Exportations françaises d’armement : net rebond attendu en 2021

On the same subject

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  June 22, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land

  The French Army wants to toughen up, and here’s its plan to get there

  By: Christina Mackenzie PARIS — France's Army needs to toughen up, according to its chief of staff, and he has the strategic plan to do it by 2030. Gen. Thierry Burkhard, a paratrooper in the Foreign Legion and former commander of its 13th Demi-Brigade and later of the Combined Operations Center, unveiled the 20-page document on Wednesday. The document was prepared by a tight-knit group of senior officers, who worked on it from August to October last year. It was then discussed by senior Army cadres, and by January it was ready. However, the coronavirus pandemic delayed its publication. Burkhard said implementing the plan is critical because a “recurrence of a major conflict is now a credible hypothesis.” He added that the cycle of asymmetrical warfare is coming to a close and that a return to symmetrical, state-on-state conflict is likely. But the document also warns that “there are new means of using force, unforeseeable and more insidious, based on intimidation and manipulation, in a new type of warfare, undetectable and disclaimed, to obtain undeniable strategic gains by imposing a fait accompli.” One of France's concerns is that China's expansion in the Pacific will endanger the European country's territories there, such as New Caledonia and French Polynesia. French armed forces in the area must be able to riposte vigorously if necessary, Burkhard said. To “acquire operational superiority,” the French Army must improve its capabilities in the electromagnetic environment, space, cyberspace and information technology, the report said. It also stressed the importance of “strategic industrial partnerships within Europe,” specifically mentioning the CaMo (Capacité Motorisé, or motorized capacity) program, which will see Belgium receive 382 multirole Griffon armored vehicles as well as 60 reconnaissance and combat Jaguar armored vehicles identical and thus compatible with the French ones. The report also highlighted the importance of the Franco-German Main Ground Combat System — a joint effort to develop a main battle tank that will replace Germany's Leopard 2 and France's Leclerc by 2035. There are 12 major projects meant to make the 114,000 French soldiers (of whom 77,000 are ground troops) better prepared for the future of war as described in the report. These include setting up a new technical school to give noncommissioned officers the stronger technical education they'll need to use the materiel being delivered under the $12 billion Scorpion modernization program. Burkhard also wants to reorganize the management of military vehicles, handing responsibility back to the regiments so they can independently prepare for operations. He also wants training to be more realistic and to involve new technology. Other projects involve improving joint and allied interoperability as well as making better use of the reserve force, which currently stands at 24,000 men and women. According to Burkhard, these reservists should be given more autonomy and be better spread out over the territory, and their contracts should be better adapted to their very different life styles based on full-time profession, academic status and geographic location. He also said the Army should have a role in educating French youth on the importance of defense and in developing the universal national service, which will become obligatory from 2024 for French individuals born in 2008. Burkhard also wants to plan a division-level exercise to prepare for air, ground and sea maneuvers. And lastly, he wants to get the job done without having to cut through a mound of red tape. Things in the Army should be simpler, the report read, “so that at local level things are clear and pragmatic.” https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/06/19/the-french-army-wants-to-toughen-up-and-heres-its-plan-to-get-there/

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  October 10, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

  OpenAI Blocks 20 Global Malicious Campaigns Using AI for Cybercrime and Disinformation

  OpenAI disrupts 20 malicious operations exploiting AI for cybercrime, including malware debugging, social media manipulation, and misinformation.

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  July 20, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land

  Lord hopes to loosen weapon export restrictions in next six months

  By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — The Pentagon's top weapons acquisition official on Thursday called for another review of what defense technology is export-restricted, in an attempt to ensure the United States remains a defense technology provider of choice for other nations. Speaking at an event hosted by the Reagan Foundation, Ellen Lord said she has in recent months become “passionate” about revisiting export controls. “In the next six months, I very much hope to open the envelope, particularly on some of the weapons technology that we can export,” Lord said. “I am concerned that sometimes we are losing international competitions, because we have — as we have increased our capability, we have not increased the capabilities that we export in a commensurate fashion,” she added. “And we sometimes are having some of our potential customers, typically in the Mideast turn to Russia or China — you see the same thing in India, for instance.” Export control reform is hardly a new issue. In 2018, the Trump administration unveiled new defense export policies that it said should increase sales of U.S. weapons abroad; during the rollout, officials used some of the same phrasing about the need to think “strategically” as Lord did on Thursday. And in a process that started under the Obama administration and continued into the Trump administration, the U.S. State Department reviewed the 21 categories on the U.S. Munitions List, moving thousands of pieces of technology into categories that allow for straight commercial sales without a government review. Many of those technologies that were reviewed are systems that are no longer unique to America, or are so prevalent in commercial systems that to restrict them would be to harm broad swathes of American industry. But Lord's comments indicated that she feels not enough has been done in the realm of making it easier to export defense items. “We are having a very focused discussion on: Let's rethink this from a strategic point of view” she said. “A lot of this technology — frankly, the magic sauce is in the manufacturing of it, the technical data package doesn't always give it to you. So obviously we have to make sure we're very careful not to have things that could be disassembled and understood and so forth.” Lord also noted a desire to “beef up” the National Technology and Industrial Base, or NTIB, which currently covers Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Countries in the NTIB are considered part of the American defense industrial base, making it easier to collaborate on materiel. The U.S. remains the largest arms exporter in the world. Per data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, America represented about 35 percent of all arms exports from 2015-2019; Russia, at 18 percent, was a distant second. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/07/16/lord-hopes-to-loosen-weapon-export-restrictions-in-next-six-months/