2023-09-13 16:52:44
The cross : France and Germany have launched two large-scale military projects around a future tank and a combat plane. However, these programs have fallen behind schedule and continue to raise debate. How do you explain the current difficulties?
Léo Péria-Peigné: These two projects were launched primarily for political reasons, and neither the military nor the industrialists were particularly interested. Since then, Olaf Scholz has replaced Angela Merkel and the political will is increasingly one-sided, since almost only President Macron still seems as attached to it. German industry considers that it does not need France to make a tank, and we are in the opposite situation in the context of combat aviation of the future, knowing moreover that Dassault and Airbus hate each other. These programs were lame from the start and are becoming more and more laborious.
Why are the military of both countries hostile to it?
L. P.-P. : The two armies have radically opposed strategic cultures and doctrines. France has a very expeditionary vision, focused on being able to deploy in non-European theaters. Conversely, Germany is focusing more than ever on continental defense, the war on the continent and European dynamics.
This is reflected in the choice of material. The French are developing the Griffon and the Jaguar, which are vehicles suitable for asymmetric conflicts, including stabilization operations in hot countries, etc. Meanwhile, the Germans are working on the Puma, which is a tracked armored vehicle larger than a tank, and the Boxer, a wheeled armored vehicle, capable of carrying weapons oriented toward conventional warfare.
Germany recently published its national security strategy, in which there is a lot of talk about the Franco-German couple…
L. P.-P. : In my opinion, these are above all political statements. If France tends to consider that Germany is its first military partner in Europe, the opposite is not true. Its first operational partner outside the United States is the Netherlands, and it seeks to integrate other small countries like Hungary into its military system.
With France, there is no longer much concrete. Look at the state in which the Franco-German brigade finds itself, which no longer coexists. Watch operational cooperation between the two countries’ navies fall into disuse. Only the air forces maintain truly active common training structures. Conversely, you have Dutch brigades integrated organically into the German order of battle. The three German divisions planned for 2035 could be made up of a third of soldiers from the Netherlands. German marines are stationed on Dutch ships…
Berlin is also discussing integrating Hungarian units and building an armor factory in Hungary. The German army is developing as a common base capable of integrating smaller ones into its command and communication system. France is trying to carry out, with delay, a similar project with Belgium and Luxembourg. For the moment, the only “European” army is that of Germany.
How do you explain France’s difficulty in pulling other countries behind it?
L. P.-P. : The French have a defense strategy distinct from that of other Europeans, which is reflected in the choice of our equipment, our employment concepts, our foreign policy. The Germans are preparing for a conventional war in Europe and the defense of the continent with our NATO partners, an approach that the French abandoned at the end of the Cold War in favor of a more expeditionary approach.
France often insists on strategic autonomy, saying that the Americans will not always be there to protect us…
L. P.-P. : France talks about European strategic autonomy, but when the war in Ukraine began, Paris was three hours by plane from a theater of war, and many European states consider that France was not there. -you, not at the level of his speech. The Élysée had an erratic diplomatic attitude which cost us dearly with our allies, in particular by declaring that we should not humiliate Russia.
This attitude has come to contradict French discourse on European autonomy, while the United States is first in terms of military aid to Ukraine, the Germans second, and the French fifteenth, according to the Kiel Institute calculations. Other countries were able to see who was providing security and who was not on the continent. European states therefore compared the American offer via NATO and France’s vague European sovereignty project and they made their choice in the face of the Russian threat. The French want to cover the entire spectrum of defense, but their investment is insufficient to deploy significant capabilities, or simply support their allies, a situation which will not improve with the next military programming law, which continues in this model of “a little bit of everything”.
You underline the French paradoxes, but there are also German paradoxes, which want to push certain European defense flagships and at the same time buy American and German equipment when it comes to anti-missile shields.
L. P.-P. : The Germans were really scared after the invasion of Ukraine, which accelerated a lot of processes: the air shield project dates back to 2014. They therefore moved as quickly as possible by looking for American equipment – which they were already using – and Israeli which completed their own Iris-T system, with which the Franco-Italian Samp-T system would have duplicated.
The Germans of course have their own paradoxes, but which are less discriminating than ours, with regard to other Europeans, particularly in relation to the Atlantic Alliance. For a German officer, joining NATO is an obligatory milestone in a career, while it is seen more as a hindrance in France. German investment in the functioning of the Alliance is therefore incommensurate with ours.
But the Trump presidency reminded us that the Americans would not necessarily always be there. We do not know whether NATO would have resisted a second term.
L. P.-P. : The situation under Donald Trump was very complex, indeed. And there was real concern about the future of the transatlantic link. Now, many American officers during this period conveyed the message to Europeans that the prospect of an American departure from Europe was much more limited than President Trump might have suggested. I remind you in passing that France would be in great difficulty without its ally across the Atlantic.
Our army is totally undersized for a high-intensity conflict. In 2011, after two weeks of bombing in Libya, we no longer had enough ammunition and we had to ask for American help. At each major NATO exercise, the United States provides an enormous proportion of equipment and personnel to make up for our deficiencies, which are also found in other European armies.
The Germans have made a very simple strategy: they assume that the Americans will always be there. They develop a force system that is based on this hypothesis. They may be wrong, but their policy is more coherent in the eyes of other Europeans than the French strategic concept.
#France #Germany #longer #concrete