United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Plans to reduce the French military by 20% and close many bases were expected to be announced on Tuesday, the Financial Times of London reported.[1] -- The resulting savings would be used to increase spending on technology and intelligence, Ben Hall wrote, including satellite technology, a ballistic missile detection system, long-range radar, France’s own cruise missile, a fleet of six submarines to fire them, and armored personnel carriers for the army. -- "The defense overhaul will also trigger a transformation of France’s military links with its former colonies in Africa, with all 30 or so defense accords open to review and many expected to be scrapped." -- In an article translated below, Le Monde (Paris) reported shortly after Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy presented a commission's white paper Tuesday morning in Paris that the doubling of the intelligence budget was the plan's most innovative feature.[2] -- Laurent Zecchini also called attention to an emphasis on operational capacities, since most cuts are foreseen in support and logistics: at present "60% of French military personnel are devoted to support functions, and 40% to operational forces, a ratio that is exactly the inverse of Great Britain's." -- Le Monde also described plans for France's reentry into NATO's military command, but in such a way that France retains "strategic autonomy," insulating itself from the effects of decisions with which it may disagree. -- Nevertheless, the French left protested the new contours of France's defense posture: "Paul Quilès and Louis Gautier, PS specialists in defense questions, believe that the white paper is, on the whole, 'an operation directed by Nicolas Sarkozy.' . . . '[N]o political solution is sketched to confront what are described as "new threats," which are globalized and presented in a way that dramatizes them. The absence of analysis of the cause of these threats has led the commission to envisage responses that emphasize excessively security and military means.'" -- In an editorial, Le Monde was critical of two "paradoxes": "The first has to do with the means that are mobilized. Even as the necessity of responding to new and multi-faceted threats is emphasized, and while American, Russian, and Chinese great powers are actively reinforcing their military potential, and at a time when everyone recognizes, particularly on the occasion when foreign interventions are carried out, the obsolescence and limits of French forces, the white paper puts them on a severe diet (a reduction in personnel of 54,000, a delay in the program of heavy investment). This risks rendering French strategic ambitions obsolete. -- The second paradox is political. France's reentry, from this point on unconditionally, into NATO's military teams obviously brings to an end the French singularity imposed by General de Gaulle in the 1960s. But despite fine declarations of principle, the white paper alos abandons the ambition carried forward by François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in the 1980s and 1990s of making Europe's defense capacities a major and autonomous player. Is this realism, or renunciation?" ...

PARIS -- France is to reduce its armed forces by almost a fifth and close scores of bases under a defense overhaul that will increase spending on spy satellites, cruise missiles, and transport.

Long-awaited defense legislative proposals -- to be launched on Tuesday by President Nicolas Sarkozy -- will aim to modernize Europe’s second most powerful military, creating slimmer but more deployable forces as part of a 15-year national security strategy that stretches beyond conventional territorial defense to deal with terrorism, missile strikes, and natural disasters.

France will reduce its army to 88,000 deployable troops -- roughly akin to British land forces -- but will increase spending on technology and intelligence. In total some 54,000 jobs across all services are due to go.

The document marks a change of direction in several respects from existing French defense doctrine. It confirms France’s intention fully to rejoin NATO’s integrated military command structure, while maintaining complete control over its nuclear strike capability. “This differentiation no longer has its raison d’être,” said an official who helped draw up the white paper.

In return for rejoining NATO’s military command, France will press ahead with plans to boost the European Union’s role in defense.

Intelligence and anticipation of threats will play a greater role with spending on satellite technology to double to €700m ($1.08bn, £552m) a year. From 2015 France will start to put in place a ballistic missile detection system using infra-red sensors on satellites and long-range radar to be fully operational by 2020. It wants other countries to join in the project.

The white paper also redraws the map of possible French military intervention along an axis of potential trouble-spots running from the North Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, stretching from West Africa to South Asia.

The new policy was drawn up against tight spending restraints. As well as cuts in manpower over seven years, the government will seek to close many of the 470 military installations around the country at the risk of a furious political backlash, including from within Mr. Sarkozy’s own party.

The government will use cost savings to increase spending on procurement from €15.5bn a year to an average of €18bn a year from 2009-2020.

Priorities will include developing France’s own cruise missile, a fleet of six submarines to fire them, and armored personnel carriers for the army.

