U.S. Strategists Keep Getting France’s Defeat Wrong |
The United States, according to the New York Times, has a Maginot Line problem. In the first in a series of articles castigating the 21st century U.S. military for allegedly failing to adapt to modern military technology, the editorial board raises the specter of Monsieur Maginot’s infamous namesake fortification.
“It is an ancient and familiar pattern,” the editorial board laments. The French in 1940, ensconced safely—so they thought—behind their elaborate frontier wall, utterly failed, unlike the Germans, to pay attention to the new verities of armored warfare and airpower and paid the penalty in a catastrophic six-week defeat. The image of overconfident security is easy to grasp. The problem is that it has little to do with what really happened in 1940.
The United States, according to the New York Times, has a Maginot Line problem. In the first in a series of articles castigating the 21st century U.S. military for allegedly failing to adapt to modern military technology, the editorial board raises the specter of Monsieur Maginot’s infamous namesake fortification.
“It is an ancient and familiar pattern,” the editorial board laments. The French in 1940, ensconced safely—so they thought—behind their elaborate frontier wall, utterly failed, unlike the Germans, to pay attention to the new verities of armored warfare and airpower and paid the penalty in a catastrophic six-week defeat. The image of overconfident security is easy to grasp. The problem is that it has little to do with what really happened in 1940.
This is hardly the first time that L’Étrange Défaite (“the strange defeat”) of France in 1940, as historian Marc Bloch dubbed it, has been cited in U.S. punditry as emblematic of a profound societal failure to grasp the realities of the present when existential stakes are on the line. The so-called “Maginot mentality” epitomized, so it is routinely said, France’s inability to learn the proper lessons of the 1914-18 conflict. In the words of U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Leah Amerling-Bray, that lesson was “to perceive changes in the conduct of war and to adapt.”
Daniel J. Mahoney writes that the campaign “was a direct result of this failure to adjust to the requirements of warfare in the age of the internal combustion engine.” Sheltering behind a fortress wall “to stop a German attack that never came while failing to anticipate the one that did,” in Thomas Wright’s words, the French ceased to innovate while their enemies developed weapons and doctrine for a new epoch of war.
In the severest interpretations of this argument, France’s military myopia in the 1930s was merely symptomatic of a deeper civilizational trough,........