impact the Corbett had in Maritime and Grand Strategy, please read Professor Lambert’s excellent book – ‘The British Way of War‘.
Andrew Lambert is Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King’s College. After completing research in the Department he taught at Bristol Polytechnic,(now the University of West of England), the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich, and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and also Director of the Laughton Naval Unit. In 2020 he was made a Fellow of Kings College London (FKC).
Transcripts
How did a Royal Navy outsider become central to the development of British maritime strategy and indeed, grand strategy? We look at the contributions of Sir Julian Corbett to 20th century strategic thinking. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 87 of the Principles of War podcast, Sir Julian Corbett and British Grand Strategy.
This is the Principles of War podcast, professional military education for junior officers and senior n.
It’s a very lofty topic that we are tackling today and that’s why I’m very honoured to have Professor Andrew Lambert on the podcast today to help us understand it. Andrew, the preeminent naval historian of our times is the Lawton professor of Naval History at the Department of War Studies at King’s College. He has 20 taught at the Royal Naval Staff College, Greenwich and at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was made a Fellow of King’s College London in 2020. He is a prodigious author. Three books that I’ve read and would highly recommend would be Naval Commanders who Made Great Britain, Nelson, Britannia’s God of War. This was one of the key references that I used in developing the series on Nelson and Mission Command.
The third book is the British Way of Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy. Without further ado, here is Professor Lambert and our discussion about Julian Corbett and grand strategy. So, good morning, Andrew. Welcome to the podcast.
It’s a great pleasure to be with you.
Sir Julian Corbett, do you want to just start out by giving us a little bit of an idea about who he was and what he did?
One of the conceits of this book is that in order to think strategically, you need to know who the strategist is, where they’re coming from, what their background is, what kind of assumptions they’re bringing to the party and how they’re going to evolve on from there. So a book about strategy without an understanding of who the strategist is really missing the prints from Hamlet. You need to know what is making this individual tick. So Julian Corbett, born in 1854, middle of the 19th century, classic prosperous and rising middle class family, got onto the edges of seriously moneyed status. His brother would be a Member of Parliament. He himself would be closely connected with the British Liberal Party throughout his career and was more than once offered a seat in the House of Commons. But that really wasn’t his strength.
He was a brilliant, legally trained intellectual. He was also an outstanding writer of late Victorian prose fiction. He published four very successful novels. But his family wealth, his experience of travel and I think a sense that he had a duty to do something. Men of his class and wealth really had a responsibility. They had to serve society in some way. They couldn’t just lounge around on the proceeds of unearned income. And for Corbett, he found his metier when he was invited to write about the naval past. It’s typical of Corbett that the individual who asked him to write about Sir Francis Drake was a close personal family friend who happened to be the head of the Macmillan publishing dynasty.
So he knew people, he moved in the right circles, he had access to the people who really were the movers and shakers of late 19th, early 20th century Britain. Having joined the writing of naval history, he rapidly rose through the ranks as he published a series of outstanding in depth studies that took the history of the English British Navy from Francis Drake and the Armada through to the glorious capstone of Trafalgar in a period of little more than a dozen years. But along the way he picked up some really important friends. Admiral Sir John Fisher, the man who revitalised the Edwardian Navy and prepared it for the First World War, relied on Corbett for high end propaganda policy explanations and followed very much a similar political trajectory.
A progressive liberal with a tendency towards radical change rather than the so called social conservatives that we tend to associate with the armed services. So Fisher is a radical, Corbett is a very progressive liberal, and they see Britain’s future not as an imperial power, but as the head of a freestanding Commonwealth of nations in which as the different countries reach a political point, they become essentially self governing. And the one thing that will unite the world, the former British Empire, in the future, will be mutual dependence on sea communications and commerce. The ties will be all the stronger for not being based on the pulling up of a union flag and the blowing of a trumpet every morning. There’ll be ties that bind because they are ties of mutual interest.
