Is America Becoming France of 1940?

BCF : Decades of emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusion over combat readiness have taken their toll.

When Hitler invaded France in 1940, the conventional wisdom was that the French had the best military in Europe. This was despite Germany’s crushing victory over Poland and several other powers considered to be second rate by most military observers. The disastrous rout of the French army along with its British allies came as a devastating surprise to the free world.

Although there is no consensus about a single factor underlying the French failure, most historians seem to agree that there were several contributing causes. Unfortunately, all of them seem to be present in American society and its military today. As Mark Twain supposedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

The points of intersection between France in 1940 and the United States in the first quarter of this century are disturbing. At the strategic level, France in in the 1930s was as deeply divided between the left and the right as America is today. The extreme Left favored Soviet Communism; the far Right admired what Hitler had done to Germany and Mussolini to Italy — it wanted to take France in a fascist direction.

Most on the left and right were not quite as extreme, but this split drove everything, including military strategy, doctrine, and training. The second strategic driver was the horrific casualty count of World War II, which impacted France much more than Germany, as the latter had started and ended World War I with an advantage in population. Casualty avoidance in war dictated French strategy almost as much as it drives Americans today.

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