9 décembre 2019 | International, Naval
By: Christina Mackenzie
PARIS — France has ordered six 70-meter-long (230-feet-long) offshore patrol vessels from Socarenam, a shipyard in Boulogne-sur-Mer on the country's northern coast, to patrol its vast economic exclusive zone.
The announcement was made earlier this week by French President Emmanuel Macron at the Maritime Economy Congress in Montpellier, southern France. These kinds of announcements are usually either made by the minister for the armed forces or by the DGA procurement agency.
Following the president's announcement, the Armed Forces Ministry said in a statement that the ships had been ordered “in a context of increasing threats to our fishing resources, biodiversity and international maritime rules."
"France intends to fully exercise her sovereignty and responsibilities both in her metropolitan and overseas territories,” the statement continued. France has the largest economic exclusive zone in the world, at about 4,514,000 square miles. By comparison, the United States's EEZ comes in at about 4,383,000 square miles.
Each vessel's draft is no more than 3.8 meters, has a maximum speed of at least 22 knots that it can hold for 24 hours but with a normal cruising speed of between 12 to 14 knots, and has a range of 5,500 nautical miles. This enables the ships to stay at sea for a month.
French media reports the ships are likely to carry a 20mm remotely controlled gun and machine guns, but no official weapons specifications have been published. The tender and the technical specifications, issued by the DGA in 2018, called for the ships to be able to deploy a 700-kilogram-class rotor-blade drone, and to be able to keep it under cover. The tender also said the ships should be able to deploy divers and two high-speed intervention boats, as well as keep six prisoners secure.
The ships will be delivered to the French Navy between 2022 and 2025. That time frame is two years ahead of the schedule laid out in the 2019-2025 Military Program Law. The value of the order has not been disclosed.
“I have decided, as is specified in the Military Program Law, to further strengthen the protection of our maritime spaces. The order for six new overseas patrol boats was officially launched last week by the armed forces minister,” Macron said. “With these ships we will acquire a capacity that we have never yet had on the maritime front to protect our spaces and take on this mantle as a balance of power in the maritime sector.”
“We are building a European maritime capacity,” he added, noting that he assumed “responsibility for France taking the leadership.”
The ships, known in France as POM (patrouilleur outre-mer), will be based in France's Pacific Ocean territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia, and the French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, Réunion. Some of the ships will join the Pacific fleet at the Nouméa naval base in New Caledonia and at Fare Ute Papeete in Tahiti. Others will join the Indian Ocean fleet at Port Réunion.
A naval spokesperson told Defense News that the exact destination for each ship had not yet been officially announced.
The order for these six ships is a continuation of a program to bolster France's protection of its maritime regions. Three patrol vessels were delivered between 2016 and October 2019 to the Caribbean region and Guyana on South America's northeastern coast. The three vessels were also built by Socarenam, which has sites in Calais, Dunkirk, Étaples and Saint-Malo.
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By: Mike Yeo MELBOURNE, Australia — China could stand to lose almost all of its ballistic and cruise missiles if it were to sign a new strategic arms control treaty, according to a new regional security assessment. The analysis, titled “The End of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty: Implications for Asia,” is one of the chapters of the annual Asia-Pacific regional security assessment published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank. IISS' report was released June 5 and covered regional security topics such as Sino-U.S. relations, North Korea and Japanese policy. China could lose 95 percent of its ballistic and cruise missile stockpile if it signs a treaty similar to the 1980s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, according to the chapter's co-authors Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow focused on military air power; Michael Elleman, the director of the Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Policy Program; and Meia Nouwens, a research fellow focused on Chinese defense policy and military modernization. The treaty, signed between by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1987, banned all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles systems with ranges between 310 and 3,420 miles (500-5,500 kilometres). The U.S. withdrew from the INF Treaty in August 2019, citing Russian violations of the agreement with its development and fielding of the 9M279 missile, although Russia denies that the missile violated range restrictions. However, the IISS report suggested the U.S. withdrawal was done with an eye toward China's missile arsenal, which has grown to what is believed to be the world's largest inventory of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. IISS' own figures estimate China possesses more than 2,200 missiles that fall under the INF Treaty's restrictions. These short- and medium-range missiles are important assets in exerting pressure on Taiwan, which China sees as a rogue province and has vowed to reunite with the mainland, by force if necessary, although it continues to describe its fielding of ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles as solely for defensive purposes. Given these missiles provide China with what Barrie described as a “comparative advantage” in the region, it's unlikely the country would willingly sign a potential arms control treaty like the INF Treaty. The U.S, for its part, has already started testing missiles previously prohibited by the treaty, and there have been suggestions that the country might deploy such missiles to the Asia-Pacific region to address an imbalance in such weapons between itself and its rivals without solely relying on air- and sea-launched cruise missiles. (Those cruise missiles existed under the INF Treaty, as they did not violate the pact.) The report cautioned there is a two-fold risk in deploying such weapons to the Asia-Pacific. Chief among those: exacerbating Chinese concerns that the missiles will be positioned for use against it, increasing the potential for a response from China that could lead to an “action-reaction cycle of weapons development and deployment” and continued regional instability. The U.S. is also faced with the quandary of basing any potential INF-busting systems, with regional allies and partners unlikely to accede to locating such missiles on their territory, partly because of the diplomatic and economic reprisals Beijing could inflict on them. And there's precedent here: China targeted South Korea's economy in response to and expressed its distaste at the deployment of a U.S. missile defense system on South Korean soil in 2017. As for the U.S. territory of Guam, basing missiles there would limit their utility due to the distances involved. The IISS report also raised questions about whether U.S. moves to develop and deploy weapons previously prohibited by the INF Treaty will bring China to the arms control negotiating table. However, the think tank conceded that not deploying such weapons is also unlikely to persuade China, noting that that Beijing has shown little appetite for participating in any form of strategic and regional arms control. https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2020/06/05/china-could-lose-95-of-ballistic-cruise-missiles-under-strategic-arms-control-pact-says-new-analysis/