It’s not at all surprising that well into the 21st century, Britain and Australia are still strategically, politically very close. The shared values that Corbett is talking about are still the shared values. Liberal, progressive, inclusive, tolerant and resistance to the threat of overpowering hegemonic states. 1900, it was probably Germany in the 2000s, it’s somebody else, but it’s still out there and it’s still a very good reason for those countries to stick together. Corbett becomes the lead historian, teaching the Royal Navy’s Senior Officer staff course in 1902 and right through to 1914, that’s his primary output. His books are written for naval officers in high ranks, preparing for sustained Long service. So his job is to educate the Navy, to think about the future, to prepare for the next war and to make sure that they understand that they are part of a continuum.
Naval warfare wasn’t invented in 1900 and there’s a great deal to learn, not just from the experience of the British past, but also of other pasts. And Corbett makes it his business to get his students to see the other side of the story. Why did the French lose? Why did the British win? These are important questions going forward as well as looking back. And ultimately, in 1911, he produced a book called Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, which is the foundation text of what we might call a British way of war. Limited maritime conflict on a global scale, designed ultimately not to defeat the enemy’s army, but to destroy their economy. And this week we are powerfully reminded that totalitarian countries with mono dimensional economies are remarkably vulnerable to this.
Russia had been heavily defeated in a war that broke out the year Corbett was born, the Crimean War. The Russians were not defeated by a British army in the Crimea, they were defeated by economic sanctions. Their economy collapsed into bankruptcy and they were forced to backtrack on their aggressive plans against, in this case, Ottoman Turkey. The British had done the same to the Russians in the middle of the Napoleonic wars as well. So there’s a pattern here. If we look at how the sanctions will work, blocking Russian exports will choke economy. Whether those exports are timber and grain, oil and gas, whatever you name, the Russians depend on external sales and those sales are the real economic target. So Corbett would have been on board with the way we’re approaching those sanctions at the present time.
When the First World War breaks out, Corbett is right in the heart of the higher echelons of British government. He’s working as a historian for both the Admiralty and the Committee of Imperial Defence, the not only Cross Government, but also Cross Empire coordinating body, which has membership from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, as well as the British armed services. He’s writing Confidential History of the Russo Japanese War to explain how maritime strategy works in great power conflict. Tragically, the book appears in print just after the war breaks out and his target audience is now rather too busy to read.
Is a brilliant book and it never appeared as a publication until the 1990s because it was a confidential text, but it certainly lays out what will become his approach to his last great mission, which is to write the official strategic history of the First World War. His book is called Naval Operations and he didn’t live to finish it, which is a tragedy, but it explains how the war was conceived, how it developed. It positions campaigns like the Dardanelles, Gallipoli, Pain on the Western Front, campaigns in the North Sea. In a global context, Corbett explains how the British Empire won the first world war. By December 1914, the world was now under British control in terms of economics and resources, and Germany was left to fight a very big European conflict. The Germans had no access to the outer world.
They ran out of really important things and it crippled their war economy. And once again, economic sanctions play a critical role in the defeat of an aggressive great power. In 1922, Corbett was working through the difficulty of explaining the Battle of Jutland, both to the British and to the people who were responsible for it. Not working very well when he dropped dead. Overwork, exhaustion, heart failure. And his legacy has ever since then been contested. He didn’t have the opportunity to finish writing that great book, to finish off his work. And so for many people, he’s been put to one side, he’s been forgotten. But bringing him back and bringing back in context really does help to explain how Edwardian England thinks as it goes into the First World War.
And it explains how the Royal Australian Navy was thinking when it set up, because the founding mission that was sent out to get the Australian Navy up and running, all of the members of staff of that mission had been taught by Corbett. Several of them were personal friends. And that’s not accidental. Jackie Fisher made sure the Australian Navy got the best intellectual startup pack they could. And Corbett is critical here. So he is the Edwardian intellectual behind the thinking of the First World War.
And his ideas both reflect past British practise and are going to shape future British practise after the anomaly of the Western Front 1914-18, has passed and the British learned that it’s not their business to take on the main enemy army in the heart of Europe, it’s their business to facilitate that being done by larger and more populous countries like the United States or the Soviet Union.
What was the approach that he took to develop his. So he started with naval history. How did he develop his theory for grand strategy? How did that lead into it? What was his intellectual approach?
