Produced by the Command Doctrine and Education Centre (CDEC), and hopefully with input from many contributors, this new tactical review illustrates in its own way one aspect of the renewal of military thinking within our Army. It also meets three main requirements.

The first is linked to the growing need to fill a void and to give back visibility to Tactics, both art and science, which has been somewhat neglected in recent decades in favour of the strategic and operative levels of reflection and action. Our operational environment has thus been strongly marked by counter-insurgency operations, which have gradually constituted the normative framework for the use and the limited scope of application of a tactic that is less and less learned and practised in all its complexity.

The second relates to the context of our current commitments and the concomitance of various situations. The nature of operations conducted on national territory, the projection of our forces in the form of expeditionary forces, the foreseeable evolution of the future battlefield as a result of technical developments and the possible return of high-intensity conflicts... and "the fundamentals" for the military is the understanding and practice of tactics, the art of operation nel consisting of combining the action of weapons against the enemy.

The third is based on a simple idea. To learn and know tactics is to understand war through study and practice, and to prepare for it. Because its scope is vast and evolving, tactical thinking is salutary in that it encourages us not to overly confuse operational experience with the knowledge we need to acquire to win tomorrow. In 1918, Foch, in Des principes de la guerre (Principles of Warfare), said no other thing when referring to the Prussians and the French between 1815 and 1870: "The former fought the war without understanding it; the latter understood it without doing it but studied it".

May this quarterly publication, which follows on from the work of the CDEC's newly created chair of general tactics, contribute to the renewal of tactical thinking, to its development fuelled by innovation and military history and to its wider dissemination in our ranks.