A clever and highly articulate officer, John Stanier was the first post-Second World War general to become Chief of the General Staff (Head of the Army) without having seen active service in that war or in any of the numerous campaigns that followed. He was perhaps overconscious of this, although some contemporaries in the Royal Armoured Corps were also denied active service experience. Between the Korean War of 1950-53 and the Gulf War of 1990-91, the principal need for armoured units lay in the European theatre, where deterrence against Soviet attack was Nato's prime task, a subject Stanier understood exceedingly well.

John Wilfred Stanier was born in 1925 and educated at Marlborough College. He took a short wartime course at Merton College, Oxford, before being commissioned into the 7th Queen's Own Hussars in 1946. During the immediate aftermath of the war, he served with his regiment in Italy, Germany and briefly in Hong Kong. After graduation from the Staff College, Camberley, in 1957, he began to emerge as a highly competent staff officer and became military assistant to the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

This first experience in Whitehall's corridors of power during a turbulent period when the War Office and the other single-service ministries were being subsumed into the Ministry of Defence under the Mountbatten reforms was to stand him in good stead. It provided him with experience required for handling national defence issues as they became increasingly centred upon Europe and Nato, rather than military involvements outside the Nato area as Britain's withdrawal from empire took its course. His appointment as MBE indicated his success in this assignment.

After attending the Joint Services Staff College as a student and commanding a squadron of tanks in Germany, he returned as an instructor to the Army's Staff College, where he was to become commandant ten years later. He was already identified as a man of ideas with the personality to put them across forcefully in Camberley's continuing debate. He did not have an altogether easy ride, however. An entertaining role in the Staff College pantomime he had played while a student had revealed the thespian aspect of his character; this led envious detractors to accuse him of consistently playing a part to attract attention.

His original regiment had amalgamated with 3rd The King's Own Hussars in 1958 to form the Queen's Own Hussars. Although he had commanded a squadron of this regiment in Germany, he was not chosen to command it. Regarding this as critical set-back in his military career, he decided to leave the Army, even applying — unsuccessfully — for the briefly vacant post of Defence Correspondent of The Times. Then, to the surprise of himself and others, he was selected to command the Royal Scots Greys — Scotland's smart, highly professional only regular armoured regiment. Lacking, as he did, any Scottish affiliation, this posed a challenge. A man of lesser personality might have met with an uncomfortably difficult time, yet he raised the professional standards of the Greys still higher, meanwhile winning their confidence and respect.

After regimental command he went to the Imperial Defence College (now the Royal College of Defence Studies) as a junior member of the directing staff. There were three such appointments, one from each service. Often parodied as mere “bag carriers” for the more senior students, the incumbents shrewdly took advantage of the course to broaden their outlook while making useful contacts. Stanier was in his element, enjoying the cut and thrust of debate and foreign travel.

He was selected to command 20th Armoured Brigade in the Army of the Rhine in 1966 and, having thoroughly refreshed himself on the deterrent strategy of the Nato Central Region during that assignment, returned to London to become the Army Department's director of public relations. Then, as now, this direct interface with the information media and the London press in particular on behalf of the MoD's Army Department was of key importance.

Stanier was media aware and amusing when the occasion demanded. He toured garrisons at home and abroad explaining to all ranks the importance of good relations with the news media, warning his listeners not to treat reporters with disdain while emphasising the need for having the correct facts when speaking to the press and never to bluff if without them.

His style and military grasp demonstrated in this appointment, and consequent high profile in the Army as a whole, undoubtedly contributed to his promotion to command the 1st Armoured Division in the 1st (British) Corps sector of the Nato Central Region. During this period he made a telling contribution to the restructuring of the British Corps brought about by the financial constraints of the 1975-76 Defence Review.

He became the next Commandant of the Staff College at the end of his divisional command in 1975. His energy and ability as a public speaker fitted him well for an institution that requires periodic enlivenment, although some of the less robust students found his challenging humour uncomfortable. He made history by leading a delegation from Camberley invited to visit the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow, the first meeting of its kind between the British and Soviet armies.

Promoted to lieutenant-general in 1978, he returned to the office of the Vice-Chief of the General Staff, this time as the incumbent and as an obvious candidate for the post of Chief of the General Staff and professional head of the Army. He proved a vigorous and innovative vice-chief, instituting adjustments to the structure of Rhine Army formations where trials of the organisation introduced by the Defence Review of 1975-76 had revealed shortcomings. He also visited Rhodesia in 1979 to advise the British Government on the composition of the British Monitoring Force to oversee elections consequent on the termination of the Ian Smith regime that had unilaterally declared independence in 1965.

He was the first to acknowledge that he had no experience of British defence issues outside the Nato area, which still required constant attention, as the Falklands crisis was to demonstrate. This deficiency was corrected in 1981 by his appointment as C-in-C United Kingdom Land Forces, with responsibility for the efficiency of the regular and Territorial Army units at home and for the planning and deployment of forces for operations overseas. In this capacity, he oversaw the provision and dispatch of the army component of the South Atlantic Task Force during the Falklands campaign.

Appointed KCB in 1978 and honorary ADC General to the Queen in 1981, he was advanced to GCB on taking over as Chief of the General Staff from Field Marshal Sir Edwin (later Lord) Bramall in the autumn of 1982. Behind the apparently conventional exterior of a British general officer, Stanier concealed a quick and imaginative mind. It proved a pity that his time as Head of the Army coincided with a period of consolidation after the Falklands rather than innovation, so his abilities as an original thinker were to an extent left unexploited.

In retirement from 1985, he was chairman, 1986-89, of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. He wrote jointly with his friend and political activist Miles Hudson War and the Media (1997) to illustrate the steps they recommended to overcome the mutual wariness between the Armed Services and the information media. He was Constable of the Tower of London, 1990-96, and devoted much of his time to local affairs in Hampshire and to the councils of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and Marlborough College.

He married in 1955 Cicely Constance Lambert. She and their four daughters survive him.

Field Marshal Sir John Stanier, GCB, MBE, Chief of the General Staff, 1982-85, was born on October 6, 1925. He died on November 10, 2007, aged 82