Ten Year Rule

The Ten Year Rule was a British government guideline, first adopted in August 1919, that the armed forces should draft their estimates "on the assumption that the British Empire would not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years". The suggestion for the rule came from Winston Churchill, who in 1919 was Secretary of State for War and Air. In selling the policy to Britain in August 1919, Prime Minister David Lloyd George referenced recommendations made by the Duke of Wellington following the end of the Napoleonic Wars: "There is not likely to be great eagerness for war in this generation. I think we might take the lesson of the Napoleonic Wars. As soon as the Napoleonic Wars were over, the greatest soldier we produced in those wars—the Duke of Wellington—advised the Government. He said, "You need fear no foe—at any rate for a generation. Europe has had enough fighting." He might have said, "Russia is stronger, Austria is stronger, Prussia is stronger, and, therefore, you must prepare for some other war." He did not. He had a great Army, which had done glorious things, but he had the courage and the greatness to say, "There is no peril that I can see except the financial peril, the social peril, the industrial peril; reduce; cut down." Lord Castlereagh and all those who had charge of that great war fortunately took his advice, and there was no big war in Europe in which we were engaged until forty years later..." Former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour rejected the proposal but unsuccessfully argued to the Committee of Imperial Defence, which adopted the rule, that "nobody could say that from any one moment war was an impossibility for the next ten years ... we could not rest in a state of unpreparedness on such an assumption by anybody. To suggest that we could be nine and a half years away from preparedness would be a most dangerous suggestion." In 1928 Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, successfully urged the Cabinet to make the rule self-perpetuating, and hence it was in force unless specifically countermanded. In 1931 the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wanted to abolish the Ten Year Rule because he thought it unjustified based on the international situation. This was bitterly opposed by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson who succeeded in keeping the rule.