Fighting raged 1,300 km from France. The Russian attack on Ukraine, launched in February, caused an electric shock within NATO. For the past three months, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s western allies, including France, have been delivering numerous arms and equipment to Kyiv. However, no one sends troops on the ground for fear that the conflict with Vladimir Putin will turn head-on.
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If France were to enter a “high-intensity” war head-on, it could count on the support of its military allies and, as a last resort, on nuclear deterrence. Without being “the most likely,” “this extreme hypothesis can no longer be ruled out,” warned a National Assembly report on preparation for high intensity, released a week before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. France must prepare for all scenarios. The experts interviewed by franceinfo agree on this. These defense specialists have dissected what the conflict in Ukraine teaches us about our armies.
Insufficient “mass” in high-intensity conflicts
Tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters… The war in Ukraine devours heavy equipment by the hundreds. Moscow has lost more than 670 tanks, around 40 helicopters and nearly 120 planes to date, according to the specialized blog Oryx (in English), which lists Russian vehicles destroyed, abandoned or captured by Ukrainian forces.
France doesn’t have nearly as much material, according to a report by the French Institute for International Relations (Ifri) devoted to “mass in the French armies”. Between 1991 and 2021, the number of tanks was divided by 6 (222 tanks vs. 1,349 20 years ago), combat aircraft by 2.7 (254 vs. 686). Military personnel are also two times fewer (203,000 versus 453,000) and reservists ten times fewer (41,000 versus 420,000).
The parliamentary report released in February also points to a possible problem with stockpiles of certain ammunition that have a lifespan of ten years. For example, to replenish a stock of rockets, up to three years sometimes elapsed between order and delivery.
Peace production, hard to ramp up
“France today produces to the rhythm of peace, guaranteed by nuclear weapons,” notes Léo Péria-Peigné, researcher at Ifri, armaments specialist. In the event of a high-intensity war, neither supplies nor production rates would suffice. For example, “the 150 Rafale planes would risk disappearing in a week or two” if involved in such a conflict.
If France were to mass produce in the face of an attack, it would take several months or years, depending on the model. “Dassault relies on more than 200 subcontractors, some of whom only manufacture certain parts that they are the only ones to produce,” explains Léo Péria-Peigné. Not to mention the weapons that are produced in collaboration with other European countries, like the EC665 Tiger helicopter, or those that the country no longer produces, like infantry weapons bought abroad.
Something that will remind you in passing that money is also the sinews of war. The French defense budget for 2022 excluding pensions is 40.9 billion euros, according to the Defense Ministry, 8.5 billion more than in 2017. The military programming law, promulgated in 2018 by Emmanuel Macron, has set the target of increasing the defense budget to 2% of GDP by 2025 A target that the World Bank says will be surpassed by 2020 but remains well below spending by Russia, which spent 4.3% of its gross domestic product on its defense in 2020, Ukraine (4.1%) and the United States (3.7%). ).
“In order to strengthen France’s armaments capacity, to recruit and keep our troops, we need more budget”, defends Patricia Mirallès, LREM deputy for Hérault and co-rapporteur of the mission dedicated to the National Assembly. “The best way to avoid war is to prepare for it, says the chosen one. Even if we didn’t go to war alone.”
An army formed by and for asymmetric conflicts
If the French armies appear ill-equipped for an interstate conflict, it is because the geopolitical situation has changed significantly since the early 1990s: “Before the fall of the Soviet empire, during the Cold War, France was still preparing for the possibility of a high-intensity, symmetrical interstate struggle,” recalls Edouard Jolly, researcher in the theory of armed conflict and philosophy of war at the Institute for Strategic Research at the Military School (Irsem).
In the 1990s, conscription was abolished and army budgets fell. “Since then, France has participated in external, asymmetric operations. Barkhans in the Sahel, Sangaris in the Central African Republic, Pamirs in Afghanistan… These anti-insurgency armed conflicts have shaped our military tool.” These operations required less heavy resources than a conflict between states. They have also enabled France to increase its logistical capacity.
Abandoned tanks due to lack of fuel, expired rations… From the beginning of the conflict, signs of a certain disorganization of the Russian army began to be felt in the international community. Most importantly, these blunders gave Ukraine the ability to resist a numerically superior army. “Logistics convoys are particularly vulnerable when the conflicts are long-distance,” explains Angélique Palle, researcher at Irsem, specialist in energy and the environment. She recalls that in Iraq, “the United States lost nearly 3,000 personnel to logistical convoys.” France is “pretty good when it comes to logistical supply issues, and the army has trained a lot in the Sahel zone,” the researcher notes.
An established cyber defense
Land, air, sea, the war in Ukraine is omnipresent. Less visible, it is also present on the networks. “Even before 2014, cyber weapons were used by Russia to attack banks, media, infrastructure, to interfere in elections,” analyzes Arthur Laudrain, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford and an expert in cybersecurity. “Since the beginning of the conflict, these cyber attacks have had a significant impact on populations and their ability to obtain information, access government services and even get light.”
In total, around thirty Russian cyberattack campaigns were documented by the CyberPeace Institute and interviewed by Radio France’s investigative unit. On the very first day of the conflict, Thursday, February 24, the American ViaSat satellite network, widely used by the Ukrainian army, was attacked. The impact extended beyond Ukraine’s borders as 9,000 people in France were left without internet access.
Aware of the risk since attempts at Russian interference in the 2017 presidential election, France is preparing. His teams also won first place in the 30-nation international cyber defense exercise Locked Shields in 2019. Tricolor benefits include incentives for startups to stay in the territory “for 5-6 years” and “a well-established level of public-private collaboration, which is not the case everywhere,” argues Arthur Laudrain. “Many companies that could become the target of a cyber conflict scenario maintain privileged relations with the state, such as EDF, GDF, SNCF…”
Long-term considerations
War also involves the control of information. Vladimir Putin could well censor the press and intensify propaganda on his territory, “the Ukrainians managed to impose their narrative on the Russians, who were sort of masters at it,” General Thierry Burkhard told AFP. The researcher Samuel Longuet confirms: “At the beginning of the invasion, it was expected that pro-Russian trolls would drown the social networks in the Kremlin narrative.” But with his off-road communication and his interventions in front of numerous parliaments, Volodymyr Zelensky knew how to occupy the media space.
In France, “thinking about information warfare has already begun,” recalls Samuel Longuet. In late April, the French army released drone video to counter an attempt to manipulate Russian Wagner Group mercenaries in Mali.
In this information war against Moscow, Ukraine is massively using its drones, which capture images of the fighting. They are also used to confront a large air force by locating the targets’ day to attack them at night. Or by bombing “Russian anti-aircraft batteries and fuel convoys,” explains Samuel Longuet, a postdoctoral fellow in international relations at the Free University of Brussels. In a note published in April, the Center for Strategic Aerospace Studies (CESA) is observing precisely these multiple uses of drones that France could draw inspiration from.
Soon the energy issues that are affecting the world will also appear in the army. At high temperatures, a Leclerc tank consumes around 300 liters per 100 km. “However, fossil resources are becoming scarce,” Angélique Palle recalls. The armies are therefore faced with new trade-offs: diversifying energies but being the first to use only renewable energies could mean giving up an operational advantage to opponents. “A solar-powered tank will inevitably be less powerful, slower, and less armored than an oil-powered tank.”