A low point

in strategic thinking

JEAN-PHILIPPE IMMARIGEON

It has become a media cliché: although America is still the military

superpower, it has to be admitted that it has a habit of losing its wars.
This oxymoron doesn’t seem to shock its authors: even a five-year-old
knows that when you lose, you aren’t the strongest. Never mind: de-
feated on the ground, America and its ethereal and managerial concep-
tion of war has nonetheless become the model to which our leaders are
rallying; to the point of sending troops to a pointless battle, of rejoin-
ing an alliance that is coming to the end of its time, and of duplicating
in a White Paper this woolly-minded concept of Transformation whose
total failure needs no further demonstration.

Afghan adventures

You don’t make war, you win it. Can NATO beat the Taliban? No!
That idea has been written off; the word now is that we must avoid
losing. This is what the French President said in Kabul in early 2008,
and repeated three months later at the Bucharest summit: not exactly
inspiring. If Afghanistan falls, we are told, Pakistan will also fall. There
we have a clumsy recycling of the domino theory of the 1960s.
Obviously no Western general is going to repeat Joffre’s witticism
after the Battle of the Marne, and that between allies it is a matter of
passing the hot potato of a failure that was predictable from the very
beginning.1 Meanwhile we have moved on from Taliban raids to a
guerrilla war of the maquis, where the counter-insurgency methods go
1
J.-Ph Immarigeon, ‘La Guerre introuvable’, Défense Nationale, April 2002.

Défense nationale et sécurité collective, August/September 2008

 A low point in strategic thinking

back to the Challe Plan.2 There are already more than 60,000 Euro-
pean and American troops on the ground, plus 10,000 mercenaries and
an Afghan army of 35,000. NATO has a crushing superiority over the
rebellion, both qualitatively and quantitatively. All for nothing. The
strategy is still, nonetheless, to send ever more troops and resources.
The ‘Surge’ is the sole concept of the Americans, unable to progress
beyond McNamara-style accounting. In a confidential memo dated 16
October 2003, the former Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld asked,
‘are we killing more terrorists than the Pakistani madrassas can train?’
Forty years after Vietnam, nothing has changed, and nothing will ever
change in the Pentagon’s way of thinking. A nation whose skirmishes
with the British were a failure, and which owes its independence to the
regiments and the fleet of the King of France, has become definitively
conditioned to the notion that battles are only won by the big battal-
ions.
So, there we are, caught up in a process of escalation where we have
no control over the form or the timetable, to which the Americans re-
fuse to set a terminal date. There has been no definition of what would
constitute victory, and the Europeans are surprised by this. Their sur-
prise is surprising. America is embarked on an eschatological war. The
Afghan war will last until one of the parties is exhausted. With the fol-
lowing difference compared with the war in Indo-China and the 1966
Phnom Penh declaration, that it is no longer inconceivable that this
time American military might could be the first to yield. And us with
it.

The French ‘surge’

The art of war is to preserve one’s freedom, not simply as the ultimate
goal of the exercise but in the initial choices. A war in which you lose
the initiative is a war already lost. ‘The science of war consists mainly of
only ever fighting when you want to fight’, wrote Henry, Duke of Ro-
han in the seventeenth century in Le parfaict capitaine. So we have gone
into this eastern war without knowing why, and from which until re-
cently we had kept our distance. This was the policy that candidate
Sarkozy confirmed that he wished to maintain, between the two polls

