CIVILIANS AND MILITARY POLICY.
1WE publish in another column a letter from Mr. Arthur H. Lee protesting against the views we expressed last week in regard to civilians and military policy. Mr. Lee's experience of modern war in Cuba, his ability and know- ledge as a student of military affairs, and his acquaint- ance with political life as an active Member of Parlia- ment give him every right to respectful attention on such a matter, and therefore we propose to deal more fully than we were able in our note last week with the problem of civilians and military policy. We may say, to begin with, that we maintain to the full what we wrote last week on the subject. We hold that the governing civilians at the top cannot during a war shuffle off their responsibility for military operations on the expert, and say as the present Government have been too much inclined to say : We as civilians have, of course, no knowledge of war, and so no right to interfere. All we can do, and what we have done accordingly, is to select the best military exPert, we could find, and to give him a free hand. As long as we supply him with all he asks us for we are doing all that it is possible for us to do, and if things go wrong it is not our fault, but the fault of circumstances. We have done the only thing we as civilians are capable of doing, and no one can blame us. In fact, we ought to be praised instead of blamed because we have trusted so implicitly to the best military experts we could find, and. refrained so entirely from any interference when once we had selected our generals.' This is, of course, a very common atti- tude for the non-expert to take in every kind of technical business, from building a house to carrying on a manufacturing business or a bank ; but in spite of its commonness and apparent reasonableness, it is, we Contend, an attitude of mind which is liable to bring any human business into danger and difficulty, whether that business is commercial or political, and whether it consists in " running " a factory or carrying on a war. If, and when, in any business, commercial or political, the men at the top, the men who have the powez to say the ultimate word, and by whose intention and direction the business must be run, adopt the attitude of We are not experts, and can only call in an expert and give him a free hand,' that business will never prosper. Ultimate control and direction can never be divorced from executive action in this way. The notion that daily and hourly vigilance and superintendence and the taking of responsibility can be avoided by the man at the top, the man with the ultimate control, declaring that he is no expert, and can only throw himself blindly into the hands of an expert, is utterly unsound. As we pointed out last week, this is not due in the case of military affairs to the fact that civilians are cleverer than soldiers. Quite as often as not just the reverse is the case. It is due to the fact that we are ruled by the civilians and not by soldiers, and that it is to civilians and not to soldiers that the nation has entrusted the supreme and ultimate control of its affairs. As long as this is so—and, in our view, it must and will remain so—the civilians cannot make war satisfactorily by calling in the best military expert they can find and trusting him blindly. The men who can say the last word on the war, and therefore on its conduct, must understand, superintend, and supervise, because they, and they only, know what they intend in regard to the war. They alone know the conditions under which the war must be waged. If the military expert were also the Secretary of State for War and the Prime Minister—i.e., were the man who could say the final word on all subjects connected with the war—it would, -of course, be different. Then, no doubt, civilian control would be out of place. He would be like an architect building a house for himself at his own cost. In Such cases the architect wants no control, and builds an excel- lent house. When, however, he, as an expert, is called on to build a house for a non-expert, who pays the bill, knows what he wants, and has certain definite intentions as to the house. things are certain to go wrong unless the civilian non-expert who can say the last word occupies himself with the details of the house and goes into the whole policy of construction. If he merely chooses the best expert, and then gives him a free hand and a blank cheque, it is a hundred to one that he gets a bad house. The expert does not really know what the employer wants, and how- ever self-confident he may be, the complete divorce between execution and ultimate responsibility produces errors and difficulties. It is the same in war. To put the point yet once more, there cannot without the gravest of risks be the complete divorce and severance between the ultimate authority and the chief executant indicated by the notion, Choose a good expert, give him an absolutely free hand, and then ''cro home to dinner.' If the Government are determined to give their military expert an absolutely free hand, and to leave him entirely alone, the only wise plan is to make him not merely Generalissimo, but Prime Minister also. That plan would be sound enough. The plan of trusting blindly to a military expert who is, never- theless, still a delegate and subordinate, without essential powers of his own, is bound to fail.
