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| Europe |
| France's new military |
| 2008-06-19 |
| French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who has just unveiled a strikingly ambitious new plan for a joint European military force and identity, has an interesting sense of timing. He launched his bold proposals for a new EU aircraft carrier task force, along with a common air transport and logistics command and common procurement systems, on June 16. Characteristically, Sarkozy was very generous with other countries' assets. He suggested the German navy contribute frigates and logistics units to an aircraft carrier battle group that will sail under a European flag. The carrier itself, however, would have to come from Britain's Royal Navy, since France's The reason is simple: There is no cash left in the French treasury. He also told Merkel that France probably will have to delay building a planned new nuclear submarine. Sarkozy's explanation to Merkel of his financial squeeze puts a new cast on the grandiose unveiling this week in Paris of the country's new defense strategy, to trim and restructure the French military. The army will lose 10 percent of its troops, some 13,000 men. The air force will lose more than 20 percent, another 13,000 personnel, but 88,000 of the future army of 130,000 are supposed to be available for swift deployment overseas. The navy will also lose 20 percent of its effectives, another 10,000 sailors. The civilian support staff will also lose 18,000 jobs. The idea is to build a leaner and more deployable military, more attuned to fighting terrorism, helping with humanitarian emergencies and U.N. missions and mounting swift expeditionary forces and working with coalitions. Defense Minister Herve Morin, writing in Le Monde this week, said the idea was to make the French more like their British allies. France currently has 60 percent of its troops in support and administrative roles and only 40 percent available for operations -- the reverse of the more agile and leaner British forces, Morin noted. France could not really operate alongside its British and U.S. allies on the same battlefield, and that had to change. So the new defense plan is to try to save money while shrinking and modernizing the military, phasing out many of the 471 military bases in France and in Africa, closing the vast barracks that used to house the country's conscripts and cutting back 150 tanks from its armored divisions. Money will go instead to intelligence satellites and to a new generation of small and agile armored vehicles and cruise missiles and submarines. But by deploying these forces within a European defense structure, with common units like the aircraft carrier task force, France hopes to get far more geopolitical bang for its buck. One aspect of this will be, if the terms are right, to bring France back into NATO's joint military command for the first time since 1966, when President de Gaulle walked out in protest at being refused a say in the deployment and use of U.S. nuclear weapons on French soil. In return for rejoining NATO as a full member, France is insisting on a top-ranking command, preferably a French admiral in charge of the Mediterranean, although the United States would not want its Sixth Fleet under even the most nominal French orders. And neither France nor Italy wants the Mediterranean airspace coming under French command. |
| Posted by:3dc |