by DR HUW J DAVIES

This is the first of several posts running on Defence-in-Depth over the next few weeks arising out of the Military Learning and Innovation Roundtable held at the Joint Services Command and Staff College on Wednesday 17 June 2015. The roundtable explored the various ways in which militaries have learned, adapted, and innovated in times of war and peace, austerity and pressure from the eighteenth century to the present day. You can read more about the aims and objectives, research outputs and future events of the Military Innovation and Learning Research Group at www.militaryinnovation.org

Although branded anti-intellectual by historians, I have argued in previous posts (here, here and here) that this anti-intellectualism was a veneer designed to disguise a significant element of intellectualism within the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British Army. Not until Victorian times, as Britain approached the pinnacle of…