2
Editor’s note: a plan by General Maurice Challe to counter the FLN insurgents in the Alge-
rian War.

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Jean-Philippe Immarigeon

of the presidential election: ‘It was undoubtedly useful to have sent

troops inasmuch as the fight was against terrorism; but the long-term
presence of French troops in this part of the world does not seem deci-
sive to me. Even if we have to maintain a presence to prevent Taliban
from returning to power . . . ? I have told you my answer to that.
Moreover, the President of the Republic has taken the decision to repa-
triate our Special Forces and a certain number of other elements. This
is the policy that I shall maintain. But in any case, if you look at world
history, no foreign army has succeeded in a country that was not its
own. Not one, at any time or any place.’3
One year on, and the rhetoric is exactly the opposite. ‘As I speak,
night has fallen on Kabul’, was how Prime Minister François Fillon
opened his speech to Parliament on 8 April 2008, continuing with a
very Third Republic-style description of the civilising mission of our
troops. It was as politely anodyne as the televised spot by a mobile
phone operator, but you don’t base policy on a publicity film-clip, nor
on a boy-scout oath. Sending troops to Afghanistan strongly resembles
the final parachute drop into the Dien Bien Phu bowl. They are rein-
forcements, said the prime minister: it was the right word. We know
what that signifies on the ground, and above all we know how it ends.
From here to the point where our soldiers will give their posts sweet
names like Françoise, Dominique or Éliane-4, as they already did
around Sarajevo, is a small step.

Like the days of the SFIO4

Atlanticism, the religion of our leaders made unhappy by the Iraqi

quarrel, has become the only guideline for a policy that has still not yet
taken its bearings. Concerning America, the line has been laid down,
and the admiration of the Head of State for the paternalist and authori-
tarian nation described by Tocqueville is after all the only real topic
where he is in phase with those French people who are incapable of
abandoning their American dream, as witnessed by their hysterical
Obamania since the beginning of the year.

3
France 2, programme À vous de juger, 26 April 2007.
4
Editor’s note: Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (international workers’ move-
ment); became the Socialist Party in 1969.

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 A low point in strategic thinking

This ideology marks a strong return by those who took part in the
events of 1968, reconverted to neo-conservatism, who have set them-
selves up as the oracles of the twenty-first century and imagine that
they have regained something long lost. An ‘American’ group is at
work in the media and at the dinner tables, and has infiltrated both
ministerial cabinets and the weekly Atlanticist round-table programme
Esprits Libres on France 2, now very trendy. It has made its mea culpa
admissions since Iraq, so it is said. One of its mouthpieces has come
out with a denunciation of the mistake that this war has been: George
W. Bush is not Franklin D. Roosevelt, and 2003 is not 1944.5 Our
‘neocons’, who were saying exactly the opposite five years ago, have
leapt to the rescue of the defeat. For them it is a way of safeguarding
the myth, because, basically, their militaro-sentimentalist fancy has
scarcely changed: America is still the same as on D-Day, and whoever
disputes its status as the providential nation is a visceral anti-American,
the friend of all those who attack the United States.
‘America is a nation at war!’ This victimisation rhetoric that ap-
peared on TV screens on the afternoon of 11 September 2001 suc-
ceeded beyond reasonable measure (a comparison with the Holocaust
was even made by the State Department in early 2008 to justify the
upcoming Guantanamo trials). Repeated relentlessly by the world’s
media, it heads the Pentagon reviews. All our leaders bow before this
shrine, out of mental laziness and because it fits the conceptual frame-
work that they were missing since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unwilling
to eat their words, they are trapped by this sterile and incapacitating
prolegomenon that claims the world changed on the day of the 9/11
attacks. And it is this fable, completely out of phase with reality, that is
taken up in the White Paper, as if, 40 years after May 1968, imagina-
tion had deserted the corridors of power.

Beware!

The basis idea behind the White Paper commission’s findings is that
we should henceforth think in terms of a global defence and national
security concept. This is a stupid idea. It mixes up external aggression
and law enforcement, discards the frontier between what is internal and
what is external and bundles the war into a great carry-all where de-
5
Le Meilleur des Mondes, no. 7, editorial, Denoël, 8 May 2008.

