Ferdinand Foch and the Applicatory Method
The practice at the heart of 'The Principles of War'
All teaching is vain if it stops at ideas, words, and theories before arriving at application.
Ferdinand Foch *
In 1903, when serving as a professor at the French war college (École Supérieure de Guerre), Ferdinand Foch published a lecture that laid out his philosophy of professional military education. In this essay, which served as the first chapter of a longer work, Lieutenant Colonel Foch argued that the best way to teach the higher arts of war used the same combination of military history and decision games that the Prussian soldiers had employed for nearly a century. In making this argument, Foch compared this foreign approach to professional military education with the traditional French methods of military schooling, which rested on an attempt to make an exact science of war, with firm rules to cover every eventuality.†
For Foch, the best proof of the superiority of Prussian military education could be found in the great catastrophe of 1870, when the armies of Prussia and her allies inflicted a series of humiliating defeats on the land forces of France. In particular, he attributed many of the failures of French generalship to the absence of a program for the systematic cultivation of military judgement.
Trained to think entirely in terms of precise calculation, Foch argued, French generals could only engage intangible factors in an extreme fashion. That is, they either placed too much value upon things like morale and motivation, or dismissed them entirely. At the same time, Foch added, the senior leaders of the French Army fell prey to the presumption that the ability of a leader to make sound decisions in the face of the enemy was either an inborn talent or a skill that could only be acquired on the battlefield itself. ‡
Notes
*Ferdinand Foch Des Principes de la Guerre [The Principles of War] (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1903) page 9
†Des Principes de la Guerre pages 3-4
‡Des Principes de la Guerre pages 4-5
Readers looking for a translation of Des Principes de la Guerre will find two: one by Jacques de Morinni and another by Hillaire Belloc. (Major de Morinni served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. Mr. Belloc coined the phrase: ‘Whatever happens we have got, the Maxim Gun, and they have not.’)
Good thing Ferdinand Foch wrote all of that after Marshal MacMahon had retired (“I shall remove from my promotion list any officer whose name I have seen on the cover of a book.”)!