So Corbett is beginning to write naval history at a time when naval history itself is. Is a somewhat thin specialisation. It’s mostly drum and trumpet history. This happened and this happened. And the navy itself is remarkably uninterested in the past, because the past is sailing ships and they’re not using sailing ships. So why should they be interested in what happened at Trafalgar the job of the historians is to persuade the navy to see that the past is full of experience at the strategic and operational level. Naval tactics might have changed and technology is shifting, but how navies operate strategically is much more permanent. So, first and foremost, it’s Corbett’s job to persuade navies that the past does contain useful understanding and that an understanding of the past will help them shape their future programmes.
He’s building off the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American sea power advocate. But of course, Mahan is writing for an American audience and America is a very long way from Britain. It’s a very big country and ultimately the United States is a military power that uses a military navy to project that power across oceans. Britain is not a military power. It uses the oceans themselves as a primary strategic asset. And controlling the oceans gives Britain the ability to conduct maritime economic warfare. It’s not in the American lexicon, it’s in the British lexicon. So, first of all, naval history matters. Secondly, the strategic ideas of other powers are not relevant. They may be useful foils for argument, but they are not going to solve the British problem. Mahan is talking about the Americans acquiring things that the British already have command of the sea.
The British have that. They don’t need to think about that. They’ve got it and if they keep building a large enough fleet, they’re always going to have it. So that’s not a big question for the British. The question is how you turn command of the sea into strategic effect on land. And here, Corbett, through his relationship with the director of the Naval War course, Captain Edmund Slade, is introduced to a fairly high level of German strategic thinking in the late 19th, early 20th century era. And here the driver is that the army, the British army, is using German strategic theory to argue that it, and not the navy, should be Britain’s primary strategic instrument. The Germans are the masters of modern war. This is what they do, we should do what they do.
Of course, as Corbett points out, Britain and Germany are very different countries, they have very different interests and the Germans have nothing that could compare with the British Empire. There are no dominions and commonwealths in the German Empire. There are merely parts of Africa the Germans hold down with a great deal of force and for no profit. So Britain’s worldview is so fundamentally different that Britain needs its own strategy. When he comes to the work of Clausewitz, and Clausewitz is the master of explaining what the principles of war are, he doesn’t tell you what to do, he. He gives you guidance on how you should think and what the key issues are. And Clausewitz understands, and Corbett highlights this, that war depends on which country is waging it, what the circumstances are.
Is it a war for national survival in which everything is available to be used, or is it a cabinet war, you just, after a little bit of territorial rectification, just grabbing the odd province. Limited war versus unlimited war, massive mobilisation versus limited mobilisation. The British have a long history of not conscripting soldiers and they don’t start doing so until 1916. The Germans and the French have a very long history of conscripting soldiers and they’re doing that long before war breaks out. So these are very different strategic arguments. And Corbett’s genius is to take the strategic arguments not just of Germany, but also France and to an extent, the United States, and to work them into a synergy of strategic thinking which highlights and emphasises how the British operate in the past, the present and what they need to think about for the future.
So this is the core text of any understanding of how the British think strategically.
What were Corbett’s thoughts on the Dardanelles campaign?
Yeah, Corbett’s task in writing the history of the First World War is to deal with a lot of things that were either misconceived or badly handled. And the Dardanelles Gullibulli is certainly one of those. Corbett is a great supporter of the use of maritime amphibious power projection. It features in pretty much all of his books. Some of the high points of British warfare are this synergy of army and navy to secure strategic objectives. So the Dardanelles looks perfect, but of course, Corbett realises from the start this is not going to be a naval operation. It has to be combined. But the army won’t provide any troops. So initially there’s a naval attack which is never going to work. The Straits are too narrow and as long as the Turks stand to their guns, they will be successful.
The army then turns up belatedly and never in enough strength to secure the strategic advantage that they need. It’s a case of reinforcing failure over and over again. As the enemy constantly upgrades their defences, it is never possible for the British and the Commonwealth forces to actually get to the end of that campaign. Corbett understands the principle is correct, but the practise is deeply flawed. And he makes two very important points. It was not possible for the Turks to dislodge the Allied presence at Gallipoli because of naval fire support. By the end of the campaign, the Royal Navy had complete dominance over any movement of Turkish Troops on land. So the gunfire support assets meant that was a permanent position. It could have been held forever. It was abandoned because the French retreated and took their troops to Salonika.
