I go on to talk about how the French finally implemented change. And in the end, this change required modernization across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P) before victory in the Hundred Years War would be secured. It took the French three terrible defeats to finally get the message that change might be needed. There was an institutional arrogance on the part of France’s senior commanders who believed that their force and their approach to warfare would prevail. French knights were slaughtered by the English longbow at Crecy in 1346, Poitiers in 1356, and again at Agincourt in 1415. The French ignored the threat posed by the longbow for more than 65 years before working to counter it. The longbow, it turns out, was not a silver bullet or a cheap way to ensure dominance.
The lesson here is that technological advantage often is fleeting and may not be as powerful as it initially appears on the surface. Joan of Arc - decimated a force of English longbowmen. Indeed, several years later, in a lesser known battle at a place called Patay, French knights with better leadership - St. That we often believe it did is nothing more than mythology, or perhaps good information operations by an Englishman of the name William Shakespeare, who mastered the art of the narrative.
They also did not end the utility, or even the dominance, of the knight on the battlefield. The English were never able to parlay their tactical victory into a war-winning event. Army, as it works through its own efforts to modernize and adapt to the changing character of warfare evident in today’s Operational Environment (OE).Īs I concluded my initial thoughts on Agincourt, I argued that the conventional myth of the battle, which holds that the English won a resounding victory and ended the dominance of the armored mounted knight, was false, namely because the French won the war.
1 I argued that these same lessons, which the French learned the hard way, were relevant to the contemporary U.S. Briefly, these lessons were: 1) the need to master the transitions between competition and conflict 2) the need for better leadership and 3) the need to effectively modernize their force. My article was intended to offer a stark reminder that although the French were indeed defeated in detail, they still won the war, namely because they learned three important lessons and were able to adopt rapid reforms to implement them. military was fast becoming the expensive, exquisite force - akin to the French knights at Agincourt - that is vulnerable to modern equivalents of the English longbow, such as drones or cyber-attacks. In July 2019, I wrote a blog post titled “ The Myth of Agincourt and Lessons on Army Modernization.” This piece challenged the mythology surrounding this seminal battle, as well as a stream of analysis, which held that the U.S. Army “ building the right force, with the right people to prevail over adversaries who have thought long and hard about how to defeat us?” (Please review this post via a non-DoD network in order to access all of the embedded links - Thank you!)] ), today’s post pushes this line of query further, using a number of historical military reforms and last year’s conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh to explore the fundamental question: Is the U.S.
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