Abstract
With the death of Professor Sir Michael Howard, The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) lost not only its president emeritus but the last of its founders and intellectual parents. The foremost military historian of his generation, Sir Michael embodied and epitomised a historical sensibility that informed all his writing. He will forever remain an icon not only for historians, but for all those who acknowledge the indispensability of history and the historical sensibility for any true understanding of present events.
In tribute to Sir Michael and in celebration of his life and work, this Adelphi book collects a selection of his remarks and writings for IISS publications over six decades, as well as previously unprinted material. Through this collection, these works will reach a new generation of readers and be made more accessible to those fortunate enough to have read them already. They illustrate Sir Michael’s role in the Institute’s creation and his abiding presence in its evolving intellectual life, and serve as a historical document, tracing the development of strategic thought and preoccupations from the 1950s to the recent past. In addition to their historical value, Sir Michael’s conclusions retain their immediacy and power. This book is therefore of direct relevance to anyone interested in contemporary events: whether the professional analyst, the student of international relations or the general reader.
‘This wonderful collection, containing pieces written by Sir Michael Howard over 60 years, will be enjoyed by his, and the Institute’s, many friends and admirers. Here will be found many reminders, written with Michael’s customary lucidity, of the big issues of the post-war period as they were seen at the time. In addition to a fascinating interview conducted not long before his death about the origins of the Institute, there are obituaries of many of the key and now too often forgotten figures of those early years.’
— Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King’s College London
‘Sir Michael’s exploration of policy judgement by fusing politics, strategy, history, ethics, and technology in the nuclear age is increasingly relevant in this complex age of artificial intelligence. His interdisciplinary approach continues to be a guide as we work to synthesize and solve the challenges presented by rapid technological advancements. The pieces contained here show both the continued relevance of his work, and his commitment to studying military history properly, in “depth”, in “width”, and in “context”.’
— Dr Yoichi Funabashi, Chairman of Asia Pacific Initiative
Survival 21-6, 1979
Jack Slessor was a founder member of the Council of the original Institute for Strategic Studies and one of the first Vice-Presidents of the IISS. His outstanding career in the Royal Air Force and the honours bestowed on him as an officer who reached the summit of his profession have tended to obscure his role as one of the most influential strategic thinkers of our times. For it was he who in 1952, as Chairman of the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, devised the formula for nuclear deterrence – the prevention of war by the threat of unacceptable and unavoidable retaliation – that was to be adopted by the British Government as the foundation for its defence policy, taken up by the US Joint Chiefs of Staff the following year, and promulgated by John Foster Dulles in 1954 as ‘the New Look’. From this acorn that Slessor planted has developed the whole vast jungle of strategic nuclear theorizing that envelops us all today.
The concept of deterrence through Air Power was not of course new. It had been the orthodox doctrine of the Royal Air Force between the wars and indeed, briefly, the policy of the British Government when it began to rearm in 1934. But Slessor had not then been one of its most enthusiastic supporters. A deeply pragmatic man, he knew better than most the practical problems involved. Born in 1897, he went straight from school into the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, for the reason, which so well reflected his personal courage, that an attack of infantile paralysis in childhood had lamed him for life and so made it impossible for him to join the Army. He thus became one of that unique generation who, as young men, virtually invented the techniques of air warfare that they were to apply a generation later in the Second World War.
Between the wars Slessor spent four years at the Army Staff College at Camberley. So, at a time when most of his contemporaries were obsessed with the role of the RAF as an independent force, Slessor was thinking through the problems of co-operation with surface forces, and in 1936 he published one of the very few books on the subject: Air Power and Armies. This perhaps did something to set him apart from his colleagues, and although he was to command a Bomber Group in 1941–2, it was as C-in-C Coastal Command at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943 that he made his most notable contribution to the winning of the war – a post which in the struggle for priorities set him across the table from his colleagues in Bomber Command. But no acrimony ever developed. Indeed, much of his most notable work during the war was done in senior staff positions, smoothing out differences between the Services and between the Allies. His shrewdness and breadth of vision was to become as famous in Washington as it was in Whitehall.
For the last two years of the war Slessor was C-in-C of the RAF in the Mediterranean and Middle East; and in this capacity his experience in trying to ferry support to the Polish resistance during the Warsaw rising of August 1944, which was wrecked on the non-co-operation of the Soviet authorities, gave him a view of Soviet character and intentions that he was never to change. In 1950, at the time of the Korean War, he became Chief of the Air Staff and found himself faced with the same depressing task that had confronted him as a staff officer in the Air Ministry in the 1930s – making military bricks without financial straw. The development of Britain’s nuclear weapons and of the V-Bomber force to deliver them pointed, however, to a solution that had not been available before the war; and it was this that he persuaded his colleagues on the Chiefs of Staff Committee and later his Government to accept.
Slessor retired in 1954 and turned to writing and lecturing. His two books Strategy for the West (1954) and The Great Deterrent (1959) were vigorous if simplistic statements of the original doctrine of ‘Massive Retaliation’. The controversy they helped to provoke brought him into contact with such critics of the theory as Rear-Admiral Sir Anthony Buzzard and Professor P. M. S. Blackett; and it was the discussions between these and other authorities that led to the foundation of the Institute in 1958.
Slessor’s support for the Institute, and the weight his name carried in both Washington and London, was very largely responsible for its early success, and for some five years he played a leading part in its affairs, displaying in all its discussions not only all the expertise and political acumen to be expected from an authority of his experience, but an intellectual humility, an open-mindedness and a courteous readiness to listen to younger and far less experienced thinkers that was in itself an education in constructive thinking. Only his increasing lameness forced him to abandon his visits to London and to lose regular touch with the Institute’s activities. We were intellectually impoverished by his absence; and his death marks the end of an epoch in our affairs.