School of War - How the British Army Learned to Win, with Huw Davies

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Huw Davies, an associate dean and professor of British military history at King’s College London and author of several books, including The Wandering Army, joins School of War to discuss what the 18th-century British Army can teach us about modern warfare. How does battlefield failure drive military innovation? How did institutions of the past respond to change? And in an era of drones, autonomy, and AI, have we learned from the past, or are we destined to repeat it? Times: 02:40 18th century military enlightenment 06:30 War of the Austrian Succession 12:43 The British officer class 18:39 Tension between ancients and moderns 20:20 Discovering Sir Henry Clinton’s notebook 20:48 False caricature of the British Army 27:02 Challenges of North American warfare 29:32 Battle of the Monongahela 35:09 Importance of light infantry 38:17 Rifle evolution 39:00 Why armies resist change 43:40 Lessons for today 46:42 Human behavior in war 47:10 Learning curve of war technologies 49:11 Is Ukrainian drone warfare a turning point? Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. We've got Wars Rays. in the Middle East in Ukraine, and School of War in 2026 has heavily focused on contemporary issues of strategy and the modern battlefield. But we reserve the right to nerd out from time to time. That's part of what school of war is. And that's what we're going to do today. You may think that the subject of innovation and cultural change in the officer corps in the 18th century British Army is a bit esoteric. And I guess on the one hand, you'd be right. But on the other hand, I think as you'll

listen to this really interesting conversation with the scholar Hugh Davies about how the British Empire came essentially to rule the world and what role the British Army and its own evolution played within that. I think you'll agree with me that the echoes for the present day are pretty striking and there's actually a lot to be learned about this story that's relevant to today. So let's get into it. It is for a shift to war. This Milwaukee invasion of December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face a great kind of little dream.

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Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Hugh Davies, he is Associate Dean and Professor of British Military History, King's College London. He's the author of several books, the most recent of which is The Wandering Army, the Campaigns that transformed the British Way of War. Hugh, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you, Aaron. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. So the 18th century for the British Army, just to speak in very broad generalities, a period of transformation, defeats, victories, technological change, social change. Sounds a bit like the present in certain respects. And so one of the things I want to get to today are lessons we might take from the British experience of that century that are applicable today, whether to Britain or the United States or wherever.

But I want to open with a really broad question, which is, you know, your book is a study of what's popularly known as the 18th century military enlightenment as it plays out in the British Army. What is the 18th century military enlightenment? Maybe even give us a bit of a hint about how it's downstream from the Enlightenment. Yeah, no, sure. So the military enlightenment is essentially a branch of the 18th century enlightenment, the birth of the, the birth of the, romantic ideals of thought of knowledge and of scientific investigation and of the communication of the communication of that knowledge more broadly. And within the military enlightenment, there is a sort of number of ways in which that develops across the 18th century.

The first and probably most prominent is the sort of growth of humanitarianism in war about how there is much more focus on the conditions in which soldiers are abilited, fight, how they are treated when they're captured, and on the rules and laws of war, as that becomes much more globally and universally understood. There is a parallel element to that, and that is the birth and growth of the transmission of knowledge about how war is fought.

And this is linked to a number of factors, the growth and spread of common uses of weaponry, muskets most, most obviously, but also growing use of artillery, and then how armies are organised to use those different weapons. And so you start to see the knowledge about that way of fighting,

captured in various formats. So obviously the most common is in book format. a huge explosion, pardon the pun, in the number of books about the art of war during the 19th century. They get passed around, you get the growth in the use of libraries and the sort of diffused knowledge to the lower ranks. So this is no longer the orbit of generals and the senior staff. This now becomes something that more junior officers. and in some cases where they have the ability to read soldiers as well. You also get the increasing birth of formal means of education,

but then there are also informal networks, so conversations. We're reliant in history on the use of what soldiers and officers write down in letters and correspondence, notebooks and diaries as a means of understanding what knowledge they possessed. And so occasionally you get records by particularly diligent individuals of conversations that have taken place. And you can see senior officers talking to junior officers and telling them about their experiences. And what I tried to do in the Wondren Army was unearth and shed light on that aspect of that informal set of knowledge. A big recurring theme in your book is how battlefield failure drives institutional. change within the army.

