This chapter examines the challenges that the second half of the war presented to the British monarchy’s sacralised status. It examines the impact of anti-monarchist revolution in 1916–22 in Ireland and in 1917–18 in Continental Europe upon the British monarchy and the way that courtiers reacted in response to such challenges and successfully re-sacralised the monarchy by associating it with ‘democracy’. It also examines the reasons why the monarchy’s German origins only became an issue relatively late in the war. Overall it finds very limited levels of wartime anti-monarchism in Britain, in contrast to the situation in Ireland.

This chapter examines how the monarchy was used to symbolise war victory in 1918 and how it was also used to culturally ‘honour’ the war bereaved. It looks at how the monarchy engaged with war grief both within royal circles and among the wider population in Britain.

On 4 August 2014, the United Kingdom marked the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War with three major ceremonies – a service at Glasgow Cathedral to commemorate the Commonwealth contribution to the war effort, a vigil at Westminster Abbey and a moving twilight ceremony at St Symphorien Military Cemetery near Mons in Belgium.

This chapter looks at how the monarchy became central to the British commemoration of the First World War and how this provided it with a long-term role into the interwar period that effectively continued to sacralise it. It examines the impact of the monarchy’s First World War role upon the 1936 abdication crisis.

Chapter 3 expands the examination of war’s great theorists and theories to include “small war,” maritime, and airpower theorists like Callwell, Galula, Trinquier, Lawrence, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, Mitchell, Trenchard, and Slessor. This chapter emphasizes the subordinate relationship between subtheories of war and general theory and asserts that in some cases subtheories are the result of inadequacies in general theory. The chapter examines the human, political, and combat aspects of small wars from both strong and weak perspectives. Additionally, the chapter evaluates maritime and airpower subtheories and defines three tasks for domain theorists: characterize the domain in abstract terms, explain how to control it, and then show how control advances the aims of war. Finally, it synthesizes material from Chapters 2 and 3 by evaluating each theorist for balance relative to war’s twenty dialectics.

The Conclusion reiterates the book’s purpose—to more clearly and faithfully reveal war’s truths to help prevent wars, reduce their damaging effects, and win when there is no other choice. War encompasses humanity, politics, and combat, and its dialectic nature reflects humanity’s duality—peaceful and warlike, good and evil. War theory and strategy are most effective when we value both sides of war’s dialectics, and genius often lies in understanding how and when to move from one extreme to another. War has many forms, but all are related in a continuum where assessments of relative capacity influence force viscosity and posture (attack and defense). Predicting war’s future character is critical to strategy, and this is best done by studying history, trends, current circumstances, and theory. Finally, while thorough, objective analysis confirms the impracticality of permanent peace, the potential for peace increases with the full, truthful knowledge of war and its relationship to humanity provided by sound war theory.

Chapter 2 surveys and analyzes the greatest ideas and theorists in war theory and strategy – including the philosophies of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli, Jomini, Clausewitz, Liddell Hart, and Mao. This chapter makes war theory and its recurring themes more accessible by presenting diverse perspectives spanning all eras of military thought from classical through the twentieth century. Each theorist’s background and main ideas are presented, and their strengths and weaknesses are summarized. As history’s preeminent but also most misunderstood war theorist, special attention is given Clausewitz. Principal themes include war’s fluidity, unpredictability, violence, and reciprocity; concentration and momentum; adaptability, intelligence, and relative capacity; military genius; centers of gravity and decisive points; fog, friction, chance, and policy; guerrilla, asymmetric, and nuclear warfare; and war’s moral and physical dimensions.

Chapter 4 introduces the rules and importance of theory, then derives a Unified War Theory (UWT) that leverages insights from earlier chapters to define key aspects and relationships pertaining to politics, strategy, and combat. The chapter also establishes theory’s relevance to strategy, historical analysis, warfighting, and doctrine, then relates politics, power, influence, and ideology to war, including how autocratic and democratic governance reduces but cannot eliminate the potential for conflict. The chapter defines the nature and character of war, outlines the levels of war and strategy, and explains that cause, capacity, and will to fight comprise the “engine of war.” Additional analysis includes war’s fractal nature, warfighting domains, chance, chaos, and momentum. Next, the chapter presents a “fluidic” metaphor and defines force “viscosity,” a property based on directness, acceleration, restriction, cohesion, and concentration that reconciles war’s regular and irregular forms. The chapter offers a “war-viscosity algorithm” that illustrates the dynamics of viscosity, including how and why war’s forms change, and it concludes by examining the UWT’s value and implications vis-à-vis historical analysis, domain theory, terrorism, nuclear weapons, and ethics.