Guerrilla Marketing: Print Culture and the Public Remaking of British Military Expertise, 1950–70

In 1956, the astounded students and instructors of the Staff College, Camberley woke up to an anonymous leaflet in the form of a memo dated 1 October 2056. This message from the future was in the form of a military paper on World War III, a permanent state of asymmetrical conflict rooted in the global Cold War. This science fiction fantasy was the brainchild of Frank Kitson, a young officer who believed that his experience in guerrilla warfare in Kenya granted him the expertise to suggest a reordering of British force priorities from nuclear warfare to special forces units for guerrilla conflict. When thwarted by institutional gatekeeping he had turned to guerrilla tactics to get his message across. The memo outlined how “the old guard stamped upon the upstarts [who suggested new tactics] in a frenzy and ground them into paste.” Kitson was not the only junior officer who turned to a fictional genre as a means for recruiting buy-in to a new kind of military expertise.

This paper argues that the late twentieth century, rather than seeing a foreclosing of professional pathways in a new technocratic military, actually saw the development of an alternative public market for military expertise. By appealing to the public through action-packed memoirs in the style of genre fiction, junior officers in the 1950s-1970s found a competing set of arbiters of their skills. The public could crown the new kings of strategy, leaving the military the uncomfortable task of accommodating these upstarts. Once accepted, these newly minted experts became public personalities with political and social capital that altered not only the British way of warfare, but also their way of life.