And in fact, you open with, well, with the war of the Austrian succession, which actually it might be useful. I don't want to demean the listeners and viewers of the School of War podcast, but I don't know how many of us to include the host would pass the set exam in your military history course at King's College London about the stakes of the war of the Austrian succession. And, of course, I could do, I would do somewhat better on the war of the Spanish succession. if only because I'm an enormous Winston Churchill fan. And so I've read his marvelous account of his great ancestor,

the Duke of Marlborough's life. So, you know, ultimately the century opens with this war to contain French egemony, which ultimately the coalition, the Brits prevail in. But then we run into trouble in the War of Austrians' succession. What was this war? The army didn't do well. Why not? Tell us what happened.

Well, the reason it didn't do well is the extent. expansive piece that occurs between the end of the War of Spanish Succession and the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession. There's one war in between, which occurs just before the War of Austrian Succession begins, which is a shore war, which really does blossom into the full War of Austrian Succession. That's called the War of Jenkins Year. But the War of Austrian Succession is about who is going to succeed the recently deceased Emperor of Austria, of the Holy Roman Empire. So the great powers start to fall into their usual alliance politics about trying to ensure that their favoured successor is put in charge of the Holy Roman Empire. It essentially

becomes a war on the one hand between Austria and Prussia and on the other hand between France and Britain. And it principally revolves around possession as wars in Europe that involve Britain tend to the possession of the low countries, because that's where Britain is very concerned that a hostile power should have control over the ports and the channel that could then facilitate an invasion of England. And this becomes a war that has a series of quite bloody battles. And my book opens with the Battle of Fontenois on the 11th of May 1745, which sees the British Army being led into battle by the Duke of Cumberland, second in line to the

throne of England. And he's a young but ambitious general and seen as a great light for the future of the British Army. He's also devastatingly arrogant about the power of the British army. And he also essentially marches into a trap set by his opponent. Marshal de Sacks, the French commander, which decimates this column of British infantry, and causes this stunning defeat. This is the first time the British Army had been defeated in Europe. Since the War of Spanish Succession, it caused shockwaves while seen as a huge issue for the British. And it sparked a huge amount of self-reflection about what had gone wrong.

how could the British learn from the various ways in which the French had utilised the terrain at Fontenois? They had used sharpshooters and irregular forces to break up and cause some difficulties for the British. They'd used artillery imaginatively. So this sort of gave the impetus to the British to start looking at how things are being done on the continent and how to develop their own approaches to war fighting. Because until then, the doctrinal manual, such as it was that the British were relying on, had been written in the 1720s. So 25 years earlier and had been very much based on the war of the Spanish succession.

So hadn't really evolved. Whereas the French had utilized various experiences from shorter wars, the more limited wars, in Europe that they had been involved in, or which soldiers had been participants in as mercenaries. So they'd gathered a lot more information and knowledge about how to fight. The War of the Ocean Succession also sort of starts a spiral of ongoing conflicts in Europe over the next 20, 30 years, really up until the end of the American Revolutionary War. It really is an extraordinarily violent 75 years or so, which also has to have.

