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Source is Omaha Beach, A Flawed Victory by Adrian R. Lewis

In modern warfare, amphibious doctrine requires the cooperation of air, sea and land forces to accomplish what each operating alone can not. These forces have to work together to develop a joint doctrine in order to filfull their mission and acheive the nation's political objectives.

The British Empire was conquered and maintained through the use of naval power. Based on Britain's geographical circumstances and wide-ranging empire, one may assume that the British were masters of the art of joint amphibious operations. This would be wrong.

Britain's relationship with the continental powers of Europe, its policy of acting as a balancing force among them, prevented the development of any large-scale joint amphibious operation. And because the European powers enjoyed a significant superiority in military technology and doctrine over Third World nations, the conquest and maintenance of empires was possible without developing advanced amphibious doctrine and technology.

The British practice of warfare from the 16th century to World War One was to employ what Basil H. Liddell-Hart called the "indirect grand strategy". This was a limited war, exhaustion strategy. This de-emphasized direct confrontation, concentation, mas and battle and emphasized surprise, mobility, maneuver, peripheral attacks on enemy weaknesses, dispersion, conservation of resources and negotiated settlements.

The British used their naval power to destroy, when possible, the enemy's fleet; attack enemy trade; blockade the enemy's coast and to conduct raids on the enemy's ports, coastal towns and colonies; to seize, when possible, the enemy's colonies; to subsidize allies on the Continent; to wait for attacks on the enemy's economy and peripheral areas to erode its capacity to resist; exploit opportunities through the use of surprise made possible by the superior mobility of the fleet; deploy limited expeditionary forces on the Continent to fight alongside the larger forces of allies; and, finally, to maneuver the enemy into an untenable positon in which the only option was for the enemy to conclude a peace agreement on terms set by Britain and her allies.

British amphibious doctrine was based on the strategy of limited war and was employed mostly against enemy colonial possessions and occasionally against the continent of Europe. This doctrine was incapable of producing decisive results. British landing forces were usually incapable of sustaining themselves and were too small to decisively engage, thus, they were confined to coastal regions, where the Brish Navy could support them and evacuate them when necessary. From the operations of Sir Francis Drake in 1587 the operations of Lord Louis Mountbatten in 1942, the British had amassed a long tradition of amphibious raiding operation against targets of opportunity for limited gains.

Gallipoli put a stop to the British enthusiasm for amphibious operations. The campaign was fought, in the inter-war years, at staff colleges around the world. The general belief was that a daylight amphibious assault against a defended shore was suicide and folly in the face of modern military technology.

With the fall of France and the British evacuation of Europe, they were forced to develop a new amphibious doctrine. The British Inter-Services Training and Development Center (ISTDC) developed a functional doctrine that was used in the North African, Siciy and Salerno landings. The new doctrine called for an approach under the cover of darkness in fast ships carrying landing craft; the landing craft being sent ashore while the ships lay out of sight of land; small-crat smoke and gunfire protection while the beachhead was secured; the landing of a reserve; the capture of a covering position far enought inland to secure the beach and anchorage from enemy fire; the bringing in of ships carrying the main body; and finally the discharge of vehicles and supplies by other craft specially designed to do so directly on to the beaches.

British amphibious doctrine relied on speed, tactical surprise, control of the sea and air in the immediate vincity of the operation, limited commitment against targets of opportunity, short duration of operations, unopposed assaults on terrain that allowed rapid advance inland and interservice cooperation rather than unity of command.

The Dieppe raid revealed the weakness of this doctrine. Unopposed landings were no longer possible with the advent of radar, radio communications,high-speed transporation systems, professional intelligence analysts and airplanes and boats that could monitor large sections of the coast and enemy movements. Tactical surpise became more difficult to achieve and less necessary beacuse the combat power of the landing force was multiplied by technology in the form of battleships, aircraft carriers, close air supprot, landing craft and the sheer magnitude of the forces that an industrialized society could produce. The limited commitment of elite troops for short duration approach could not produce decisive results. It could not produce victory.