ABSTRACT
This chapter is in some ways the pivot of the book. It draws together the material from earlier chapters. It is one thing to assert the existence of a ‘strategic culture’, the subject of Chapter 1. It is another to provide evidence for it. Avner Offer, for example, demonstrated that Fisher, Slade and Hankey understood the potential for economic warfare against Germany, but not that their views were underpinned by a broader sympathy and understanding among naval officers.2 Chapters 2 and 3 showed how, and from where, officers were recruited and trained, such that the most successful would serve on particular stations and (usually) flagships, building ‘service interest’ as they funnelled up the career ladder. Chapters 3 and 4 considered contemporary thinking on economic and cruiser warfare, inside and outside the Service. This chapter will examine the debate among naval professionals and others in policy areas relevant to economic warfare, but it will concentrate on reserve officers. Relatively junior officers – commanders and lieutenants – were able to attend and participate in debates at RUSI with flag officers, enter and win essay prizes, and get their opinions published on the subjects of maritime warfare, food supply and imperial communications. This demonstrates the existence of that shared ‘strategic culture’ suggested in Chapter 1. This chapter does not duplicate Bryan Ranft’s doctoral thesis, nor the analysis of the press examined by A.J.A. Morris.3 The contemporary and Service press were not discrete: the article by ‘Captain RN’, ‘The New Building Programme’, in USM, April 1905, was a rejoinder to that by H.W. Wilson, ‘The Command of the Sea in Danger’, in Leo Maxse’s National Review, the previous month.
