André Beaufre

André Beaufre, Adolf Heusinger u. a. (Washington, 1964)

André Beaufre (born January 25, 1902 in Neuilly-sur-Seine , † February 13, 1975 in Belgrade ) was Général d'armée of the French army , one of the most important strategy theorists of the 20th century . He was known for his commitment to an independent French nuclear force and his strategic writings. In addition to a fundamental theory of strategy, he also wrote works on guerrilla tactics and terrorism , which are considered classics in their respective genres.

Life and military background

At the age of 19 André Beaufre entered the military academy École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr in 1921 , where he was taught by Charles de Gaulle , who later became the first president of the Fifth Republic . In 1925/26 Beaufre fought against the Moroccan independence movement Abd el Krims in the Rif War . He then studied at the École supérieure de guerre and the École Libre des Sciences Politiques and was then transferred to the French General Staff . At the beginning of the Second World War he served in the rank of colonel in Algeria and was arrested by the Vichy government in 1941 . After his release in 1942, he continued to serve in the French army until the end of the war. In 1952 he led a NATO study group in the Indochina War to analyze the tactics used there. He had hardly returned from Indochina when he was sent to the Algerian war as a division commander . In 1956 he commanded the French troops in the Suez Crisis to become Chief of the General Staff at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Forces in Europe (SHAPE) of NATO in 1958 . As head of the French delegation to the NATO Standing Group in Washington, he was promoted to Général d'armée in 1960 . In the early 1960s, Beaufre was known in professional circles and interested parts of the public through several books. After initially dealing with strategic questions and problems of nuclear war , from 1970 onwards he also evaluated his rich experience from the wars in which he had participated in Indochina, Algeria and Egypt in specialist books. André Beaufre died in 1975 during a lecture tour through Yugoslavia .

Works

In several publications Beaufre evaluated his personal war experiences. Beside 1940: The Fall of France , The Suez Expedition. Analysis of a lost victory and his memoirs also include his work The Revolutionization of the War Image. New forms of violence . Due to the knowledge and theories formulated therein, he is considered one of the fathers of guerrilla tactics and a fundamental theoretician of terrorism.

The second major branch of his authorship deals with fundamental questions of strategy as they arose in the emerging nuclear age after the Second World War. In addition to his works deterrence and strategy , NATO and Europe , this also includes the Total Art of Warfare in Peace , which is now considered a classic - an introduction to the strategy , which was presented in German translation with a preface by General Hans Speidel one year after its publication .

Theoretical approach and key messages

Based on his own experience and solid knowledge of military history, Beaufre understands war as a general social and national phenomenon. His claim that the defeat of the French Army (1940) was the most significant event of the twentieth century, points in the direction that Hitler's regime would otherwise be dropped immediately and therefore not a conquest of Western Europe, not to attack the Soviet Union , not to Holocaust and probably not to the annexation of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. In searching for the cause of this catastrophic defeat, he does not dwell on the most obvious aspect, the serious military errors, such as the division of armored forces instead of their concentration. He traces deeper causes in social and political factors, the split in French society and the deep cracks in the political landscape, which are expressed in slogans such as Dear Hitler than Blum ! showed among the French elites of the 1930s. He showed himself completely bogged down in the thinking of his time when he demanded small fortified positions to protect against nuclear weapons as shields and for strikes in the wide open spaces very light mobile troops with nuclear artillery for wars like the one in Indochina. From his struggle in Algeria he brought with him the conviction that the borders between the military and society should be abolished because they are unreal in modern warfare. The battlefield has expanded so much that all aspects of civil society, the social order, economy, information system etc. have now become parts of the battlefield. His theory of total strategy, which must not be confused with total war, calls for the bundling of all forces of the state for a coordinated fight against the enemy. In the American-Anglo-Saxon area, this concept is interpreted in such a way that military requirements have the prerogative in all strategic questions and all aspects of civil society have to be coordinated according to these needs. The Vatican examined this document and Beaufre's statements on nuclear deterrence in the fourth session of the Second Vatican Council in 1966 and commented on them in Gaudium et Spes .

Overall, Beaufre, like his British colleague Liddell Hart , who was writing at the same time , was an advocate of the so-called indirect strategy.

Beaufres strategy term

In his introduction to strategy, Beaufre defines strategy as “ the art of the dialectic of the will, which uses power to resolve its conflict. “He admits that this definition appears abstract and general, but points out that strategy must be raised to this level in order to understand its thought mechanisms and the inherent laws. The definition common at the time that strategy was the art of using military power to achieve the goals set by politics seemed too narrow for him. His main points of criticism were that the conventional definition includes the entire art of war, including tactics and logistics, and does not consider the non-military means of power. On the one hand, however, the art of war consists of strategy, tactics and, according to some systematics, as a third component of logistics, which means that strategy must be something different from tactics and logistics. On the other hand, the strategy would have far more resources at its disposal than the purely military ones. Raymond Aron argued against it that at least Clausewitz's concept of strategy never dictated the restriction to military means of power.

In the tradition of Clausewitz, Beaufre emphasizes the value of morality. This is how he defines the goal of the strategy: “To bring about the decision by creating and exploiting a situation that produces such a strong moral effect on the opponent that he accepts the conditions placed on him. "

Finally he formulates five strategic models, from which he develops a subdivision of the strategy into a large number of subordinate terms. In addition to sea and land strategy , he sees other “ specialist strategies ” in the field of economics, diplomacy and all other areas of public life. At the top of this strategic pyramid, he sees what he calls " total strategy ". This term makes more sense to him than Liddell Hart's term “ grand strategy ” or the American term “ national defense ”, which he dismisses as completely meaningless and confusing. But the specialist strategies also formulate a general strategy for their area, which is operationalized in the subordinate area by state secretaries or chiefs of staff in such a way that conception and implementation interlock. He describes this as an " operational strategy " based on the German military term

bibliography

• Total art of war in peace, introduction to strategy . Edited with the Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Policy eV, Berlin 1964 ( Introduction à la stratégie . Paris, 1963)
• Le Drame de 1940 . Paris 1965 ( 1940. The fall of France . London 1967)
• Deterrence and strategy . Edited with the Research Institute of the German Society for Foreign Policy eV, Berlin 1966 ( Dissuasion et stratégie . Paris 1964)
• La revanche de 1945 . Paris 1966
• NATO and Europe . Stuttgart 1967 ( L'OTAN et l'Europe . Paris 1966)
• The Suez Expedition: Analysis of a Lost Victory . Berlin 1968
• Mémoires: 1920, 1940, 1945 . Paris 1969
• Revolutionizing the image of war: new forms of use of force . Stuttgart 1973 ( La guerre révolutionnaire: les formes nouvelles de la guerre . Paris 1972)
• La nature de l'histoire . Paris 1974
• Strategy for tomorrow / Stratégie pour demain . New York: Crane, Russak & Co. 1974 ISBN 0844803103

Individual evidence

1. ↑ SUDOC : bibliographical evidence .
2. ↑ copac: bibliographical evidence .