Failing to Prepare for the Great War? The Absence of Grand Strategy in British War Planning before 1914

Abstract

It is a commonplace that the Royal Navy entered the Great War intending to strangle the German economy through a strategy of blockade. This was not so. Prior to 1912 blockade was mainly seen as a means of attaining operational intelligence; economic warfare was secondary. For legal reasons blockade had to be abandoned in 1912. Thereafter, only contraband control remained as a means of waging economic warfare, and this was seen purely as a way of luring the Germans to battle. In 1914 the Royal Navy had no grand strategy, a fact that explains its hesitant performance in the war.