Greenwich challenges short-term defence planning

Cold War planning could assume that a future war would become nuclear and end so quickly that conventional reserves had little purpose. Later policy also expected limited peacekeeping operations to produce only small numbers of casualties. Greenwich embodies the opposite approach because Queen Mary commissioned a hospital that would serve sailors from wars not yet fought and did not expect to see the completed institution herself. Counterinsurgency campaigns and pressure on rehabilitation facilities such as Headley Court exposed the danger of planning only for the most convenient casualty forecast. The comparison makes care for veterans, reserve capacity, and defence infrastructure parts of the same long-term readiness problem.