  Phenomenological Lagrangians for physical systems with spontaneously broken
symmetries are reformulated in terms of gauge field theory. Description of the
Dirac $p$-branes in terms of the Yang-Mills-Cartan gauge multiplets interacting
with gravity, is proved to be equivalent to their description as a closed
dynamical system with the symmetry $ISO(1,D-1)$ spontaneously broken to
$ISO(1,p)\times SO(D-p-1)$.
