§ After the main Conference at the Foreign Office, a Military Conference took place at the War Office, and resulted in an agreement on the fundamental principles set out in Papers which had been prepared by the General Staff for consideration by the Delegates. The substance of these Papers (which will be included among the Papers to be published) was a recommendation that, without impairing the complete control of the Government of each Dominion over the military forces raised within it, these forces should be standardised, the formation of units, the arrangements for transport, the patterns of weapons, etc., being as far as possible assimilated to those which have recently been worked out for the British Army. Thus, while the Dominion troops would in each case be raised for the defence of the Dominion concerned, it would be made readily practicable in case of need for that Dominion to mobilise and use them for the defence of the Empire as a whole.
§ The Military Conference, then entrusted to a Sub-Conference, consisting of military experts at headquarters and from the various Dominions, and presided over by Sir W. Nicholson, acting for the first time in the capacity of Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the duty of working out the detailed application of these principles.
§ I may point out here that the creation early this year of an Imperial General Staff, thus brought into active working, is a result of the discussions and resolutions of the Conference of 1907. Complete agreement was reached by the members of the Sub-Conference, and their conclusions were finally approved by the Main Conference and by the Committee of Imperial Defence, which sat for the purpose under the presidency of the Prime Minister. The result is a plan for so organising the forces of the Crown wherever they are that, while preserving the complete autonomy of each Dominion, should the Dominions desire to assist in the defence of the Empire in a real emergency, their forces could be rapidly combined into one homogeneous Imperial Army.