The Army of the Future (PDF)

By: Charles De Gaulle

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Synopsis: Charles de Gaulle's book The army of the future is the ground force version of Giulio Douhet's Command of the Air. de Gaulle describes what his vision of what mobile warfare would be in the future. He begins the book with a very interesting terrain analysis explaining why France has always been open to invasion. From there he describes what a division would look like containing two tank brigades, mechanized infantry, self propelled artillery, engineers, air defense, aviation and logistics. He also describes how these mobile divisions would fight. He explains what type of individuals would be needed to fill the ranks of this highly professional mobile army. My opinion that de Gaulle's vision is closer to the Heavy Divisions of the Cold war is based on de Gaulle calling for two Tank Brigades in his division while the German army of WWII had only one Panzer Regiment in their Panzer Divisions. Also the German Army relied heavily on horse transportation for most all of their artillery. A US Tank Division during the Cold War had two Tank and one Mechanized Infantry Brigade, all artillery was self propelled, this organization was more in line with de Gaulle's division than the Panzer Division was. That said, de Gaulle's vision for ground warfare was far more accurate than Douhet's vision for air power was.