Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war deindustrialization.

Barnett later said: I can safely say there were only two books that I read at Oxford which strongly influenced my subsequent approach – one part of the Special Subject, and the other something which a friend recommended to me.

[citation needed] He was the author of The Desert Generals, a book that attacked the perceived cult of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and assessed the roles of his sacked predecessors as commanders in the North Africa campaign, including Richard O'Connor, who drove the Italians from Cyrenaica in late 1940, and Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (whom he called "The Victor of Alamein"), who forced Rommel to a halt at the First Battle of El Alamein, only to be dismissed by Winston Churchill for his pains.

He pointed out that Montgomery enjoyed massive superiority of men and materiel at the Second Battle of El Alamein, and described him as an "emotional cripple", a description, he noted in subsequent editions, borne out "in rich detail" by the Nigel Hamilton biography.

[citation needed] In several of his works (The Desert Generals, The Swordbearers) Barnett portrayed the British armed forces as hidebound by tradition (e.g. cavalry regiments allegedly reluctant to adopt modern tank tactics) and by technology inferior to that of the Germans.

This position was also attacked by Carver, who observed that during Operation Crusader and during the Battle of Gazala, British technology was a match for, or in some cases, better than that used by the German and Italian armies.

These various chains eventually converged on a common primary cause: a mutation in the values – indeed the very character – of the British governing classes which began in the early nineteenth century.

This mutation supplied the starting-point of my narrative, and thereafter, in Enoch Powell's words in his review, was my 'guiding and interpretative thread through the events of the twenty inter-war years'.

[6] Rab Butler said that The book should be praised for its profound research...It is written in excellent prose and with great historical ability which will be valuable to historians and challenging to any of us.

The development of modern Germany, through the creation of a state dedicated to the pursuit of national efficiency in a ruthlessly Darwinian world, is held up by Barnett as the example which Britain could, and should, have followed.

Britain's tradition of collectivism he interprets as a decadent, "romanticizing humanism, anti-industrial, riddled with illusions, and perpetuated by the public-school system"".

And by internalising the code of honour they did not, as Barnett supposes, make themselves defenceless in a world of chicanery and crime, but endowed themselves with the only real defence that human life can offer – the instinctive trust between strangers, which enables them in whatever dangerous circumstances to act together as a team".

[12] In 1974, Barnett wrote of Britain's economic crisis as a low-wage, low-investment and low-productivity nation:the peculiar structure, history and attitudes of British trades unionism is—and has been for a century—largely, although not wholly, responsible for this dismal cycle.

Yet for all the glib talk by trades union leaders about improving productivity, everyone knows that British industry is fettered by demarcations and other restrictive practices aimed at preserving somebody's "property rights" in a particular task...the necessary switch to a high-wage economy cannot be achieved in isolation, by the process of "free collective bargaining" (ie, extortion of money by menaces or force), but only in step with a parallel switch to high productivity and investment.

It is the conjunction of such a regime, and its manifested wish to dominate others, with armed forces powerful beyond the needs of mere defence that is the engine of the present "armaments race".

The real guilty men of the crisis are the MPs of both parties who, in the past, blocked possible deals with the Argentine with emotional cries of "sell-out" without apparently reckoning the possible cost of defending the Falklands against the value of the islands to the United Kingdom.

Can it now be really argued that a capability to do another Falklands somewhere in the wide oceans is more important to our security of this country than the preservation of Western Europe, our own outer rampart and our greatest market?

[17] In a 1996 interview, Barnett stated his belief that Britain's future lay with a form of federated Europe, including the adoption of the European single currency.

[18] Barnett opposed British participation in the Kosovo War of 1999, arguing that Yugoslavia was "a sovereign state committing no aggression beyond its own borders, [the military action against it] is a breach of the UN Charter and likewise of the North Atlantic Treaty".

He claimed that whereas Nazi Germany was disrupting the balance of power in Europe, Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no threat to the region.

He claims the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were mistaken in that they "opened up long American flanks vulnerable to increasing guerrilla attack: a classic case of strategic overextension" and that Saddam Hussein's regime had no links to Al-Qaeda.

In order to defeat Al-Qaeda, Barnett argues, the United States should "recognise that combating terrorists is essentially a job for special forces like the SAS, for the police or gendarmerie (or troops trained in a gendarmerie role) and, above all, for good intelligence (meaning, at best, spies inside al-Qa'eda cells) – and not a job for heavy-weight hi-tech firepower".

Furthermore, he argued that Lord Hutton's "judgement is so unbalanced in its treatment of the BBC and of Downing Street and the MoD as to be worthless" except as a way for Tony Blair to "escape" from an investigation on "whether or not he did take us to war on a false prospectus".

He possessed no weapons of mass destruction...and he was subject to close Anglo-American surveillance of the "no-fly zone""; thirdly, "Saddam had provided a highly competent ally, if a tacit one, in the so-called "war against global terror"" due to his opposition to Al-Qaeda.

Barnett contrasted Blair to Clement Attlee, and his military withdrawals in India and Palestine, claiming that no British lives were lost in them.

People who think the pre-Thatcher years were a golden age really didn't live through them: just ask anyone who rode on the clapped-out railways or tried to make a telephone call when the Post Office ran the phones.

[34] Barnett's comment that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three" was cited by Noam Chomsky in his essay "A Predator Becomes More Dangerous Once Wounded".