Lieutenant-General Sir Launcelot Edward Kiggell, KCB, KCMG (2 October 1862 – 23 February 1954) was an Irish-born British Army officer who was Chief of the General Staff (CGS) for the British Armies in France under Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig from late 1915 to 1918.

[9] He then served as assistant adjutant-general (AAG) for Harrissmith District, then held the same post in Natal after the end of the war.

[15] He was then promoted to temporary brigadier general[16] in charge of administration at Scottish Command from March to October 1909.

[2][1] J. F. C. Fuller, a student at the Staff College at the time, saw Kiggell as "a highly educated soldier, but a doctrinaire … he possessed knowledge, but little vision … a dyspeptic, gloomy and doleful man".

Kiggell's stress on high-morale infantry attacks cannot be blamed for the catastrophe which befell Henry Rawlinson's Fourth Army on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, as an infantry advance in straight lines was only one of the formations suggested in Rawlinson's Fourth Army Tactical Notes and modern research has shown that it was not widely adopted.

[2] Nigel Cave writes that Haig was highly critical of what he perceived as unsatisfactory performance, even in such senior generals as Rawlinson (in 1915) and the Second Army commander, Sir Herbert Plumer (in 1916), and that it is therefore unlikely that he would have retained Kiggell's services had he not been up to the job.

Cave writes that Kiggell was "a solid effective administrator" and "basically sound and capable" but that "it is questionable whether he should have been allowed to carry on for so long".

[23] Along with a number of other senior officers at the BEF's general headquarters (GHQ) in the winter of 1917–18, including Butler and John Charteris,[24] Kiggell was removed from his position, as a result of political pressure from Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and replaced by Herbert Lawrence.

He was a scapegoat following the failure of Allied forces to achieve a decisive result at Passchendaele and the German counterattack which retook almost all the British gains at Cambrai.

[2] Kiggell worked on the Official History of the Great War from 1920 to 1923, but had to give up the task on health grounds.

[2] In 1924 he was appointed to write the volume of the Official History covering January 1918 to 21 March 1918, the period up until and including the first day of German Michael Offensive.