A good staff is a prerequisite of military power. It is, in a sense an army’s ‘brain’. However, the office is relatively recent. In France, Marshal Ségur created an Army Staff Corps in 1783. In 1796, Berthier, Bonaparte’s Chief of Staff, proposed the division of staff duties between four Adjutants General, under his orders. A few years later, in 1800, Paul Thiébault, one of those Adjutants General, published a Staff Officer’s Manual which was translated into Russian, English, German and Spanish, and was considered as the authoritative work for a long time thereafter. The European powers thus borrowed from French theory and practice to create their own staffs. In a spirit of emulation which would lead them to overtake their ‘master’, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Massenbach gradually forged the German Army Staff. Moltke had a clear vision of what lay ahead when he wrote: ‘Our strength will lie in direction, in command, in a word, in the General Staff to which I have devoted my life.’⁽¹⁾ He would indeed demonstrate that a soundly constituted staff had become one of the essential elements of military power. Later on, the Americans, confronted with the great military campaigns of 1917-18, would also draw inspiration from the French model to create their own structure.

It must be admitted that if, nowadays, a staff is still, and more than ever the ‘brain’ of a modern army, in the majority of the member states of the European Union, with the exception of our German (Der Führungsstab der Streitkräfte–Fü S), British (Defence Staff) and Italian partners, the very concept of a staff has become dissipated, even where the title remains. No doubt it retains some meaning, but if it does it is in relation to the need to have available a sufficient number of officers capable of operating jointly with their allied counterparts, destined to participate in multinational headquarters in the preparation and execution of military operations usually described as stabilisation or peacekeeping operations.

Our European partners consider this ‘evaporation’ of the very concept of a national Defence Staff as a logical development related to the transformation of the international context and the means by which differences can be resolved through the use of force. One no longer makes war, but conducts operations, usually as part of a coalition, where military and civil-military action are combined in the name of maintenance of law and order. This ‘evaporation’ is equally justified among our partners by the increasingly interministerial character of crisis management, where the Armed Forces are involved in the process of crisis resolution without their specific character and the particular nature of their function enabling them to occupy a specific place in its overall management. The military are ‘standardising’. Undoubtedly this is the consequence of the ever-increasing impregnation of European strategic thinking by American concepts, and many Europeans adopt the well-worn transatlantic term ‘inter-agency’ to characterise the group of players combined for crisis management purposes. This evolution is in fact the rather desperate reflection of the growing tendency amongst Europeans to renounce the attributes of power and the different ways of projecting it, including through the use of force. Many historical examples illustrate the sad fate which overtakes states that have come to disdain military matters. Venice, once one of the great European powers, saw its people and its leaders steadily develop a philosophy that happiness should take priority over all other ambitions, and where it was reasonable ‘to enjoy the sweet fruits of peace, the real goal to which military institutions and operations should lead’.⁽²⁾ A few decades later la Serenissima fell like a ripe fruit into Napoleon’s hands without the slightest effort to defend itself. It disappeared from history to become a museum.