happens to be, you know, the period where the British Empire comes into the form that, you know, when people speak of the British Empire, they talk about the end of that period. And in particular, after the defeat of Napoleon, you know, of course, part of your argument is that that is a defeat ultimately brought about in part because of what the British Army has learned and has institutionalized over the years. I want to get into some of the evolutions in war fighting specifically, some of the actual lessons. But before we do that, just to stick with the officer class for a moment. you referred to the Duke of Cumberland's arrogance, you know, the popular image of the 18th century British officer class, not just at the start of this period, by the way, but throughout is, you know, it was before we started recording Hugh, I was looking, there's a great riff in a Flashman novel somewhere. It's in the first few pages of one of the novels. By the way, Chad GPT completely failed me because I asked it which one it was, and it just lied. It just picked one, and it told me it was at the start of the Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. and I looked in it, it's not there. It's not there. Chat GPT. You lied. But I can't, sorry. I got to it late before our recording was scheduled. So there's a great riff at the opening one of these novels where the old Flashman, you know, reflecting on his experiences and reflecting on the new meritocratic, you know, turn of the, I guess turn of the 20th century, new meritocratic British Army. He's like, I don't think these guys are doing any better than the ones who purchased their commissions. I'm going to track, I'm going to track this down. But it's very funny, very Flashman-like thing to say. Of course, this is the image of, you know, Flashman is the image in a way of the, of the, of the, of the earlier army, you know, corrupt purchase commissions. There's a welfare program for the aristocracy,

not particularly reflective, not particularly bright even. How much truth is there to the stereotype? How did this officer class evolve in the period in which you're speaking? And the evolution does not really involve the elimination of the institution of purchasing the commissions, right? So just Talk us through this group of men and who they are and how they change. So it's not a myth, but it is, I think, something of an exaggeration. And part of the reason being, you know, Flashman has created this mythology around the arrogant officer class. And there certainly were officers like that, as there are in any aspect of society.

So it's neither unusual nor is it endemic. The thing about purchasing, which on the surface looks like an incredibly corrupt and deeply flawed system, it's actually a means of maintaining the availability of resources for the British Army in peacetime. Because in peacetime, officers go under half pay. And some of the really good officers aren't necessarily from landed wealth. so they're not really in a position to be able to afford to live on half pay. So they will be looking for jobs elsewhere in civilian society. Yet the British Army still needs to sell its commissions.

It still needs to have income from those commissions. And that is one of the ways in which the British Army is funded. It sounds nuts, but that's the way it is done. So you had very wealthy families purchasing very expensive commissions in very fashionable regiments, the cavalry regiments in particular, but also the foot guards and so on, that are seen as extremely fashionable and are themselves an introduction to high society.

They purchase commissions for their children. In peacetime, you have children with commissions in various regiments. There's no sense at all that they're going to go and fight a war when war breaks out. And when war does break out, the commissions are sold and they're repurchased. And you get the officers with more experience who now come back into the army, rejoining and able to take up their old positions on full pay. So in a way, it's a slightly bizarre, but for the time, logical way of maintaining,

the funding and the the vitality of the British Army, if you will. So that's the first thing to do is to try and dispel this idea that the British Army is completely populated by rogues and wealthy idiots. An army such as that that goes on to win substantial victory during the seven years war in Europe and the French and Indian War in North America. This is not an army of idiots.

It's not an army of incompetence. What you actually see in times of war are extremely experienced, intelligent, thoughtful, innovative officers getting into positions of authority and therefore influence. and you have a lot of officers who have were extremely well read who think about how to apply ideas right from the classics through to the more recent wars

such as those fought by Charlemagne in the 15th 16th centuries and how to apply those lessons and adapt those lessons for the 18th century context and they do so extremely effectively. And I mean, I could give you a couple of examples, but James Wolfe is one that immediately springs to mind

in terms of somebody who was extremely well read on the history of war. There's a letter that he writes to a friend who is seeking advice for his sense, son on what books his son should read on entry to the British Army. And he sends through essentially a bibliography of books that the young man should read, which include classics, such as Caesar's commentaries on war, write through to much more modern interpretations and histories and treatises on the art of war. And we also get little snippets. And we also get little snippets, and this is what I was talking about earlier

in trying to shed light on the on the bits of, of, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the of time, there aren't discussed commonly. So conversations in the mess, for example. People don't tend to write home about those. They don't tend to think that families want to hear about it or that it's a particularly interesting thing to do. So, but, uh, wolf, we have this snippet. of a conversation Wolf has with a junior officer in the mess, the officer asks him how he determined the way in which he would conduct the siege of Louisbourg at the entrance of the St. Lawrence

