by ROBERT BECKHUSEN

For an American military struggling to respond to crises around the world, the answer might be just a little less firepower and a little more coup de maître.

At least that’s the RAND Corporation’s idea. A new report from the California think tank analyzes Operation Serval—France’s 2013 intervention in Mali—and argues the United States can learn a lot from how the French fight.

This is also relevant as Army chief Gen. Ray Odierno wants the Army to shift to smaller units more closely tied to the service’s six combatant commands.

The commands divide the world up into six regions. More and more, Army brigades align with particular commands—and learn the appropriate languages and skills to match the region.

That’s a lot different from how the Army has usually done things. Traditionally, units deployed from the U.S. to Asia, Europe or the Middle East pretty much randomly. Brigades were all the same.

The French, by contrast, have long assigned particular units to fight in specific parts of the world—matching soldiers and regions according to language, terrain, equipment and tactics.

So it makes sense for American troops to be more like the French, right?

RAND stops short of saying the U.S. Army should be just like the French Armée de Terre. Instead, the think tank wants to “provoke such a debate” in order to “inform discussions regarding how to fulfill Odierno’s vision.”

France went to war in Mali in January 2013 to expel the Islamic Ansar Dine militant group and the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa. Across the border in Libya, the dictator Muammar Gaddafi was dead. Guns and ammunition poured into Mali from Libya’s civil war, which allowed the militant groups to carve out a fiefdom in the country’s northeast.