There is a great challenge in warfare: generals need to plan for the next war, not for the last war. France and the Allies had won the Great War with static defences to prevent the enemy taking ground and by a war of attrition, which eventually led to a breakout and the defeat of Germany. Germany’s position was quite different: having lost the Great War, it was clear that new tactics and innovations would be needed to win the next war if and when it came.
There was a general consensus amongst military planners that some form of innovation would be needed to break the stalemate of the trenches and to go over and through the enemy’s defences. Mechanization was clearly the way forward, as tanks had proved in the Great War, but how these new mobile forces should be used was still being debated. In British circles, the military thinking was led by Captain
