French static doctrine. The second, the Tet Offensive of 1968 in Vietnam, tested the American development of fluid warfare against a doctrine, designed for the special conditions of Vietnam, to move "below the radar" of the industrial warfare system. The third, the Persian Gulf War, tested against the industrial system a new, post-industrial development that accelerated movement to hyperspeed.
In the broadest industrial sense, the French and German armies that faced one another in the spring of 1940 were roughly equally mechanized. Both sides possessed roughly comparable numbers of aircraft and armor, though both were still made up primarily of infantry dependent in the battle zone (i.e., once past friendly railheads) on foot mobility. The Luftwaffe was markedly superior to the French and British air forces in both numbers and quality of aircraft. The potential balance in armor lay in the other direction; altogether the French and British had 3,000 tanks to 2,400 German, and the best French tanks, the "B" and the "Somua," were superior in both numbers and quality to the main front-line German tanks, Marks III and IV (Shepperd, p. 13).
The chief difference between the armies, however, lay in doctrine, particularly with respect to movement. In addition to the armored panzer forces, the Germans had a substantial amount of motorized infantry (though still a minority of its infantry forces). The French had little motorized "cavalry," and had only recently formed three armored division; these last had only a minority of French tanks, and were too recently formed to have developed and practiced an operational doctrine.
The lack was not due to industrial capacity; the resources that could have been put into mobile, motorized forces had instead been put into the Maginot Line, the elaborate, interlinked system of hard points along the German frontier. (Unaccountably, in view of the previous war, the line did not extend al...