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by Michael Shurkin (Author)
The French Way of War distills a century of French strategic thought into a concise, highly usable guide for modern war and statecraft. Drawing on Ferdinand Foch, Raoul Castex, André Beaufre, and their successors, it argues that strategy is not about firepower or technology, but about a duel of wills in which each side struggles to preserve its own freedom of action while constraining the other's. The book uses historical and contemporary cases to show how states win or lose long, often in the realms of politics, psychology, and international opinion.
The opening chapters define strategy as "the art of the dialectic of wills that employ force to resolve their conflict" and introduce the core idea of liberty of action. Strategy is about preserving options for oneself and denying them to the enemy, whether through classic military security measures, tempo and surprise, or what Beaufre called the "external maneuver" propaganda, lawfare, diplomacy, and economic pressure that tie the adversary's hands like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. This leads naturally to the second key theme, initiative, the imperative to act first, act faster, and keep acting, forcing the enemy into a reactive posture.
Subsequent chapters expand these fundamentals into a broader framework of eight "lessons" Liberty of Action, Initiative, Maneuver, Effet majeur, the Primacy of Will, Indirect Strategy, Grand Strategy, and Servitudes. Maneuver is defined as "moving intelligently to create a favorable situation," including diplomatic and informational moves that alter the balance of freedom of action. The effet majeur is defined as the minimum action that seizes or restores the initiative often by dislocating the enemy's plan, not by destroying its forces. The discussion of will and "spirit versus matter" challenges Western faith in technology and attrition, arguing that modern wars were lost because leaders misread the psychological dimension and the limits of what military force alone can achieve.
The book then develops Beaufre's concept of Indirect Strategy and "peace-war," a continuous competition in which states maneuver below the threshold of open war using limited force, proxies, and external maneuvers. Here the author analyzes how weaker actors use time, public opinion, law, and international forums to erode a stronger adversary's will and liberty of action, and how great powers often defeat themselves through self-imposed constraints.
Finally, The French Way of War insists that all of this must be subordinated to a genuine Grand Strategy. War is never just a military problem; it is a total enterprise in which political, economic, diplomatic, informational, and military strategies must be coordinated toward a clearly defined political end state. Castex's notion of Servitudes-constraints imposed by politics, law, public opinion, alliances, and other strategies-explains why militarily "optimal" courses of action are often impossible, and why ignoring these constraints can turn tactical success into strategic defeat. The concluding chapters apply this framework to the ongoing U.S.-Israeli confrontation with Iran, arguing that the absence of clear political objectives, over-reliance on action, and neglect of will, external maneuvers, and Servitudes have produced a war run on hope rather than strategy.
The result is both a primer and a provocation: a compact synthesis of French strategic thought aimed squarely at practitioners, analysts, and serious readers who want to think about today's conflicts with more rigor, historical depth, and intellectual humility.