That was why the Gallipoli campaign came to an end. It was not a British decision, it was a French decision, it was not a joint Allied decision. The French didn’t even mention it to the British. They just said, we’re leaving. And instead of posing a threat to the security of the Ottoman Empire, a major war aim, they dumped all of those troops in Salonika where they posed no threat to anybody apart from themselves. So this is one of the problems that Corbett highlights. Working with allies is a constant negotiation. Your allies will not share your agendas, they will not share your objectives, they will have their own. And in the political battle over where the troops are going and what they’re going to do, strategy begins to unravel, politics takes over. And Corbett emphasises this.
It’s brilliantly done, very subtle, and I think any historian who’s writing about Gallipoli needs to read what Corbett says, because it is not a naval history, it is the history of British and imperial grand strategy in the First World War. If you haven’t read Corbett on Gallipoli and you want to write about that subject, you really need to read Corbett because he knows all the people who are driving this process. He, he knows the staff officers who planned it, he knows Churchill who ordered it, he knows Fisher who opposed it. And he’ll give you the straight story of what is happening and why we need to learn from that. And the great benefit of what Corbett has to say is that we don’t see similar chaotic, incompetent strategic planning in the Second World War.
And there the interwar Imperial Defence College, which was established in 1929, brings the senior officers of the services and the Dominions together in one building and makes sure that they all understand that they are part of a bigger whole. And the commandant of that college, when it was set up, was Corbett’s greatest follow up pupil, Admiral Sir Herbert Richmond, who was teaching Corbett in the 1920s and 30s to the rising generation of commanders, the men who would command in World War II. So if there are fewer mistakes in World War II, it’s because they learned their lessons and many of those lessons have been captured and processed by Corbett. So Gallipoli, it’s a great what if? If enough troops have been sent soon enough maybe, but as it was hampered by the half baked way in which it was conducted.
Churchill’s desperate attempt to win the war with a purely naval operation was the direct result of his commitment of the British army to the Western Front. If he’d kept divisions in Reserve in 1914, they could have been sent to the Dardanelles at the beginning rather than later on. If you let a continentalist run your navy, you will never get a clear strategic pattern emerging. And Churchill is a continentalist.
Churchill was quite bitter about Corbett’s assessment of the Dardanelles campaign. Do you think that he learnt during the interwar years from Corbett’s teachings?
Churchill and Corbett is a great study. Churchill has read Corbett’s Principles of Maritime Strategy before the First World War. He’s read most of Corbett’s output. He knows exactly who Corbett is. They’ve met on several occasions. They’re both Liberals. But Churchill abandons maritime strategy on the day war is declared. It’s Churchill who leads a handful of cabinet ministers in deciding to send the entire expeditionary force not to Belgium to defend Britain’s vital interests on the Belgian coast, but to France, where they serve the French interest. The generals all applaud. The one admiral in the room, First Sea Lord, can’t say anything because his political master has already committed the Admiralty and he has no position. So we have one admiral, nine generals and four Cabinet ministers decide to send the British army to the Western Front. That’s not a very representative body.
It’s somewhat weighted in favour of one side. Churchill objected to Corbett’s work in principle because it would reveal who had taken the decisions that had led to the catastrophes, not just at the Dardanelles, Gallipoli, but also at Coronel, to the loss of the three old armoured cruisers in the broad 14s early in the war and other significant failures. So Corbett’s job as the official historian was to explain what had gone wrong without being too obvious in pointing out who was responsible. So his work is subtle. You won’t find Corbett jumping up and down, pointing a finger and saying it’s all Churchill’s fault. But Churchill is far too smart to think that lets him off the hook. He knows that everybody knows that. What Corbett is saying is that Churchill got it wrong. So he tries to block the book.
