From the editors

This issue of The Journal of Strategic Studies focuses on strategic history and thought. The opening essay by John Stone of King’s College London examines the liberal political theorist Sir Isaiah Berlin’s much-neglected contribution to strategic studies, including the importance he placed on sophisticated historical learning. As Stone shows, Berlin’s ideas are relevant to strategy for two reasons. First, he placed great emphasis on human agency in highly contingent situations, such as military operations, when choices have profound consequences. Second, the importance of decisions places a premium on sound political judgment, a quality that emerges from an appreciation of broad historical and political trends. Sound political judgment helps determine what the use of force makes possible, and at what costs and risks. According to Berlin, a study of the past provides a guide as to what is possible today.¹

The next two articles offer archival-based studies of Soviet strategy and diplomacy in the interwar years. In his analysis of Soviet perceptions of the threat to the Soviet western borderlands, Peter Whitehead of York St John University shows how Soviet leaders inflated the threat from Poland in the 1920s and early 1930s because of the deep and lasting impression that Polish military victories in 1919–20 made on the Bolsheviks. Rather than inducing caution, the legacy of that war lead to an obsession with the menace from Poland, either as a source of covert subversion against the Soviet regime or a launching pad for an all-out attack from the leading capitalist empires. According to Whitehead, Stalin used the Polish threat as part of his rationale for accelerated industrialisation and militarisation in the 1930s. In his essay, Aleksandr Vershinin of Lomonosov Moscow State University examines the first Soviet-French rapprochement in the military sphere in the early 1930s. Some scholars have argued that a closer relationship between France, Britain and the Soviet Union might have contained Germany. As Vershinin shows, the Soviet leadership did not rule out a military alliance with France, but ultimately the warming of relations between the two European great powers was limited by mutual distrust and opposing foreign policy goals. For the Soviet leadership, military cooperation with France was principally a means to improve the capabilities of the Red Army and the Soviet Union’s international status without taking on the burden and risks of a full-fledged military alliance.²

The JSS has a long tradition of publishing high quality naval history, as exemplified by the next two contributions to this issue.³ In his study of the special service squadron of the Royal Marines, Matthew S. Seligmann of Brunel University challenges the assumption that the British Admiralty evinced little interest in amphibious operations before 1914. Instead, the Royal Navy was in the midst of converting the Royal Marines into a maritime strike force and drafting an amphibious warfare doctrine when war came. The ill-fated Gallipoli operation underscored how complex and how much work still needed to be done by Britain to perfect amphibious capabilities rather than the complete neglect of that mode of war. The next essay by Matthew Heaslip of Portsmouth University takes the analysis of British amphibious warfare to the interwar years. Although some scholars have argued the Royal Navy’s development of amphibious warfare between the two world wars was hobbled by a ‘Gallipoli curse’, a reluctance face up to the challenge of land-sea operations, Heaslip shows that the opposite was true. The disasters of the Dardanelles campaign convinced the British Admiralty that it had to continue to develop its amphibious capabilities and doctrine through realistic exercises and small operations within the British empire. Much of this experimental work in the interwar era contributed to the Royal Navy’s successful amphibious landings in the Second World War.

This issue fittingly closes with a review essay by Andrew Lambert of King’s College London of three naval history books about British war planning before 1914, Churchill and the Dardanelles, and the Anglo-German struggle for maritime power in the North Sea.

Notes

¹ For recent articles on similar themes, see George Dimitriu, ‘Clausewitz and the politics of war: A contemporary theory’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 43:5 (2020), 645–85; Andrew Carr, ‘It’s about time: Strategy and temporal phenomena’, Journal of Strategic Studies 44/3 (2021), 303–24.

² On Stalin’s threat perceptions, see James Harris, ‘Encircled by enemies: Stalin’s perceptions of the capitalist world, 1918–1941ʹ, Journal of Strategic Studies 30/3 (2007), 526–28. For a survey and analysis of recent Soviet Second World War historiography, see Mark Edele, ‘Who won the Second World War and why should you care? Reassessing Stalin’s War 75 years after victory’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 43:6–7 (2020), 1039–62. For a study of contemporary Russian strategy, see Dmitry (Dima) Adamsky, ‘From Moscow with coercion: Russian deterrence theory and strategic culture’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 41:1–2 (2018), 33–60.

³ See for instance Edward Hampshire, ‘Strategic and Budgetary Necessity, or Decision- making “Along the Grain”? The Royal Navy and the 1981 Defence Review’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 39:7 (2016), 956–78; Stephen McLaughlin, ‘Battlelines and Fast Wings: Battlefleet Tactics in the Royal Navy, 1900–1914ʹ, Journal of Strategic Studies 38:7 (2015), 985–1005; David Morgan-Owen, ‘A Revolution in Naval Affairs? Technology, Strategy and British Naval Policy in the “Fisher Era”’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38:7 (2015), 944–65; John W. Coogan, ‘The Short-War Illusion Resurrected: The Myth of Economic Warfare as the British Schlieffen Plan’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38:7 (2015), 1045–64; Matthew S. Seligmann, ‘Naval History by Conspiracy Theory: The British Admiralty before the First World War and the Methodology of Revisionism’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 38:7 (2015), 966–84; John Brooks, ‘Preparing for Armageddon: Gunnery Practices and Exercises in the Grand Fleet Prior to Jutland’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 38:7 (2015), 1006–23; Christopher M. Bell, ‘The Myth of a Naval Revolution by Proxy: Lord Fisher’s Influence on Winston Churchill’s Naval Policy, 1911–1914ʹ, Journal of Strategic Studies, 38:7 (2015), 1024–44.