The British Army, information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs Hall, BH http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2018.1504210 Title The British Army, information management and the First World War revolution in military affairs Authors Hall, BH Type Article URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/47962/ Published Date 2018 USIR is a digital collection of the research output of the University of Salford. Where copyright permits, full text material held in the repository is made freely available online and can be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Please check the manuscript for any further copyright restrictions. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at:
[email protected]. The British Army, Information Management and the First World War Revolution in Military Affairs ABSTRACT Information Management (IM) – the systematic ordering, processing and channelling of information within organisations – forms a critical component of modern military command and control systems. As a subject of scholarly enquiry, however, the history of military IM has been relatively poorly served. Employing new and under-utilised archival sources, this article takes the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of the First World War as its case study and assesses the extent to which its IM system contributed to the emergence of the modern battlefield in 1918. It argues that the demands of fighting a modern war resulted in a general, but not universal, improvement in the BEF’s IM techniques, which in turn laid the groundwork, albeit in embryonic form, for the IM systems of modern armies.