The great obstacle in the way of a
reform of this kind, as a rule, arises from the fact that the decision
rests to a large extent in the hands of comparatively old officers,
who do not always quite realize that they are past the age for work in
the field. That is not so much the case now, so that it seems to be
the right time to act.

The position of the General Staff within the War Office appears to be
pretty well assured now. But it also appeared to be pretty well
assured before the war; and yet there were those incidents of the
non-existence of the high-explosive shell for our field artillery
which nearly all foreign field artilleries possessed, and of Colonel
Swinton's Tank projects being dealt with by a technical branch and the
General Staff never hearing of it, which have been mentioned in this
volume. The military technicalist, be he an expert in ballistics or in
explosives or in metallurgy or in electrical communications or in any
other form of scientific knowledge, is a very valuable member of the
martial community. But he is a little inclined to get into a groove.
He stood in some need of being stirred up from outside during the
Great War, and he must learn that he is subordinate to the General
Staff.

The old project of instituting a Ministry of Defence has cropped up
again, very largely owing to the importance that aeronautics have
assumed in war and to the anomalous position of affairs which the
creation of an Air Ministry has brought about. Could aviation in its
various forms be left entirely out of consideration in connection with
defence problems, no case whatever could be put forward for setting up
such a central Department of State. The relations between the sea
service and the land service are on a totally different basis now from
what they were when Lord Randolph Churchill, thirty years ago,
proposed the establishment of a Ministry which would link together the
Admiralty and the War Office, each of which was under his plan to be
controlled by a professional head. It was in many respects an
attractive scheme in those days. The departments that were
respectively administering the Royal Navy and the Army were not then
in close touch, as they are now; they badly required association in
some form or other. But it has been found possible to secure the
needed collaboration and concert between them without resorting to
heroic measures such as Lord Randolph contemplated. The sea service
and the land servi