But though we hold this view so strongly, it must not be supposed, as we regret to see Mr. Lee supposes, that we think the governing civilians ought to interfere with the details of mobile columns and such purely technical matters. That is by no means our opinion, and it was to avoid such an interpretation that we were careful to choose the words "military policy." We meant by that that the governing civilians must not leave the principles of the war blindly to the military experts, but must insist on. having a voice, first in their adoption, and secondly in their application and carrying out. By "military policy" we did not mean giving orders that such-and-such a column should be so many men strong and should move on such-and-such a day to such-and-such a place. Of course all such technical details must be as much left to the soldiers on the spot as the mixing of the mortar or the setting of the bricks is left to the expert even in the case of a house where the owner, instead of leaving it all to the architect, insists on having his voice in the plans. Again, all such questions as the number of guns to be employed, their calibre and their handling, and all field tactie-s are mattAis which de not come within the scope of "military policy," as we use the words. No doubt in deciding on general military policy the governing civilians should be very greatly guided by expert military opinion, and. should hesitate very much before rejecting it. They would never, that is, light-heartedly take up a plan which had no military support. But as a matter of fact, this is a theoretical rather than a practical difficulty, as any one who has ever had to do with expert opinion soon discovers. When the civilian or layman goes at all deep into any problem requiring expert knowledge, he is almost certain to find that -there are two expert views, and that it is his business as a man of good sense and. judgment to decide between them on grounds that are common to all intelligent persons. The picture of the civilian Secretary of State confronted by a view universally held by all military experts is 'a purely ideal vision. The governing civilians, must, of course, consult the experts on their military policy, but they must check all expert advice by the common-sense judgment of the man of the world. In _certain things they will, no doubt, bow to military advice entirely, but the selection as to what are the matters in which the military are to decide must remain, as we have said, with those in whom the supreme responsibility ultimately rests.
'We shall perhaps be told that all we have written is ?pre theory, and that in practice the only thing the unfor- tunate governing civilian can do is to give his expert a free hand and hope for the best. Now we do not want to weary our readers, but we should like to take one instance to show that this is not so, and that our view is not Mere werd-spinning Take the great initial mistake in Military policy of the present war. That mistake was set forth in the famous telegram to the Colonies," Unmounted. men preferred." When the present writer, a pure civilian, quite guiltless of any expert military knowledge, read that telegram he well remembers his bewilderment. He asked himself : 'Can this mean that the Government have made such splendidly adequate provision for supplying horses that they have actually overdone it, and are really afraid of having too many if the Colonies send any 9' But, of course, this view was ridieulonsly wrong. The telegram "Unmounted men preferred" was sent because the military expert with a free hand had decided, no doubt with the best intentions and after the fullest consideration of the military • problems involved, that the war was to be an infantry war, and was to be fought in the main by foot soldiers. Now we do not blame the military expert. He did his best and Spoke what he thought was right, though he made a mistake. The people we blame are the governing civilians, the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for War, who accepted such a decision. We eannot for a moment suppose they agreed with it. They are men of common- sense, and they doubtless said to themselves : 'Can this be right ? Can it be sound military policy to try to conquer an army entirely composed.of mounted men with an army chiefly composed of foot soldiers ? Does not the fact that the Boers are all mounted necessitate that our army shall be mounted ? ' Lord Salisbury and Lord Lansdowne and the rest of the inner -Cabinet are such able and intelligent men that it is impossible to doubt that the vision of a man on foot trying to pursue and hunt down a man on a horse must have crossed their minds. But they did not act on it. They put it away because they were obsessed by the notion that their business was to find the best expert they could and to give 'him an absolutely free hand, regardless of all other con- eiderations. If he said "Unmounted meii preferred," immonnted men it must be, even though it looked like Pure madness. If our view of not reposing a blind trust in the expert had prevailed, we cannot doubt that the fatal blunder of the "infantry war" would never have taken place. Again, it seems to us that when the governing civilians assented, as they rightly did, to the plan of organising Mobile columns to scour the country, and supplied ten thOusand horses a month for the purpose, it would have been much better if they had deemed it their duty not to give the military expert a free hand, but having paid for mobility, had seen that they got it. For example, if the governing civilians had insisted that mobile columns should not (as has been the case) be accompanied by infantry, that they should not have waggons with them 1Mt only pack-horses, and that the dragging about of liarnioniums, and kitchen ranges shouldbe tieeied not merely as a subject for a sarcastic despatch, but :fin. the sternest punishment, can we say that such interference would have been injurious ? However, we d6 ncit desire-to dwell any more on these details; but even thoughit brings us into sharp conflict with a man of such soundjudgraent as Mr. Lee, we must maintain our view that the governing, civilians cannot escape responsibility for the war by -giiing blank cheques to military experts, however eminent, and that if in the present' warthere had been less blind trust in the military expert and a wise exercise of common-sense control over military policy by the governing civilians who give the ultimate decisions in all cases, and. so must eaxiT the ultimate responsibility, better, not worse, results would have been obtained in the present war.
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