River in modern-day Canada. And the young officer asks, did you base it on Xenophon's siege? I can't remember which one it was, but a Greek siege. And Wolf was like, that's exactly what inspired me. You've hit the nail on the head. Can I ask you an extremely nerdy question that I was not prepared to ask, but the way you just rift there inspires it in me. You know, one of the themes of the Enlightenment broadly,

not necessarily the military enlightenment, is this tension between the ancients and the moderns. And of course, this is, you know, Jonathan Swift's famous take on this. Is there an ancients versus moderns, tension in military thinking that is self-conscious on some level? No, not. I didn't really get that sense. Certainly the sense I got was these offices that they're reading as widely as they can.

So the other officer I was going to mention was Henry Clinton, who is a historian's dream and also a nightmare because he records literally. everything. He's got memorandums of conversations that he has with his subordinates, with his seniors, with those of the same rank. And he's got notebooks filled with his thinking on subjects, including the books that he's read and what he thinks of those books. And I found it sort of the moment that hardly ever actually happens to a historian, particularly of the 18th century because most archives have already been unearthed. But I was in the Society of the Cincinnati Library in D.C. And one of the archival materials they had in their catalogue

just said it was an anonymous notebook on tactics and military failures from the 18th century. I was like, oh, that's the sort of thing I want to read. I'll order that up. And I was literally, they've had it in stock in, in the archive since 1997. I was literally the first person to order it in 2019. And I was reading through this and I was thinking, God, this this handwriting and the tone is very much Henry Clinton. And the brilliant thing was that the right hand page was very, very neat handwriting. writing, which is for Clinton, this is why Clinton's nightmare. His handwriting is not neat.

It's almost illegible, particularly when he's in command in North America, towards the end of the Revolutionary War. But, you know, it's very neat on one page and on the left-hand page. Some pages were left blank or had large blank spaces in them, but they had, there was quite a lot of note, but in almost a different hand, yet there was evidence that it was the same hand, became quite clear, and I subsequently did some research and read a few books about book reading of the 18th century, that when people, and this wasn't just people in the armies, how people read books, they would make notes on the right-hand page of a notebook, on their thoughts on reading the book at that point, and they'd leave the left-hand page blank

to add their thoughts later on. When something, occurred to them that would, you know, whether it was an event that would occur that, that would make them think back to that book and they'd make a notion of the event. So what Clinton was doing was going back to this notebook. He'd written the book, a notebook in the 1760s, and he went back to this notebook throughout his life and kept on adding in little, little reminiscences or points. One of the points was just sort of got goosebumps on the back of my neck was a reference to one of Cumberland's actions in the seven years war actually. But he then goes on to say, Washington did this at Monmouth Courthouse.

So he made this note in the 1760s about Cumberland's, one of Cumberland's battles from the 1550s, and then referred back to it in later life, having fought Washington. Monmouth Courthouse. And I was like, well, this is an amazing thing divine. You know, you've got this sort of almost conversation that Clinton's having with himself about his experience of war and also incredibly reflective sort of personality. Anyway, you've asked about the classics and the tensions between the classics and the moderns. Clinton read in that notebook he's talking about Caesar at the beginning and how Caesar,

is relevant, what Caesar can teach him as a young officer. And the notebook essentially evolves throughout several books that you look at wars in the Italian in Italy in the 15th century and then write through, write-up to Cumberland in the Seven Years' War. And it was just, I was thrilled when I realized it was a Clinton. We had the handwriting examined. and they by sending in some of clinton's other notebooks and letters and they confirmed it was it was clinton's handwriting who's like this is it's a dream has never happened yeah no no i was i i spent enough of my my early uh early career uh sort of pretending to be a scholar before moving on to

other things um to appreciate and and really feel really sympathized with just how excited you are even just telling the story it's a lot of fun listening to you tell it yeah i really I mean, it was probably, it was certainly the highlight of the research I did for that for that book. And there were many highlights, but that was, that was a real moment. And I don't know if you've been to Anderson House, where the library is Cincinnati is. I have, it's not far from where I'm talking to you right now. It's spectacular, totally spectacular.

