Beaufre, Gen André (1902-75). One of France's leading 20th-century military intellectuals, Beaufre had a distinguished career in staff and command appointments before writing his major work. A junior staff officer at French GHQ in 1940, he wrote movingly of the moral collapse of the French high command during the German offensive. In 1945 he was chief of operations of the French First Army, and became military assistant to Gen Jean de Lattre de Tassigny when the latter was appointed C-in-C of French forces in Indochina. After serving in the Algerian independence war in 1955, he commanded the French contingent sent to Suez in 1956. He was DCOS at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in 1956, and French representative at the NATO standing group in Washington in 1960.
Like many French officers of his generation he was marked by the experience of defeat, and in Introduction to Strategy (1963) he sought to find ways in which military power could be used to support policy in the nuclear age. He argued that the West must develop a ‘total’ strategy—political, economic, psychological, and diplomatic as well as military—to counter its run of defeats in Africa, the Middle East, and Indochina. He favoured ‘indirect strategy … the art of making the best use of the limited area of the freedom of action’ left by nuclear weapons. It was ‘total war played in the minor key’, and embodied a series of responses up to and including limited nuclear use. Despite its flaws, not least of them the practical difficulty of co-ordinating such strategy within the western Alliance, Beaufre's work was important in helping define areas of military choice available to policy-makers.
— Richard Holmes
