Extracts from the closing address by General Bruno Cuche, Chief of French Army Staff, at the seminar ‘A farewell to arms, anticipating and resolving crises’ held by the CDEF (Forces Employment Doctrine Centre) and the CEIS (European Company for Strategic Intelligence) on 19 October 2006 at the École Militaire, Paris.
A Farewell to Arms: Crisis Resolution I
Modern warfare, asymmetric, is no longer the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means. It is both political and military from the start. It keeps this ambivalence, this duality throughout, until the return to normality.
Let’s not leap to false conclusions: it is not a question of the ‘militarisation’ of the civilian world, nor is it a ‘civilianisation’ of the military world. I mean by that simply that the complexity of today’s conflicts can’t be summed up with simplistic, unilateral solutions, whether exclusively military or exclusively civilian.
This complexity can be overcome by a global approach to problems, and with synergy between all the players. This is the French approach to crisis management, where, to quote General de Gaulle, ‘the soldier and the politician go hand-in-hand’.
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