Yet another book on the British Army?

With the massive amount of literature and publications on the regiments of the British Army, and on the British Army itself, one may wonder why there is need for another publication. I will try to answer this question in this posting.

While there are many books on the British Army, not many books are concentrating on the lineages of the various regiments and corps in details. As most of the books will be of the regimental history type, they will mostly deal with battles, uniforms and personalities. Also, any lineage information will obviously concentrate on the specific regiment only.

Likewise, more general books on the British Army deal with battles and general history of the army. Lineage information will be confined to basics regarding the complete army.

Hence, we may conclude that the number of books concentrating sec on the lineages of (almost) all the regiments and corps is not very large. In fact, the last major publication dates from 1984 which is the famous "Lineage book of British land forces" by J.B.M. Frederick.

However, more than 20 years later the situation in the world has changed a lot. Following the demise of the Iron Curtain the British Army underwent several serious reorganisations (Options for Change (regular army), Strategic Defence Review (territorials)). This was followed in 2004 by the Future Army Structure which was to streamline the army for the 21st century and the new wars to come.

Furthermore, there are several areas on which the said book could be improved. This being both on contents and on presentation and layout. Also, there are several areas that were left uncovered, and the topic would seriously profit when these are discussed as well. Often this are very obscure and little known units and periods in history, but should not be an argument of course.

From the above it will hopefully be clear why I have started this project and that there are sound arguments for its usefullness.