Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Through the 1920s, Churchill insisted that the “Ten-Year Rule” he had drawn up in 1919 as Secretary of State for War and Air be applied. Each year, the Cabinet would gaze out a decade. If no war loomed, rearmament would be put off another year and disarmament by attrition would proceed. In 1928, the Ten-Year Rule was still being pressed on Baldwin’s Cabinet by Chancellor Churchill. “In the ten years to 1932, the defence budget was cut by more than a third—at a time when Italian and French military spending rose by, respectively, 60 and 55 per cent,” writes Niall Ferguson.36 “By the early 1930s,” adds Paul Johnson, “Britain was a weaker naval power in relative terms than at any time since the darkest days of Charles II.”