The Military Fights Back.(Point of View)(French armed forces)(Viewpoint essay)

Byline: Leo Michel; Michel is a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Washington, D.C.

The French might ask why they are sending more officers to NATO while closing bases at home.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged in June that France will "remain a great military power" when he endorsed the wide-ranging reforms contained in the White Book on Defense and National Security, which he had commissioned. The next day a group of general officers, writing anonymously in Le Figaro, condemned the exercise as "amateurish" and "incoherent" and warned that it "cannot mask the downgrading of our military in a more dangerous world." What, mon Dieu, is happening?

The rhetorical volleys are part of transformation a la francaise--the complex, costly and humbling process of modernizing the defense structures, capabilities and international engagements of the only European ally (except, perhaps, the United Kingdom) that aspires to be a global actor able to act independently, if needed, to defend its interests. Few disagree on the threat assessment in the White Book, or on the broad contours of French strategy. Instead the debate, at its core, revolves around a more prosaic issue: money. Sarkozy pledges not to reduce the defense budget--now [euro]37 billion, including pensions, or about 2 percent of GDP. But he cannot afford to increase it before 2012. Far-reaching organizational reforms planned by his Defense minister are intended to free up credits for investment in new capabilities, including expensive programs to upgrade space-based intelligence systems. Yet even when coupled with the projected consolidation of some 450 military bases, which have already provoked protests, the promised savings from such reforms will fall short.

The White Book's plan to cut personnel is drawing particularly heavy fire from the Army. Over the next six to seven years, Sarkozy intends to reduce the Army from 157,000 people (including 26,000 civilians) to 131,000. Navy and Air Force ranks will also be thinned, by 11 percent and 24 percent, respectively. The president's assurance that such cuts will not degrade operational commitments in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Africa and Lebanon has not convinced his generals. Indeed, some privately complained of overstretching and inadequate equipment even before he promised in April to dispatch 700 soldiers to reinforce NATO in increasingly dangerous eastern Afghanistan. In May, a respected retired general, Jean-Claude Thomann, observed ruefully in Le Monde that "while our American and British friends, learning the lessons of operations for which they are paying in blood, step up their defense effort to benefit their land forces, we are preparing to take the opposite course." In their critique in Le Figaro, the anonymous officers fumed: "We are abandoning Europe's military leadership to the ...