For 12 months, volume one of the official history is blocked by Churchill. He’s eventually outvoted by his Cabinet colleagues on a point of honour. The Chancellor of the Exchequer says, I gave my word in the House of Commons that we would publish this, therefore we will. Churchill, who also said the same thing, no point of honour on this at all. He remained bitter about Corbett for the rest of his life. He referred disparagingly to him after his death, even when he was pillaging his work to write his great biography of the Duke of Marlborough. So for Churchill, Corbett was a very embarrassing episode in which his failures as a wartime leader had been exposed for all to see, which called into question whether he should be still in the higher ranks of government, let alone a Wartime Prime Minister, 20 years down the line.
So Corbett, I think, intellectually, strategically poses a serious challenge to Churchill’s self image as a great war leader and to his reputation as having been anything other than a failure as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914-15, Churchill vetoes the great projects that might have used naval power more effectively, those of Admiral Fisher, which were written by Corbett, and he commits the navy to operations which it can’t succeed in, particularly the Dardanelles offensive. So his record is poor. And you don’t have to read Corbett too closely to realise that he’s been saved from the impact of Corbett’s work by the simple fact that, realising Corbett would publish the official history, he set to write his own version. And the world crisis outsold the official history by multiples of tens and hundreds. So the standard war in the interwar period in English is Winston Churchill.
It’s not Julian Corbett. So Churchill wins that argument by publishing a book that reaches far more audiences. And in the process, he manages to undo a lot of the really good things that Corbett does in his account. Churchill’s account of the Battle of Jutland is deeply mendacious and fundamentally wrong, both factually and strategically. But that’s what happens when you allow clever men to write their own history, to serve their own agendas.
What was Corbett and Fisher’s thinking then, in the First World War, if they’d had more sway over Church, what actions would they have taken?
The great what if of the First World War is that Germany depends absolutely on trade through the Baltic with Sweden iron for finished iron and steel goods, including things like ball bearings for food and for copper. You can’t run a world war without steel, copper and food, and the Swedes are sending huge amounts of all of those to the Germans. Fischer and Corbett know that if the British take command of the Baltic, with support from the Russians, who are still dynamic and active in the Baltic in the first three years of the war, Germany will be completely blockaded and will run out of strategic raw materials very quickly. So the threat to enter the Baltic. And Fisher builds a special fleet to do this. The threat, not the actual entrance into the Baltic should prompt the Germans to invade the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark.
And if the British Expeditionary Force is available, it can then land in the Danish islands of Zeeland and Funen and hold open the Baltic Narrows, allowing anglo Russian fleet to command the Baltic and blockade Germany. This is the end for Germany. The Germans know this. Everybody knows this. Why doesn’t it happen? Because Churchill blocks it. Churchill blocked the major strategic initiative of the war by the navy. He blocked it because it would get in the way of his own agendas, of which the Dardanelles was the primary one, and he claims, because it would take too long. The war wouldn’t end till 1916. Funnily enough, it didn’t until 1918, fought the way Churchill wanted it to be fought.
So we have two of the best strategic minds in Britain being thwarted by a cavalry subaltern who thinks that fighting on the Western Front with large numbers of men is a more effective way of using British power than maritime economic warfare. I have to say that it isn’t. The tragedy is that Fisher, in his attempt to get rid of Churchill and get this policy adopted, and it was backed by Lloyd George and several others, when he blew up Churchill, he managed to blow up himself as well, and he left office at that point. But Corbett and Fisher, to the end of their days, recognised that this was the great lost opportunity of the war to put real pressure on the German economy, which would have had far more effect than anything British armies could do on the Western Front until 1918.
The British could have won the war from the sea long before they were in a position to think about winning it from the land.
What influence did Corbett’s writings have on British strategy in the Second World War?
Corbett’s impact on the Second World War is enormous. Everybody who matters in British High command, in all three services has read Corbett. They’ve been taught by Herbert Richmond, whose teachings are essentially Corbett for those in a hurry. And what we see is a succession of senior commanders, army, navy, air force, who all ultimately accept that maritime economic warfare is the only thing Britain as a standalone can do.
And it’s that period between the fall of France and the accession of particularly the United States to the war, in which Britain manages to retain command of the sea to keep open the Atlantic and other strategic arteries by focusing its efforts on the maritime campaign, despite the best efforts of the Royal Air Force to divert all large aeroplanes into bombing Germany with no effect, and of the army to think of other ways of using British resources which were not particularly useful, particularly in the defensive campaign. But without command of the sea, Britain cannot wage the Second World War. The battles in the Western Desert, for example, they’re entirely supplied through the Indian Ocean. So if you’ve lost command of the Indian Ocean, you can’t run those campaigns.