However, a decision on whether to build a second aircraft carrier at an estimated cost of €2.8bn has been put back until 2011 and some other large procurement programs could also be delayed or scaled down.

Defense spending, which in 2008 amounts to €30bn or 2.3 per cent of gross domestic product, will be frozen in real terms until 2012, and will then rise by 1 percentage point ahead of inflation until 2014.

The defense overhaul will also trigger a transformation of France’s military links with its former colonies in Africa, with all 30 or so defense accords open to review and many expected to be scrapped. Instead of bilateral ties, which have often obliged Paris to intervene militarily on behalf of dubious regimes, France will favor multilateral solutions and intervention alongside European partners.

WHITE PAPER ON DEFENSE FORESEES REDUCED FORMAT FOR MILITARY
By Laurent Zecchini

The white paper on defense and national security whose broad outline Nicolas Sarkozy presented Monday morning, June 17, before some three thousand officers gathered at the porte de Versailles, is organized around five major strategic functions -- information and foresight, prevention, dissuasion, protection, and intervention -- of which the first, with a doubling of the intelligence budget, is the most innovative.

As was expected in military circles, the new format for the military means sharp reductions in personnel, with an overall reduction of 54,000 active personnel (including reductions in the general delegation for weapons procurement and the general secretariat for administration). At the end of this process, which will stretch over six or seven years, the overall size of the military will be brought down to 224,000 from 271,000: the Army will number 130,600 (down 17%), the Air Force 50,000 (down 24%), and the Navy 44,100 (down 11%). Most of these reductions will come from support and logistics.

The government explains that it's a matter of reversing a trend, since 60% of French military personnel are devoted to support functions, and 40% to operational forces, a ratio that is exactly the inverse of Great Britain's. The operational objectives set by the white paper commission, which have been approved by the president, foresee an operational land force of 88,000 men, permitting a long-distance force projection of 30,000 over a six-month period.

To this total are added a unit on alert of 5,000 and a capacaity to mobilize 10,000 on French soil to support civil authorities in the event of a major crisis. The Navy should be able to field an aeronaval group with a complete air group, as well as 18 first-class warships and 6 nuclear attack submarines, in addition to one or two naval groups, in an amphibious capacity or to protect maritime traffic.

The Air Force, for its part, will be have a fleet of 300 combat planes (Rafale and modernized Mirage 2000), making possible a permanent presence on French soil of about 5 squadrons, an ability for 70 planes to reach beyond French borders "to a theater as far away as 4,500-5,000 miles," and an operational unit on alert of about 10 planes.

As for nuclear dissuasion, a theme that was developed at length by the head of state in his Cherbourg speech of Mar. 21, the white paper shows no change: dissuasion is still based on two elements (ballistic and aircraft-based missiles), the first effected by four nuclear submarines equipped to launch warheads.

The white paper emphasizes that France will devote "a major financial effort" to its own defense, and asserts that the defense budget will not be cut. There is the prospect of "exceptional resources" (in particular, giving up land and buildings now in use), and, beginning in 2012, net budget increases of 1% per year, that is, 1% on top of inflation. As a result, by the year 2020 the defense budget is expected to reach 377 billion euros, not counting veterans' pensions.

These funds that will be freed up through reductions in personnel "will be entirely reinvested in improved conditions for personnel as well as equipment, amounting to 15.5 billion euros per year in the period 2003-2008 [sic] and 18 billion euros for the period 2009-2020," the white paper emphasizes.

These figures need to be set in context: not only is the promise of increased funding of 1% on top of inflation uncertain by definition, but in addition the Élysée explains that at the conclusion of the next two legislative reviews of military spending, the defense budget should amount to 2% of GDP, compared to 2.3% at present. Thus an overall reduction will be effected, especially given the fact that according to most experts the true ratio of defense spending does not exceed 1.7% of GDP at present (according to NATO norms).

The priority accorded to intelligence agencies will mean a doubling of the amount presently devoted to military space systems (380 million euros), and by the creation of an interservice space command. Beyond these figures and accounts, the white paper, which acknowledges that the strategic environment has changed completely since 1994 -- the post-Cold War period has been replaced by globalization -- goes no further than listing risks and threats that affect French territory in 2008.

Can this list (terrorists attacks, cyberattacks, the threat of ballistic missiles, pandemics, natural catastrophes, organized crime, etc.) be the equivalent of a global strategic analysis? The white paper defines a strategy of prevention and action oriented toward a "privileged axis" that "extends from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and, in addition includes zones of interest for national security, like West Africa and the Antilles-Guyana region."

