The political debate differed from the calculations made inside the defense establishment. Many MPs and peers with Western Front experience remained strongly Eurocentric and treated imperial problems as though they involved European distances. Army and Royal Air Force planners instead assigned the Far East primarily to the Navy because their services could not operate across the required distances. Parliamentary arguments about cost could therefore miss the geographic assumptions embedded in service planning.
Notable Point · 1:03:12-1:03:57
European distances distorted Britain's Far East debate
Many parliamentarians reasoned in European distances, while the Army and RAF treated the Far East as a naval problem because they could not project force across it.