And it's a very small library, very small reading room. And I'd got a fellowship there. And so I was being treated really, you're exceptionally well. And she's now retired. The director of the library, Ellen Clark, was all so thrilled. And she kept on calling people in to come and see the notebook. So it was like a real moment, you know. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update.

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But for all of your quite persuasive, quite in the American sense, a very persuasive defense of the character of the British officer corps and how it's slurred, there is, as you, I mean, this is the major theme of your book. There is this constant tension between innovation and the innovators on the one hand and sort of small sea conservative reaction on the other. Just institutional inertia that generally speaking is a villain, Generally speaking, it's not a force for good in terms of, you know, if British victory is your goal. You know, pick something, some important development of the period in terms of the art of war that you chronicle.

And just walk us through how the process actually worked, how something was discovered, resisted, but ultimately prevailed as a practice that improved. that improved the fighting quality of the army? Well, I mean, it's got to be light infantry, which is seen in the British Army of the sort of mid-18th century as the thing you did in really unpleasant circumstances, using light infantry to fight irregular war for. That wasn't the way in which war was fought, but sometimes it was regrettably necessary.

And generally, that happens in the colonies. That's not something that happens in European warfare. So you've got, on the one hand, as you say, you've got the conservative element of the British Army, is very resistant to the inclusion of light infantry in the general order of battle. So what happens in the French and Indian War, the Seven years war in North America,

is because of the nature of the terrain, generally heavily forested, not the large open spaces, the large plains that you see in Europe, which is the conventional sort of location for large battles, large set-piece battles. In North America, you've got this closed terrain. You've got more undulating terrain as well, more river valleys, which make the sort of standard approach to warfare pretty much impossible.

When battles are for, particularly due in the revolutionary war, but certainly towards the high point of the 70s war in 1759 is at Quebec, they are generally, in European terms, tiny. at most 10,000 soldiers on the battlefield in total. And that's including both sides and auxiliaries. Whereas in Europe you're talking, you're talking 10 times that number. So a large number of people need to be organised so that there is a greater need for all.

organisation, but also the use of weapons, the use of the weapons that they have, muskets in particular, which are notoriously inaccurate, mean that they have to be organised in a certain way in order to deliver the weight of firepower that you need in order to succeed. That's not physically possible in North America. So accepting a few sort of circumstances. So what you see is conservative elements, nevertheless insisting that the standard drill is adhered to in North America because that's the way the British Army fights. That's the way a European army's fight. And so the sort of, I suppose the really famous example which has been heavily written about and discussed is the Battle of the Middle England.

Monongue Helaer in July 1755. And this is the second half of my opening chapter is you've got these two major defeats 10 years apart, Fontaineau at the beginning and Mononguehela at the end. Just to interject, but I'm also conducting this interview, just a few blocks from something called Braddock Road. Oh, well. The memory is alive and well in Northern Virginia.

Yes, yes. Well, yeah, that must be the beginning of Braddock Road then. It is. It is. Yes. That's exactly what it is. The road that ends at Pittsburgh, right? So what's happened?

