The Royal College of Defence Studies 1927–2017: ninety years of preparing strategic leaders

Abstract

Better an educated soldiery than ‘a rapacious and licentious one’. This gloss on Edmund Burke's 1783 admonition might seem a fitting definition of the role of the Royal College of Defence Studies (RCDS) both in the evolution of military doctrine and as a clear demonstration of British soft power at its best. Established in 1927 as the Imperial Defence College, it became the Royal College of Defence Studies in 1972, having moved to an elegant, freestanding and well-equipped house in London's Belgrave Square. Currently, some 150 members, equally divided between British and overseas counterparts, attend a year-long course of intense reflection and debate on major issues of world affairs. The book opens with a well-informed foreword from former Chief of the Defence Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach and a helpful commentary from Sir Tom Phillips, Commandant at the time of publication.
We owe a considerable debt to Andrew Stewart (until recently Academic Studies Director to the college) for his absorbing study of the college's role in British military education over the last 90 years. He outlines in helpful detail the history of the college, delving profitably into its archive and demonstrating how the key incentive behind its foundation was the pressure to learn from past experience. Thus in May 1920 Earl Curzon, then foreign secretary, argued that the First World War ‘differed from all previous British wars, indeed from all previous wars in scale and character’ (p. 11). Hence the need, according to Winston Churchill, for a ‘common staff brain’ (p. 14) embedded in an institution to train a ‘body of officers and civilian officials in the broadest aspects of imperial strategy … with the instructional staff … drawn from the three fighting services’ (p. 20). Another key figure in the early history of the college was the indefatigable Sir Maurice Hankey, the long-serving Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence. It was he who advised Churchill about the composition of the committee established in 1922 to consider the creation of a Joint Staff College (p. 14).