And running a campaign in the Indian Ocean has been something the Royal Navy’s been planning for all the way through since the early 1920s, when Admiral Richmond was commanding on the East Indies Station and drew out the parallels with the Great War with France in the 1780s, which had been waged in the same area. So Corbett’s impact, it’s not direct. He didn’t teach that. Many of the great leaders of the Second World War, one he did teach was Bertram Ramsay, the man who planned all the great amphibious campaigns. He was on the 1913 Royal Navy War course, which Corbett was teaching. So there were men in service who’d been taught by Corbett or knew Corbett, but more importantly, his legacy had lived on.
And the whole purpose of his official history was to provide the teaching texts going forward that would equip the British to fight more effectively next time. And that’s precisely what he did.
So Corbett was writing about the British way of war. How relevant is Corbett today for Britain and for other countries?
Until about three weeks ago, I said Corbett is remarkably relevant for Britain and his impact on thinking of any power that is looking to security in East Asia maritime sphere, absolutely essential. This last few weeks, our attention has been rather dragged away to other, more continental things. But that doesn’t mean Britain is going to revert to being a great continental power. Britain is going to remain a globally engaged power. Its scale and significance in the world is not what it was in Corbett’s day, but it is still globally operating. The voyage of the new aircraft carrier Battle group to Southeast Asia, to East Asia. Recent transit by a British frigate through the Straits of Taiwan. Joint carrier operations with the Americans and the Japanese in the Philippine Sea. Britain is still a global maritime operator because that’s its great strength.
That’s what it depends on. Britain absolutely depends on imported, almost everything food, fuel, raw materials, people. Britain is absolutely dependent and it has to be able to control the seas. It has to be part of a grand alliance that can guarantee that as far as possible on a global scale. So Britain’s partnerships focus towards the maritime, even NATO. Everybody talks about NATO as if it’s a military alliance. It’s the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Right at the heart of that is an enormous sea area, the area the Royal Navy fought to control in two World Wars. It’s not accidental that the British drive NATO to keep the Americans in Europe, the Germans under control and the Russians out. Nothing has changed. As soon as the Russians start to misbehave, NATO looks remarkably relevant. So this week, NATO is a big issue.
But Britain’s contribution will not be large scale military formations in Eastern Europe. That is not Britain’s role in the world. Britain is exercising a great deal of influence in this crisis, providing military hardware and other forms of support. But it is not going to turn back to The Britain of 1918 with a mass army in Central Europe. That is just not plausible. There are plenty of large armies in Eastern Europe. They may need support, but it won’t be large scale numbers of troops. So Britain remains a maritime, globally engaged power. Corbett would recognise that. He would have recognised the relative decline of Britain as a great power. Britain was a great power, but it never became a superpower. It’s not on the same scale as modern superpowers.
It was always going to move into a different level, as the United States, Soviet Union and China reached a greater level of strength. But that doesn’t mean you are allowed to forget your strategic requirements or to forget your relationships with countries that share your interests, your values and your culture. And those are things that persist.
What lessons from Corbett are there for a small to middling antipodean power with a large landmass, low population density, long coastlines, poor maritime capabilities and at the end of everyone else’s supply routes?
Some very important ones, I would suggest. The first one is don’t be alone. It pays to travel with no position. It has a lot of support from a wide range of powers, all of whom see mutual interest. This isn’t people looking out for Australia, this is people looking out for themselves and building coalitions and partnerships that are going to be effective going forward. So being engaged, being part of and having the right security capabilities at the scale that the state is able to provide, makes the country more important in alliances, in partnerships, more likely to be supported in the event of a crisis and more significant in global order. The British are doing the same thing. Britain is not going to be standing up to Russia on its own. It’s part of an alliance.
