Education: View From Here

A 1980 paper warns that Britain could mount serious operations only every two years

"LIKE EVERYBODY else," the minister confessed during week one of the Balkans war, "I didn't expect to find myself sitting in war cabinets." He had no complaints about the degree to which the Prime Minister had kept the full Cabinet informed (this particular minister is not a member of the Cabinet's Defence and Overseas Policy Committee, which Tony Blair chairs, where the bulk of the pre-bombing work was done). "We have had more discussions on Serbia/Kosovo than anything else. Tony has made sure there have been regular updates. We have had far more opportunity for discussion in Cabinet on Kosovo than on the Budget," he added, a trifle ruefully.

A few days before this conversation, an undergraduate course of mine had reached its last pre-examination seminar. I had briefed them on Mr Blair's conduct of Gulf war II last December, how, on serious matters like these, the Prime Minister operates through the traditional machinery of collective decision-taking.

I described how the Defence and Overseas Policy (DOP) Committee had been used to discuss and approve the use of force against Iraq, how the full Cabinet had been reported to and how, once the raids started, a slimmed- down version of the DOP Committee, the Prime Minister's Group on Iraq, met daily during Operation Desert Fox, its deliberations all minuted by the Cabinet secretariat.

It's odd to be teaching a history course on, among other things, how the Cabinet system has adapted itself since 1945 to fight so-called limited (as opposed to global) wars and to find the Cabinet Office's "War Cabinet- Book" being reopened once more (since Whitehall found itself caught short by the Falklands invasion in 1982, this particular file has been kept in good repair).

Between Gulf war II and the Balkans, I had completed, with Matt Lyns, one of my research students, a short study that examines Korea (Attlee and Churchill), Suez (Eden), Falklands (Thatcher) and Gulf war I (Thatcher and Major). The pamphlet was with the printers when the cruise missiles began to explode in Serbia.

Since the war began, I have been putting the papers together for a document- based special subject for next year, which includes a detailed look at Korea and Suez. Among the pile of files is a paper for Mr Attlee's Cabinet on the legal complications of fighting a "police operation" rather than a war which is declared to be such (we haven't formally declared war on anybody since 1942).

There, too, is a desperate paper from the Chiefs of Staff's joint planners a week before the RAF began bombing Egypt in October 1956, bewailing the failure of Eden's "war cabinet" to give them political directions on what was to happen once the Suez Canal was retaken. The planners did their best to assess what would be needed, including the occupation of Cairo to depose Nasser, and the installation of a successor government "with the possible commitment of maintaining it indefinitely".

On top of the pile is a 10-year forward view prepared for the Chiefs of Staff in 1960 on the UK's capacity to fight limited wars. It warned that Britain could mount serious operations in a single theatre about once every two years, provided intensive fighting was not prolonged; and this was a period when the armed forces were substantially bigger than now.

One can overdo the lessons of history. As AJP Taylor once said of Napoleon III: "He learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones." And no two limited wars are the same.

Yet there are some interesting and perturbing resonances. Whitehall these days rarely feels able to mount "fund of experience" studies, which is why certain PhD or MA theses have such fascination and, dare I say it, occasional relevance.

The writer is Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London. `Tony Blair, Past Prime Ministers, Parliament and the Use of Military Force' is published by the Department of Government, University of Strathclyde, at pounds 3.50