The period 1904–6 proved to be a fateful one for the CID. The government successfully divorced the Regular Army from its defensive duties and re-orientated it towards operations overseas—the necessary first step to producing a more coherent, complementary approach to imperial defence. Yet despite this change in military policy, the CID failed to become a forum in which the two services could debate and co-operate in the interests of producing a cohesive grand strategy. Political intervention thus merely changed the parameters within which quasi-independent naval and military strategies continued to compete, intersect, and diverge—to the detriment of overall British readiness for war.
