French historian Marc Bloch, who fought in WWI and volunteered for WWII (serving as a logistics officer) identified one of the main problems as slow decision-making: “the metronomes at GHQ were set at too low a rate.” Things happened a lot faster than they were expecting.

A valuable source on this campaign is General Andre Beaufre, who as a young captain served on the French staff between the wars and in 1940. His observation about the general staff’s culture:

I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless plan — but so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about… ”I have the honour to inform you that I have decided… I envisage… I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.