A Unity of Thought, Doctrine, and Outlook? An Institutional History of the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defence, 1947-1992

Can Gokcen’s PhD thesis provides a new account of the U.K. Ministry of Defence (MOD). It maps how successive generations of civilian and military leaders in the department thought about strategy and its relationship to organisational matters. It draws on extensive archival material as well as interviews with former senior figures in the MOD. In doing so, this thesis reconstructs key moments of decision-making in the department. Ostensibly, organisational change in the MOD promoted greater unity between the Navy, Army, and Air Force on policy and administration. But as this thesis shows, the institutional development of Defence was intertwined with a more fundamental objective: that of protecting the basis of British strategy. To a significant extent, Britain remained a major military power with global reach, one that exploited advanced defence technology to overcome the enduring problems of limited manpower and resource constraints, because of the various organisational changes that, over a period roughly spanning the Cold War, transformed the MOD into the biggest and arguably most powerful department of the British state.