On November 19, the Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, assured in an interview with the JDD that France is “among the top five countries” in terms of military aid. However, a note from Ifri, the French institute for international relations, published this Tuesday morning puts this position into perspective. If France, insists Léo Péria-Peigné, the author of the note, has indeed donated advanced systems such as Caesar cannons or Crotale anti-aircraft systems, French military support to Ukraine raises questions compared to similar nations such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland, says the researcher.
RFI: France ranks fifth among donor countries, what does that say about French efforts?
Leo Peria Peigne: This means that, relative to others, we have fewer resources than our partners to contribute directly to the Ukraine conflict without diminishing our own capabilities. Where others could fall back on their own long-term stocks, especially the English and Poles, France had to take over capacities that were available in the units.
This raises questions about French military stocks ?
That led to the writing of this note: We were trying to find out what existed and why the stocks disappeared. These are the three parts of the note: an inventory with our partners of what has been happening in France for thirty years in terms of inventory management and, finally, recommendations for returning to an inventory policy that we can see today.
What was French policy regarding stockpiles of war material? ?
The logic of the mass army in France ends with the end of the Cold War. You have ten years during which France conducts a series of peacekeeping operations abroad, allowing it to maintain high levels of activity and limit damage. But then there are a number of reforms, be it the professionalization of the armies, which forces a reduction in format; You have the 2008 crisis that forced budget cuts; and finally the application of the RGPP (General Review of Public Policies, ed.), which mandates maximum savings for all items.
These three elements have thus led to a reduction in the resources allocated to the Armed Forces, without necessarily reducing the Armed Forces’ ambitions. We are beginning the 21st century with the war on terror, that is, new perspectives for intervention, for example with Afghanistan. Bit by bit, Operations in Africa that multiply. So you end up with an army that must move away from the prospect of high-intensity conflict to respond to what the policy calls for: counter-terrorist operations, then theOperation Sentinel which consumes a lot of human and financial resources for the armies. Therefore, in the event of a high-intensity conflict, the army cannot hold stocks or even prepare for such conflicts. What matters today, while that prospect is becoming more than likely again, is that the Army is over-specialized in entirely different areas.
►To learn more: Consult the Ifri note on the Institute’s website
We have therefore moved from an inventory logic to a just-in-time flow logic ?
The strained flow is a palliative, a way to offset the decline in resources. Since the inventory is considered as something that takes up space, which requires infrastructure, which requires human and financial resources, it was necessary to preserve what is: the active forces, what was deployed and deployable for the missions at a time T , to the detriment of what was saved for a possible high-intensity war, which some considered almost impossible in the medium term. So it’s a priority choice and it’s logical: the army didn’t have the resources to keep everything, so it first focused on the missions that were asked of it.
On the contrary, our allies held stocks and made them the subject of diplomacy, ceding them to Ukraine. You haven’t hit a dead end ?
I shall nevertheless distinguish the Polish and British cases. The Poles have one common border with Russiathey therefore held especially from 2014 (Russian invasion of Crimea, editor’s note). The British are quite similar to the French, only they have been dealing with the Ukrainians since 2014, with a mission of training, supplying equipment, which just kept spreading. While France had to start from scratch in this particular case because it had commitments elsewhere, in Africa and the Middle East, that’s a notable difference. Well, why does the UK manage to donate so much material? It is also because it is involved in a process of reducing its ground forces. This means that a certain amount of material is made available.
But in the UK, the relationship to storage is different too. When a vehicle is no longer used in the English army, as in the German army by the way, it is kept for a few more years. In the case of Germany in particular, we see that in 2016 decommissioned vehicles were retained and sent to Ukraine. Where – the example is in the note – the AMX 10P (French armored vehicles), which were the predecessors of the VBCI, some were modernized in the 2000s, and yet when the last AMX 10 was withdrawn from service in 2016, they were apparently all “empty”. So on February 24th we had no vehicles to donate. The withdrawal of the VAB armored front carriage, which for decades was the workhorse of the French infantry, is currently being organized. These will be very large numbers of vehicles, we have to think about what we do with them: do we give them to our African partners immediately, do we resell them, do we keep them for parts or do we throw them away? Or do we go back to this practice of keeping 100 or 200 in a hangar, we service them so that in case of conflict we can send those vehicles to a partner in trouble? . Knowing full well that these are not extremely complex vehicles and that the training is quite quick.
Has budgetary discipline undermined the entire logistics of the French armies? ?
If you look at the list of units that have been disbanded in the last twenty years, you have a lot of logistic units, a lot of train units, a lot of maintenance units in all three armies. One of the major air bases that closed in the 2010s was the base at Châteaudun, which was the large base where the Air Force stored all of their old airframes. They have been serviced, they have been kept in top condition. This base was very important for Luftwaffe logistics and yet closed.
Let external companies use up the remaining potential ?
Some equipment, such as the helicopters, are worn out. But beyond that, since these were very specific missions, we had a very specific way of fighting, a form of standardization of the army, in the sense that before there were units that were very specialized. As the whole army rotated through Africa, there was skill leveling. So that’s also something to review and relearn, because these specializations are important during high-intensity conflict.
In terms of donations in kind to Ukraine, France has moved up from 11th to 5th place since September, there is real progress.
When President Emmanuel Macron decreed that he would send air defense systems to Ukraine, it restored the balance. Despite this, France lags behind many others. 5th rank for an army presented as the best army in Europe remains weak. In particular, the air defense systems delivered to Ukraine in October were taken from the stocks of the task force. So it wasn’t an inventory. We took things from the army and sent them overseas. France has thus reduced its defensive potential. France could be better.
►Also read: Ukraine: Anti-Aircraft Alert and Water and Power Outages After Russian Attacks