No end of a lesson.

• Author: Donnelly, Thomas

THE ARTICLES IN this issue by Andrew Krepinevich and Andrew Bacevich indicate the sharp horns of the dilemma now before American military leaders: should they devote themselves to controlling the chaos let loose by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, or should they prepare for larger and longer term threats?

This dilemma is not dissimilar to that facing the British army and government in the early 1920s. At the end of World War I, the British army could stake a strong claim to be the world's finest fighting force. Its fighting spirit and discipline withstood the trial of four years' trench warfare while the French mutinied. It vanquished the Germans by mastering the war's new weapons, the tank and the airplane; though many of the British senior generals were crude and unimaginative, others, notably Major General Sir Ernest Swinton, were men of critical intelligence. Swinton's "Notes on the Employment of Tanks" began the process whereby the British army solved the problem of the stale-mate and slaughter of the trenches. Following the recommendations in a paper written by one of Swinton's disciples, Colonel J.F.C. Fuller, in November 1917 the British Third Army attacked the Germans near Cambrai, combining larger numbers of tanks and aircraft in concert to rip an eight-mile gash in the enemy lines, an unprecedented victory by trench-line standards. The success stunned both sides. Heinz Guderian, the German master of armored warfare, later wrote in his book Achtung--Panzer! of the shock of the British attack at Cambrai. His purpose was polemical, but his prose reflected the collective wisdom of German officers:

The outposts were taken by surprise when suddenly indistinct black forms could be discerned. They were spitting fire, and under their weight the strong and deep obstacle belt was cracking like matchwood. The alarm was transmitted to the men in the trenches, and the troops hastened to their machine guns and tried to put up a defense. It was all in vain! The tanks appeared not one at a time but in whole lines kilometers in length!...The only alternatives were death or surrender, since nobody could make off to the rear and hope to survive under this fire.(1)

The British, too, were dumbfounded by the results of the attack; they had no reserve to exploit the success and, slowly, the Germans restored their front.

In the immediate postwar era, Fuller and contemporaries such as Basil Liddell-Hart were hailed as prophets of a new age of warfare. Fuller's "Plan 1919" for the defeat of Germany by massed tank forces, dubbed by his biographer, Brian Holden Reid as "the most famous unused plan in military history," won the Royal United Services Institute essay contest in 1919 and marked the beginning of a time of ferment and invention within the British army and the Royal...