The spark this ignited the French and Indian War has been who controls a fortification built on the banks of the Monongue Hela that effectively controls the Ohio Valley. And the French captured this with Native American allies. And the British can't tolerate this because it effectively starts to cause significant problems for the colonies, particularly Virginia, but also Pennsylvania. And so they march, send Edward Braddock with a column of infantry, and one of Braddock's A's de Komp is a young George Washington

and off they go and they literally build the road as they go chopping down the forest as they move and the traditional interpretation of all of this is as the as the soldiers moving at a glacial pace towards this the Monongahela River, they are harassed by Native Americans fighting in a regular fashion

as Native Americans will be doing because they don't have the same organization as a European fighting force. And this causes all sorts of concerns for the British, starts to undermine in their confidence and then when they're surprised in an action on the banks of the Mononguehela on the 9th of July 1755 the vanguard of the infantry column is all but wiped out causing huge casualties

Washington is one of the few survivors Braddock himself is killed and the takeaways from this are that the sort of stilted European organisation of the British forces as they had fought in that battle had been the reason for its defeat, for their defeat. And they needed to think about utilising their infantry in more innovative ways, including developing the use of light infantry,

but also light infantry and regular tactics. It's been more recent research which has dispelled the truth of that situation and the reality is much more complex. And if you haven't spoken to him yet, you need to talk to David Preston, whose book on the Monongahela is absolutely fantastic. I'm not particularly interested in the truth. I know that sounds odd for instance or instance.

but I'm interested in what people thought had happened because that's how knowledge is generated and determined. And the perceptions are far more important for developing British thinking than the reality of what occurred. And so you've got one of these examples of a battle that is heavily contested in terms of people's opinions of what had occurred both during it and after. And so you see,

One of the survivors, a left-haring colonel at the time, Thomas Gage, who goes on to become the first commander-in-chief of the British Army during American Revolutionary War, he actually petitions for the creation of the first light infantry regiment in the British Army. It's probably just a gimmick to get himself noticed and get himself promoted and is successful. But there are several other officers among them, particularly William Howe, who comes a little bit later into the Seven Years' War, and actually leads a light infantry regiment up the banks of Quebec, which presages the Battle of Quebec, which defeats the French in North America in 1715, September 1759. but it's it's that spark that starts to see the the the the mainstream introduction of light infantry and irregular tactics into the general order of battle particularly in North America. And sorry, not to belabor the point, but and you spoke to it a little bit, but I just want you to expand for a minute if you would. And then sorry, I cut you off, so off so finish your current point.

But, you know, the difference between light. infantry and heavy infantry, normal infantry, unqualified, infantry without qualifying modifier, is equipment but also tactics. Can you say a bit more? Yeah. So, yeah, so I actually was coming to next was that some of this introduction of light infantry tactics is bottom up. You've got soldiers making adaptations on the ground because if they

don't, they'll die. And so you see them introducing different approaches in order to survive. One of those, I mean, it's really quite basic stuff. They're cutting off the, the end of the musket barrel so that they can use their musket in close terrain. The musket's very long, frequently keeps on hitting trees when you try and fire it, not particularly useful. So they're essentially got shorn off muskets. Another one is cutting the tails off their coat so they don't get caught in bushes, you know, changing their really long shako hats so that they don't keep getting stuck in trees to berets, which many British army officers from Europe see as they call them the slouchers. So it's, it's things like that. But they also introduced more tactical

innovation. So they have, they won't be, they won't be marching in close order like they did into Braddock's battle at the Monongahela, but actually be separated. and use the trees for cover. And this is how the forces that attacked Braddock use the terrain. They hide behind trees and then they use their weapons as sharpshooters and are taking out the officers a pretty close range. And so you've got British soldiers starting to do that. And when a column comes under attack, for example, in various scenarios,

is not a specific scenario, but in general, you get the introduction of a term called tree all, which means literally go and hide behind a tree. And use that tree as cover, and then you can start firing from behind that tree. You've got cover and you can use your weapon with more precision than you would be able to in open terrain. So it's things like that.