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Jean-Philippe Immarigeon

fence planning lies side by side with the Dati law on life imprisonment.
From the boutiques of the Avenue Montaigne in Paris to the Afghan
hills, it is the same war. The world is one, and the enemy likewise. The
Taliban is just a repeat offending rapist, and might be the neighbour
we greet every morning. Quickly, get the drones flying over the inner
cities! In regression, France seems to have adopted from America its
ontological fear of the ‘Other’, and is calling on the Leviathan state that
removes ‘the bother of thinking and the hardship of living’ as Toc-
queville wrote. It avoids having to answer the only question that mat-
ters: is France at war, and if so, with whom?
And not with what. War is made against individuals, and not
against some fabricated concept. ‘The enemy is the enemy’, insisted the
Free France leader. Behind this ultimate refinement of Gaullist tautol-
ogy there lies a profound truth: without an identified adversary, there is
no war. You cannot base a defence policy on a model in a state of
weightlessness, and affirm that France could have been attacked and
that it should act as though it had been. This is the error of our mana-
gerial style of thinking, built on apriorism and false logic: black and
white are the same thing. This is what Karl Popper called the impossi-
bility of faulting determinist models, or in other words, the art of al-
ways being right. There have been no attacks in France? It’s because we
are already at war over there. There will be, and we will have been right
to act as if they had already occurred. Except that opinion will judge
that it was idiotic to go looking for the Taliban in Kandahar in order to
bring them home. Opinion will be right: it is not because an ostrich
policy is suicidal that you should discard logic and common sense.
I remember at school a lesson on the [Franco-Prussian] War of
1870, where our teacher held forth in geostrategic terms on the balance
of power in Europe, economic competition and the imperialist rivalry
between maritime and continental powers. One of my friends inter-
rupted him and said: ‘Excuse me Sir, but you are forgetting the most
important thing; this war was who against whom, and how did it start?’
The teacher apologised and started again by recounting the essentials.
When he had finished, my friend returned to the attack: ‘and if our
charge at Reichhoffen had succeeded, and if the Prussians had not
pushed Bazaine into Sedan, would all that you have said still be valid?’
Of course not!
If we could give marks to the White Paper, it should be with the
comment: try again! It is comforting to model terrorism, and to invent

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a new crusade: there is such confusion among our experts, incapable of

appreciating the complexity of history, that a precipitate return to the
good/bad image of the Cold War days ‘gives them the illusion of rea-
soning about certainties’.6 Behind their chants, full of complicated
words about the return of the tragedy of history, our intellectuals’
words are old-fashioned. They regard as modern that which is sclerotic
thinking and a recycling of the old tunes of the military-industrial
complex and RAND think-tank strategists.

The return of the finest and cleverest

This disconnection between war and strategy is nothing new: it was

denounced half a century ago when the United States modelled war in
mathematical and statistical terms. It was the reign of the finest and
cleverest, to use the title of a celebrated book. America’s retrenchment
behind strategic models is no more than provision against the fear of a
disconcerting world from which it is trying desperately to hide. ‘Anx-
ious, it is trying to grasp a simplifying form of reasoning and find some
certainties . . . strategic reasoning appears to be intellectually helpful, as
it allows you to substitute the elementary relationship of hostility for
the astonishing complexity of things.’7
The experts comfort themselves, to conceal their setbacks in reality,
by inventing for us a Hollywood-style future where technology will at
last dominate conflict, and cling to the pretext that they will one day be
proved right. They justify this by brandishing new and as yet unidenti-
fied threats, and we shiver to hear them announce that al-Qaeda will
one day have weapons of mass destruction: when that happens they will
be congratulating themselves over the ruins of our cities. If they dream
of the conflicts of the day after tomorrow, it is because they are unable
to win the wars of today. And it is they who condition the future with
their cosmological imaginings.
It is stupefying that on the one hand we recognise the absurdity of a
strategy to impose on the adversary a terrain on which at the same time
we forbid him to go—whilst being astonished that he takes the only
way round it that we have left him—and that on the other hand we
continue to be enraptured by the alleged new methods of conflict, of

6
Léo Hamon, La stratégie contre la guerre (Paris: Grasset, 1966).
7
Ibid.

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Jean-Philippe Immarigeon

which, moreover, we are bound to admit that we don’t know the shape
or the content. As a result our adversaries impose on us their battle, on
their ground. The Taliban will never have satellites, drones or cruise
missiles: however, they have the old AK-47 and the RPG-7. And while
we try to intercept their communications with our listening devices,
they may be using homing pigeons. What is the first thing that a Tali-
ban is going to learn before coming to blow himself up in the Paris
Métro? To speak a few words of French. What is the last thing taught
to troops sent to Afghanistan? Pashto. The excuse of asymmetrical war-
fare is all very well, apart from the fact that Afghans speak to each other
in afghan in Afghanistan, rather than speaking English using Blackber-
ries. But the ‘New Philosophers’ of the ‘New Age of War’ find it more
urgent to pontificate on quantum cryptography and the illusory Magi-
not Line of an all-seeing and utterly secure world.

