7 - The empowered brigade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2011
Summary
Introduction
The appearance of a transnational operational complex is both a notable and novel development for Europe's armed forces. This new network of military expertise is likely to be profoundly significant for Europe's military capabilities in the future. Yet operational headquarters in themselves serve only a co-ordinating and directing function. However sophisticated their plans and however brilliant their commanders and staff, they require tactical forces to prosecute their campaigns. Ardant Du Picq noted the priority in his famous treatise on combat in the nineteenth century:
Is it the good qualities of staffs or that of combatants that makes the strength of armies? If you want good fighting men, do everything to excite their ambition, to spare them, so that people of intelligence and with a future will not despise the line but will elect to serve in it. It is the line that gives you your high command, the line only, and very rarely the staff.
(Du Picq 2006: 178)European military capability and effectiveness are, therefore, not solely determined by operational level developments. Operational developments are a necessary but not sufficient dimension of military reform. The success of Europe's military operations relies on the troops actually conducting operations in theatres from the Balkans to Afghanistan. Transformation at the ‘tactical’ level among those forces that actually engage with hostile and friendly populations is indispensable. The development of these military forces is central to any account of European military development.
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- The Transformation of Europe's Armed ForcesFrom the Rhine to Afghanistan, pp. 149 - 177Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011