And that's the sort of the essence of light infantry really is to get forward, to disrupt an enemy line of battle, use their weapons for more sharpshooter approaches, you know, to really pinpoint individuals rather than have a weight of firepower, which is conventionally how the musket is used when you've got several hundred muskets being fired. Once the likelihood is some lead is going to hit some flesh, but most of it won't. whereas for the light infantry, they're trying to use their weaponry much more consistently. The big problem being, of course, that the muskets terrible and not very accurate. And it's only rather later where you get the introduction of the Baker rifle,

which has a rifle barrel so it spins the bullet and makes it a much more accurate. weapon. You get that introduced in the late 18th century and that actually does start to really demonstrate the value of light infantry. But the wider point we were discussing the conservative versus the innovators is that whilst this is accepted for fighting in the colonies, it is not considered an acceptable approach in Europe. So after the end of the seven years war, William Howe, who has led light infantry regiments to some success, tries to get the light infantry units established in the general order of battle in the British Army. And he actually conducts a simulated battle on Richmond Common to illustrate how light infantry could be used to secure a word,

to take farmhouses to illustrate that actually war isn't just about occupying a large and fairly useless field. Sometimes you need to occupy terrain that's a bit more troubling to capture. And so he uses light input to demonstrate that

in a simulated battle. And there's an increasing acceptance that it needs to be incorporated. But the press have a field day. They see this as a huge embarrassment really. and Punch publishes this cartoon, the original sketch of which is in the Lewis Walpole Library

in Farmington in Connecticut. And it's just, it's in, I've got a print of it in my book, but it's just magnificent. You've got it, the light infantry of sprouted wings, so they're all flying over the field of battle, tense of spirited wings. You've got guns. as in artillery pieces with wings.

And they're all flying over the battlefield. And there's a rotund duke of Cumberland staring up at them, you know, in his dotage. And wondering what the hell is going on. And this sort of demonstrates, actually, is part of a lot of. larger narrative that light infantry is not is not acceptable for European warfare. And so it's been sort of wholesale thrown out. And so the formal, the formal institutional memory of the use of light infantry is almost completely erased. It's a bit like counterinsurgency warfare after Vietnam. It's like, we're not going to do that again. So we're just going to press

delete. And then the American Revolutionary War breaks out. And it turns out you do need light infantry again. But what I found interesting was that the institutional memory didn't really, or the absence of institutional memory didn't really matter. It was the informal knowledge and experience of the offices themselves that would go back to North America and employ the same tactics and ideas. And you see very quickly the introduction of light-in-jew once again in North America, particularly by William Howe at the beginning of the beginning of the war. And then it gradually becoming a much more mainstream element of the British armies throughout that war, obviously, ultimately unsuccessfully, but that's for larger strategic reasons,

which is a completely different element of knowledge, sort of transmission. But for this, it works. And just to finish the point, that experience is once again bidden after the failure of the American Revolutionary War. But it's officers like John Moore, who begins his service during the American Revolutionary War,

Air Coot, who is the person who uttered the word at Wandering Army incident, or the phrase wandering army, who have all of the experience of light infantry warfare in the American Revolutionary War, go on to more senior positions during the French Revolutionary War and introduce it once again. And then you start to see it become more mainstream,

particularly as they're fighting French forces in Europe, who are also using irregular tactics. So the British need to respond in kind. So it's a... It's not a straightforward process of learning. It goes back and four. But eventually the innovators win out. So much of what you say, Hugh, has such powerful echoes to me of today.

You know, the notion that there's an innovation that is sort of objectively valuable where it's developed because that's why it was developed. It's because you needed it or you're going to die. But then dismissed by the broader establishment as theater specific. and a bit beneath us. We're better than that. I mean, I'm thinking of the Department of Defense here in the United States and the war and innovations on the battlefield in Ukraine. Okay, that sort of thing might be useful in those circumstances,

but it's not the kind of war we're going to fight. And anyway, we're better than that. It turns out you take counter-UAS as an very vivid example of just the last six weeks. It turns out actually the way the Ukrainians shoot down drones, we suddenly needed to do a crash course in ourselves in a completely different theater. Despite our total dominance. I mean, there's just a complete American military dominance

over the Iranian armed forces such as they are by any objective measure. And yet, and yet it turned out that that innovation shouldn't have been quite so quickly dismissed as merely of interest in theater. But there's somebody, I mean, the role of the media that you just described is often unhelpful. You know, there's so many, so many obvious echoes.

