synarchy movement of empire book ii - Pierre Beaudry's Galactic ...

Furthermore, the First Air Division had also been formed in France on
August 14, 1918, after having played a crucial role in the tank attack of
August 8. The accompanying air cover was made up of 432 Spad planes,
which were the precursors of the Stuka attack bomber. The creator of the
Panzer German Army of the Second World War, Heinz Guderian, who had
been an eye witness to the August disaster, commented to a French Officer
after the war: "I drew my conclusions from the deployment of tanks by your
army in combination with your Air Division."
Shirer drew an appropriate conclusion: "The ranking Generals did not
know what arms were needed because they did not know how the new
weapons were to be employed. They had shut their minds to the possibility
of tanks and planes in future warfare. General Estienne beginning in 1921
and Colonel de Gaulle after 1933 (not to mention a German Colonel, Heinz
Guderian, whose book, {Achtung Panzer} appeared early in the thirties, had
proclaimed as urgently as they could that armor and air units, acting
together, would dominate the battlefield in the next war. The French High
Command with ill-concealed hostility had noted their ideas - and rejected
them." (Shirer, p.180.)
As it is always the case, the ability to make a strategic breakthrough
depends on the ability to solve paradoxes. It was the paradox of the {Assault
Artillery}, which had baffled Marshal Foch and General Weygand, and had
rendered them impotent. On the one hand, General Weygand could at best
concede to the use of tanks as an adjunct to the infantry deployments, as was
done during World War I. On the other hand, the Gaullist idea of mobile
{assault artillery} was a crucial improvement on the Carnot strategic
defense principle. The resolution of the paradox and the discovery implied
that a Tank Corp should constitute an independent unit of military action,
which is capable of operating much faster than infantry, artillery, and
cavalry. The new idea of a paradoxical {assault artillery} made its way into
Germany but not in France. It was precisely this de Gaulle strategy that the
Germans used when they hurled their Panzer divisions into France in 1940.
It was this deliberately synarchist {contrived strategic flaw} that
caused the French military defeat of June 1940. The high Command had
considered the proposition of Estienne and de Gaulle quite extensively, and
decided it was an aberration, which was to be entirely rejected, regardless of
the fact that all intelligence reports indicated that the Germans had begun
working on this same strategy as early as 1933. As for tanks, so it was for
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