French Maj. Gen. Cyril Carcy told Breaking Defense that his intelligence office can “no longer focus on a 60-degree angle between Western Africa and the Middle-East dictated by the fight against terrorism.”

“We always trained very hard following the motto ‘hard training, easy war,’ but what we are currently doing is retraining ourselves to face an enemy with the same capacities as we have,” French Army Brig. Gen. Eric Ozanne, the LAB commander, told Breaking Defense.

On Feb. 17, an almost decade-long French mission in Mali ended, with Russia’s Wagner Group stepping into the void. But France remains dedicated to the CT mission in Africa, officials say.

Lt. Gen. Frédéric Parisot, number two in the French Air and Space Force (FASF), talked with Breaking Defense about his priorities for the future.

As Gen. Eric Laval recently put it, “Today the French Army is beautiful, but in a high intensity conflict, would it be able to hold beyond 48 hours?”

Gen. Philippe Lavigne, the Chief of French Air and Space Force, walks Breaking Defense through a recent Pacific exercise.

There is room for further development in areas such as electronic warfare and signals intelligence. “These ‘soft’ components were not as accessible in the past 12 to 15 years when we were so busy in the Middle-East; for example, there is a real drive to invest in areas such as EWSI (Electronic Warfare and Signals Intelligence),” Brig. Gen. Paul Tennant, the British military attache in Washington, says.

How to deal with the Chinese threat will probably be one of the most difficult questions for the European Union to address as it executes its first-ever strategic review, to be published in 2022 and called ‘’Strategic Compass.’

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group (CSG) and the French Charles de Gaulle CSG are cooperating at levels of integration rarely achieved in the past. Indeed, “it is at the request of US CENTCOM Commander Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie to the French Army deputy commander for Air-Land operations (SCOAT for ‘’sous chef des opérations aéroterrestres de l’armée de Terre’’) that the French Air Naval Group (GAN for ‘’groupe aéronaval’’) assume command of US Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT)’s Task Force (CFT) 50 from March 31st till April 24th’’, explains a French military officer.

The French military is moving apace in keeping with Paris’s determination to, at a minimum, keep its rank as the third international space power in an increasingly large and competitive club of nations.

France has ramped up activity in the region in accordance with its 2019 Indo-Pacific strategy.

The fight against terror groups often called VEOs (Violent Extremist Organizations) in Africa faces a key strategic turning point. The N’Djamena Summit – which just took place with a US representative attending — is considered the starting point for an assessment of the results of the current strategy undertaken in the Sahelo-Saharan region. The reassessment occurred because of…

The ratio between a very light footprint and a high value-added target is often lost sight of when considering a theater of operation covering some 4 million square meters. The U.S. contingent deployed mostly in Niger is less than 1,000 men (800 according to most sources), while the type of support provided in support of the French-led Barkhane operation in the region does not require a large U.S. presence on the African continent.

The one thing Boris Johnson and his DUDE — Deliver, Unite, Defeat, Energize — partisans have in common with their opponents is that they all want to see a quick end to a process that has paralyzed the debate about Europe’s future and created a climate of instability which only NATO’s foes can find suitable.

Many feel that the FCAS (Future Combat Air System) is a Mission Impossible when one focuses on how much money — $4 billion by 2025 is to be jointly allocated by France and Germany.