The Great War was also not fought by professional armies. The war replicated many of the hallmarks of previous conflicts, but it also marked an inflection point in the ways war were waged The orchestration of the empire in waging the war heralded the arrival of a new type of civil leader, exercising control of levers of power with deft professionalism and harnessing industrial partnerships with focus and vigour.Ĭontroversies continue over whether leaders – both military and political – were either geniuses or failures, but the polemics rarely do justice to the pressures, structures and attitudes of the day.
It also was a period in which the actions of well-meaning citizens were levied for wider advantage by governments, a Napoleonic concept of harnessing the masses not simply as warriors, but as a nationwide effort. For instance, war reporting and propaganda exploited radio and media for the first time to reach a global audience ready and keen to engage with it. It was a contagious conflict, not simply because new technologies allowed for military engagements over global distances, but because it also employed unprecedented information technologies. The tension between the romanticism of a war fought for moral reasons and principles was at odds with levels of human suffering that became clear in the immediate aftermath the latter perhaps being the more dominant image today. The result was a scale of death and destruction unimaginable to pre-war populations. Technology played a part, but not a dominant one the conflict was most critically a human endeavour – and one in which participants at all levels were reminded of the feral, brutal reality of war.
It was a contagious conflict, not simply because new technologies allowed for military engagements over global distances, but because it also employed unprecedented information technologies It was a war of existential importance to the UK and its dominions: rules, behaviours and norms of conflict that we recognise today were broken, remade and broken again. The 1914–18 conflict has been characterised by some as consisting of heroic endeavours and national pride in resilience, yet it was also a conflict waged in a brutal way total war that exploited tactics viewed today as barbaric. It would be hard not to draw specific conclusions that link to today’s security environment, but that is not the primary aim of RUSI’s reflections on the Great War instead, it is to highlight nearly half a decade of subsequent careful analysis of that conflict.
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