I want to ask you, is somebody's been thinking about this stuff professionally for years. You know, if you were to draw, I don't hate to be so tried to say draw lessons, but, you know, take your thinking on the 18th century and give us some reflections on the current debates we're having about the role of data, autonomy, all the various sort of swirling debates about the future of war we're having in 2026. What would, if a general officer from the British military, the American military, sat down to read your book. What do you hope they would really take away that would be important to them?

God, that's a good question. The British Army was an informal learning organization in the 18th century. It was in the 19th century. It was in the 20th century, and it is now. I think this goes for Western militaries to some extent, though not completely. I mean, the key example against that is the German military, which is much more formal in its approach to learning. But certainly I think the American military

reflects some aspects of this informal learning style. Where knowledge and experience gets passed along through the networks and relationships that build between men and women. And it's important not to discount that element. I would hope that anyone reading my book would reflect as you have that there's nothing new under the sun in terms of the way in which humans think about and interact with war. A colleague of mine, a retired general,

I used to utter the phrase, war is about people, not stuff. And I think that is a very, remains a very relevant and accurate comment. Even as we see, technological dominance becoming more and more extreme, but it's very much about how humans behave in war and how humans choose to make decisions in war. And if there's a period in time that reflects this one even more precisely than the 18th century, it's the beginning of the First World War and the descent into war in 1914.

team and the huge range of new technologies that are available to those fighting that war, that they have almost no idea how to utilize is one of the reasons why that war becomes so bloody. And then you've got the introduction of aircraft, you've got the introduction of the tank, the developing accuracy and lethality of machine guns. all of those things the people flawed as they are at the time needed to learn how to how to how to use in in war and they did so through a process of trial and error and they did so with many many flaws and many problems and in the first world war that caused untold casualties all of that I think or much of that is the result of a continuous process of the application of experience and knowledge.

It's not something that's sort of been introduced at very, a very short notice and has caused a sudden transformation. I'm not somebody who thinks that war is suddenly transformed by the introduction of a new technology. And it takes many, many years. decades, perhaps centuries for the full weight of understanding of that of that technology to be fully integrated into the way in which war is fought.

And I myself sort of fell into the trap of thinking, you know, I've got a number of students who are Ukrainian students but also students who have had, have had, not themselves Ukrainian, but are in the fighting in Ukraine. And the comments they've made about the, you know, the nature of war or the character of the war on the front line and just how difficult it is to move around, the diffusion of the supply lines because you can no longer have things concentrated in certain areas because drones will take them out.

I think, God, this is, this is the transformation in the character of war, which we haven't seen since the First World War. And I found it deeply alarming. I thought, gosh, this is, maybe this is the moment. Maybe this is the point of which actually the long, continuous story does take a major shift. But as you just said, the application of that, of those lessons in different contexts needs needs to be understood in that wider context. It can't be, you know, it's not possible just to take the Ukrainian experience and plug it in elsewhere. It needs to be understood in a wider context.

So I sort of slightly come back from that position and think actually maybe we've got more of a, more thinking to be done on that than, well, that I have. have so far. But, yeah, to answer your question, I would hope that anyone reading the book would think actually knowledge and experience is as vital in understanding the application of modern technology as the technologies itself. Hugh Davies, author of The Wandering Army, the Campaigns, that Transform the British Way of War. Thank you for this wide-ranging conversation about something that I feel like a lot of people will consider the topic to be rather esoteric. But as I think the last 10 minutes or so indicated, it's actually quite relevant.

And I learned a lot about preparing for this episode and talking to you. So thank you so much for coming on School of War. Thank you very much, Aaron. It's been an absolute pleasure. I really enjoy talking to you.