Ukraine: measured military support from France

Emmanuel Macron with Volodymyr Zelensky in kyiv, June 16, 2022. © Ludovic MARIN / POOL / AFP

Text by: Franck Alexandre

8 mins

On November 19, in an interview with the

, the Minister for the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, assured that France is “ 

 ” in terms of military aid.

However, a note from Ifri, the French Institute of International Relations, published this Tuesday morning, qualifies this position.

If France, underlines Léo Péria-Peigné, author of the note, has indeed donated advanced systems such as Caesar guns or Crotale anti-aircraft defense systems, French military support for Ukraine raises questions when compared to those from similar nations, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland, says the researcher.

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Léo Péria-Peigné: 

That says that, compared to others, we have fewer means than our partners to contribute directly to the Ukrainian conflict without diminishing our own capacities.

Where others were able to draw on their own long-term stocks, in particular the English and the Poles, France had to take capacities which were in the units.

Does this raise questions about French military stocks

This is what led to the writing of this note: we tried to find out about what existed and why the stocks disappeared.

These are the three parts of the note: an inventory with our partners, what has been happening in France for thirty years on inventory management, and finally recommendations to return to an inventory policy which we can see is essential today.

What was the French policy regarding stocks of war materials

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 number of peacekeeping operations abroad, which make it possible to maintain a high level of activity and limit damage.

But then you have a series of reforms, whether it is the professionalization of the armies which imposes a reduction in format;

you have the 2008 crisis which forced budget cuts;

and finally the application of the RGPP (General review of public policies, editor's note) which imposes maximum savings on all items.

So these three elements have led to a reduction in the means allocated to the forces, without necessarily limiting the ambitions of the forces.

We begin the 21st century with the war against terror, therefore new perspectives of interventions, with for example Afghanistan.

Little by little, operations in Africa are multiplying.

So, at the end of the day, you have an army that must move away from the prospect of a high-intensity conflict to respond to what politics demands: counter-terrorism operations, then Operation Sentinel, which consumes a lot of resources. human and financial for the armies.

Therefore, the army cannot maintain stocks in the event of a high intensity conflict or even prepare for such conflicts.

Which means that today

So have we moved from a logic of stocks to a logic of just-in-time flows

The tense flow is a palliative, a way to compensate for the drop in resources.

The stock being considered as something that takes up space, which requires infrastructure, which requires human and financial resources, so it was necessary to preserve what existed: the active forces, what was employed and employable for the missions at a time T, to the detriment of what was saved for a possible high-intensity war that some considered barely possible in the medium term.

So, it's a priority choice and it's logical: the army didn't have the means to keep everything, so it concentrated on the missions that were asked of it first.

On the other hand

, our allies have kept stocks and made them an object of diplomacy, ceding them to Ukraine.

They didn't make a dead end

I will nevertheless distinguish the Polish and British cases from each other.

The Poles have a common border with Russia, so they have kept a much greater prospect of major conflict than us, especially since 2014 (Russian invasion of Crimea, editor's note).

The British are quite similar to the French, only they have been involved with the Ukrainians since 2014, with a mission of training, supplying equipment which has simply become more widespread.

While France had to start from nothing in this specific case, because it was engaged elsewhere, in Africa and the Middle East, this is a notable difference.

Now, why does Britain manage to donate so much material?

It is also because it is engaged in a process of reducing its ground force.

But in the UK, the relationship to storage is also different.

When a vehicle is no longer used in the English army, as in the German army for that matter, it is still kept for a few years.

We see in particular, in the case of Germany, that vehicles taken out of service in 2016 have been kept 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, once the last AMX 10 was withdrawn from service in 2016, they were apparently all “emptied”.

So, on February 24, we had no vehicles to donate.

At the moment, the withdrawal of the armored forward vehicle, the VAB, which was the workhorse of the

French infantry for decades.

This will represent very large quantities of vehicles, we have to think about what we do with them: do we give them immediately to our African partners, 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 maintain them so that in the event of a conflict, we are able to send these vehicles to a partner in difficulty? .

Knowing that these are also not extremely complex vehicles and that training is quite fast.

we give them immediately to our African partners, 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 maintain them so that in the event of a conflict, we are able to send these vehicles to a partner in difficulty? .

Knowing that these are also not extremely complex vehicles and that training is quite fast.

we give them immediately to our African partners, 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 maintain them so that in the event of a conflict, we are able to send these vehicles to a partner in difficulty? .

Knowing that these are also not extremely complex vehicles and that training is quite fast. 

Has budgetary rigor undermined all the logistics of the French armies

When you look at the list of units that have been disbanded in the last twenty years, you have a lot of logistics units, a lot of train units, a lot of maintenance units, in all three armies.

One of the big airbases that was closed in the 2010s was the Châteaudun base which was the big base where the air force stored all its old airframes.

They were maintained, they were kept in top condition.

This base was very important for air force logistics and yet was closed.

Have external operations used up the remaining potential

There has been wear and tear on some equipment, for example the helicopters.

But beyond that, as these were very specific missions, a very specific type of combat, we had a form of standardization of the army, in the sense that before, you had units that were very specialized.

As the whole army rotated through Africa, you had a skill leveling.

So that is also something that will have to be reviewed, relearned, because these specialties are important during a high intensity conflict.

Regarding donations of equipment to Ukraine, since September, France has gone from 11th to 5th place, there is real progress.

When President Emmanuel Macron decreed that he would send air defense systems to Ukraine, that somewhat restored the balance.

Nevertheless, France still remains behind many others.

The 5th rank for an army which was presented as the best army in Europe, it remains weak.

Above all, the anti-aircraft defense systems which were sent to Ukraine in October were taken from the inventories of the operational army.

So it wasn't inventory.

We took stuff from the army and sent it overseas.

So France has reduced its defense potential.

France could do better.

►Read also: Ukraine: anti-aircraft alerts and water and electricity cuts after Russian strikes

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