And being in an alliance of like minded people who share most of your values and many of your interests is better than being alone. And tailoring your assets to emphasise the points which are critical rather than those which are optional is the big defence debate of the 21st century. Nobody can afford to have everything, not even the Russians or the Chinese People are making choices and it’s the quality of those choices that reading Corbett helps you to think about. You might not agree with Corbett’s overall assumption about the critical role of maritime economic warfare or the balance of forces that he’s looking to, but the debate that you will have discussing those will help you to shape your situations going forward. So where does Australia need to be strong? What is critical?
What is absolutely critical that the country needs to think about being able to defend on its own? What would be good to defend because it’s part of a wider collection of interests with. Where are those points where Australia adds value to alliances that it can look after the interests of other powers with whom it wishes to work in partnership? So it’s about tailoring the country’s capabilities to meet a range of potential scenarios going forward. But the scenario that Corbett is always engaged with is this. By the time he was three years old, Britain was at peace with all other great powers, and it remained at peace with all other great powers until he reached retiring age. That’s a really good scenario.
And if you prepare well and get your policy right, that’s more likely than if you don’t prepare well and make a mess of policy. The purpose of peace is to try and preserve it, and you preserve that by having the capability to be effective if necessary, just to make sure that nobody expects an easy ride. And we’re looking at the Russians struggling in the Ukraine at the moment. They underestimated the enemy because the Ukrainians didn’t really let on just how well prepared they were.
Indeed, Corbett was trying to educate policymakers on grand strategy before and during World War I. What improvements do you think there are that we can do to the way that is conducted in the education of policymakers today?
That’s a hard one. Corbett’s great asset in his teaching career is really very straightforward. He’s exceptionally clever, he’s highly educated, he’s practising barrister, he has a law degree, he has a lot of real world experience of local government, very widely connected, but above all, he is independently wealthy on a scale that most of us could only well, if dream of. He doesn’t have to work. This is what he does because he feels it’s his duty to be of service and this is where his skills are most valuable. So he’s able to push this career forward without ever having to worry about where the money’s coming from. Corbett’s not bothered about getting paid. He makes sure he does get paid because it’s an esteem indicator and he Notes in his diaries, how much he was paid. It’s quite a lot.
He gets paid more than anybody else because he’s worth it. But he doesn’t need the money. He could have stopped working anytime he liked. He never had to start if he didn’t want to. He commits his life to this and he works himself, quite literally to death. He’s working six and a half, seven days most weeks. And when the First World War is on, it’s usually seven and evenings it doesn’t stop. Didn’t even stop for the Zeppelin raids. So he’s committed, dedicated. We need people who absolutely believe in what they’re doing. We need to think very carefully about how we structure education, because the danger is we make it rote, we make it formulaic. If you allow it to sit still for too long, it becomes pedestrian. Tired old lecturers giving tired old lectures about tired old subjects don’t advance understanding.
We need to keep up with what’s going on and we need to understand the past better. So we need to go at both ends of this. It’s not accidental that when Clausewitz starts to think about war, he combines the study of theory with the study of practise. And his work exists in the space between those two quite distinct fields. The history is the learning that allows you to write coherently about strategy and policy. So we need to understand that no one academic discipline has the answers. The answers come from studying the problem. The problem is war. We study war to understand, to prepare for, and hopefully to avoid. And the better we study, and the more widely we study, the less likely it is that we’ll make mistakes.
Excellent. Thank you very much for being so generous with your time and sharing some of the wisdom of Sir Julian Corbett.
It’s been a great pleasure and keep up the good work.
Thank you. So there you have it. I’m very grateful for Professor Lambert being so generous with his time. I think there’s something for everyone that they can take away from that, particularly around the development of grand strategy and the role that Sir Julian Corbett played in that. For me, a couple of key takeaways. One, the role that history can play in the development of grand strategy. Some components of strategy for a nation are going to be enduring. Things like geography because they’re enduring the process of going back. Looking at historical strategies that have been utilised by a nation can definitely aid in the development of contemporary strategy. Secondly, the difficulties that we see between the political and military in the way that strategy is developed is properly resourced and executed. I think that’s an enduring challenge for democracies that needs to be worked through.
I hope you got something out of the podcast. I know I certainly did. If you did, please like and share it on social media, on Twitter, Facebook if you see it pop up. And definitely word of mouth referrals are a great way of spreading the work that we do on the principal.
