The Wellington system and Britain's army reserves

The Wellington system envisioned sending a regular field army to the Low Countries to cooperate with Prussian, Hanoverian, and Dutch-Belgian forces. Militia and reserve formations would replace those regulars in coastal and Irish duties, as they had during the Waterloo campaign. Northern Flanders, the Scheldt estuary, and Antwerp remained the focal points because they linked continental operations to the defense of Britain. The Royal Navy, not the army, remained Britain's first line of national and imperial security. Lambert argues that later historians distorted the reserve debate by importing twentieth-century assumptions about mass conscription, continental warfare, and the seniority of the army.