Storm warning for the Alliance

War is not, and never has been, the same thing for us as for the Ameri-
cans. They have never known the English or Spanish Companies, the
Cossacks, or the Uhlans, even less the panzers in Paris; and whether the
schoolbooks on the other side of the Atlantic like it or not, the two
wars against England (1774 and 1812) didn’t reveal a great appetite on
their part for resistance on the ground, as Tocqueville himself re-
marked. Their wars have always been wars of projection, like the inter-
vention in 1775 of the insurgents in Canada. General Vincent De-
sportes has observed frequently that their understanding of Clausewitz
remains biased by this geographic discontinuity.8 American warfare did
not change on the evening of 11 September 2001; it has always existed
in similar form. But what do we want?
French people are asking questions about the imperious necessity of
returning to the Afghan Fort Apache and of rejoining NATO. It is
pointless to blame, once again, a communication failure: if our gov-
ernments don’t explain anything, it is because they have nothing to say.
Before supporting them, should we not be asking whether the Ameri-
cans themselves know what they are doing and where they are going?
Without mentioning a McCain who claims that victory is just around
the corner, how will we cope next January with an Obama who wants
8
See in particular ‘La guerre probable. Penser autrement’, Economica, 2007, p. 105, note 2.

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 A low point in strategic thinking

to take us into Pakistan and to ‘eliminate’ the Iranian threat, having

escaped a Clinton ready to ‘obliterate’ 60 million Persians and propose
that nuclear guarantees be given to the countries of the region?9 Can
France come to terms with this sort of sorcerer’s apprentice?
We return to NATO with a way of thinking that is not that of the
Americans, and with formats that are not theirs. For American gener-
als, who make no bones about it, we are just cannon-fodder. Incurable
monomaniacs, they operate on a basis of repetition of unchanging sce-
narios. Fascinated by our war in Algeria, they still see Jean Lartéguy’s
Centurions in our Paras and Foreign Legionnaires. The problem: this
type of war that the Americans will never be able to wage, is one that
the French don’t want any more of. In any case, by trimming the sails
of our armed forces and their equipments, the President of the Repub-
lic is taking away the means of doing so, by capitalising once again on
the European peace dividend.

The NATO terminus

Are we going back into NATO to revive it or to torpedo it? If it is a

case of shaking the tree of an organisation locked into the certainties of
the Cold War, of denouncing the hypertrophied staffs and plethora of
committees copied from the American bureaucratic model, or to put an
end to technological optimism, then the reintegration will serve some
purpose. If on the other hand it is a matter of lulling ourselves with the
meaningless phrases beloved of American management, of being
dragged into tribal zones on operations that are catastrophic in both
military and ethical terms, and of losing ourselves in the cult of digitali-
sation, like others did after 1917 in the worship of ‘iron and fire’, then
it won’t be, like then, a matter of just 15 years lost, at a moment when
time is of the essence in a turbulent world.
We are in a situation in which the world can change at any mo-
ment, a moment of uncertainty, which those who know that history
can be overthrown will know how to take advantage of; and whether
the proponents of determinism like it or not.10 A new century is under
way, while we watch the purging of the old one. We must open our

9
MSNBC TV, 21 April 2008.
10
See Jean-Philippe Immarigeon, ‘Un monde qui chavire’, Défense Nationale, July 2004, and
‘The world according to RAND’, Défense nationale et sécurité collective, December 2006.

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minds, forget the old managerial magic potions and put ourselves in a
position to seize the opportunity, even create it. Hiding behind out-
dated concepts and the rigid modelling of mildewed American strategic
thinking is to close the door on the future.

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