Under the rubric "A Renewed Transatlantic Relationship," the white paper draws conclusions from Mr. Sarkozy's statements about the prospect of France's return to the integrated military structure of NATO, the Atlantic Alliance, and the European Union (that is, European security and defense policy), considered as "complementary organizations."

The white paper proposes that discussion of NATO's renovation be guided by three objectives: "reaching a common understanding of the new threats that affect the Alliance's missions; defining the optimal sharing of responsabilities between Americans and Europeans, emphasizing rationalization of planning and command structures." It specifies that the Alliance's 60th-anniversary summit, which will be held at Strasbourg and Kehl in April 2009, "will begin the discussion," or in other words will be the occasion for France's reentry into the integrated military command.

The reentry has conditions, however: French political authorities will keep "an entire freedom of evaluation," which will result from the priority accorded by the white paper to intelligence and to certain defense capabilities that strengthen France's strategic autonomy. France's full participation in NATO will imply "nothing automatic in our country's contribution to NATO interventions" (decisions within the Alliance are made on a consensus basis).

Finally, and this is obviously an essential point, this reentry into the military structure is expected to preserve "France's total nuclear independence, both in terms of capabilities and in terms of strategy." This point indicates that France will not enter NATO's nuclear planning group, a structure that has, it is true, only a very marginal function. This last point concerns the freedom of engagement of French forces: it means that "no French force will be permanently placed during peacetime under NATO command."

PARTI SOCIALISTE DENOUNCES AN "OPERATION DIRECTED BY NICOLAS SARKOZY" The Parti Socialiste has already distanced itself from the white paper's conclusions. Paul Quilès and Louis Gautier, PS specialists in defense questions, believe that the white paper is, on the whole, "an operation directed by Nicolas Sarkozy." "The real decisions," they say, "like France's reentry into NATO, were made at the Élysée, the white paper commission serving in the end only to justify the president's decisions."

The general review of public policy, they add, "by eliminating garrisons and jobs, will de facto shape our new military model in a more decisive manner than the white paper on the future of our armed forces." They emphasize, finally, that "no political solution is sketched to confront what are described as 'new threats,' which are globalized and presented in a way that dramatizes them. The absence of analysis of the cause of these threats has led the commission to envisage responses that excessively emphasize security and military means," they conclude.

--
Translated by Mark K. Jensen
Associate Professor of French
Department of Languages and Literatures
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
Phone: 253-535-7219
Web page: http://www.plu.edu/~jensenmk/
E-mail: jensenmk@plu.edu

The military's obsession is not to be one war late. They don't always succeed, as we have seen in the Ardennes in 1940, in Suez in 1956, or in Iraq in 1991, in the first Gulf War. But they try. Such is, once again, the ambition of the white paper on defense presented on Jun. 17 by the president of the Republic: to define the threats or conflicts that the French armed forces may be called to respond to over the next fifteen years. And, therefore, their priorities.

The diagnosis drawn up has the virtue of being clear. First, the spreading of arms and conflicts and the globalization of threats (terrorism, cyberattacks, etc.) make the world more unstable and Europe more vulnerable. Second, France no longer has the means -- technological, logistical, or political -- to assume its "global vocation": if nuclear dissuasion remains an essential foundation of its strategy, it must from this time forward concentrate its forces on a prioritized axis that reaches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean and passing through the Middle East.

Given this realistically formulated basis, paradoxes remain. The first has to do with the means that are mobilized. Even as the necessity of responding to new and multi-faceted threats is emphasized, and while American, Russian, and Chinese great powers are actively reinforcing their military potential, and at a time when everyone recognizes, particularly on the occasion when foreign interventions are carried out, the obsolescence and limits of French forces, the white paper puts them on a severe diet (a reduction in personnel of 54,000, a delay in the program of heavy investment). This risks rendering French strategic ambitions obsolete.

The second paradox is political. France's reentry, from this point on unconditionally, into NATO's military teams obviously brings to an end the French singularity imposed by General de Gaulle in the 1960s. But despite fine declarations of principle, the white paper also abandons the ambition carried forward by François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac in the 1980s and 1990s of making Europe's defense capacities a major and autonomous player. Is this realism, or renunciation?