France also is not about to restart tank production. The company that makes the CAESAR currently produces four a month and is expected to reach a rate of six a month by December, and then eight a month by the middle of 2024. Part of the problem is that, while it is true that, for example, French production of its howitzers and various guided missile systems is currently woefully inadequate, producing these things on a much larger scale is no easy task. French President Emmanuel Macron has evoked the idea of a “ war economy,” yet the consensus in France is that this is impossible for financial and political reasons. For prominent military analyst Michel Goya, the conclusion is clear: France cannot take on even a near-peer adversary.įrance cannot simply eschew expensive new technology and return to the mass armies of the past. French and European defense industries in general struggle even just to replace older items, let alone supply large force structures - hence a growing list of customers for South Korean industry. Thus, handing Ukraine even 20 Leclerc tanks, for example, undermines French army capabilities, given that France only has about 200 of them. France already has handed over a significant portion of its precious CAESAR howitzers, which numbered just 70, and replacing them is now a serious challenge. Given current inventories, donating even a few tanks or howitzers can cause serious problems for a force’s capabilities. The old dream that precision weapons would mean fewer munitions is a fantasy. Perhaps Ukraine and Russia were not expending these things on a rate comparable to World War I, but they have seriously challenged the idea that highly professional but small “bonsai tree” militaries could get away with substituting quality for quantity, an idea that encouraged the reduction of vehicle fleets and military stores by militaries in search of post-Cold War peace dividends. Conventional combat, even in this era of precision warfare and advanced information networks, still requires enormous reserves of manpower, equipment, and ammunition. The war in Ukraine has only placed this problem in greater relief. The report said out loud many of the things that the French military itself was struggling to articulate, while also, unfortunately, providing ammunition to the military’s critics. The study made a large splash in France, where it was picked up by journalists and cited by the National Assembly and senior French officers. But it also lacked the depth and the mass to do anything on a large scale for any length of time before it simply ran out of stuff. We argued that the French military - now indisputably the most capable in Western Europe - could do a lot of things very well. Is the current French model of warfare viable? In 2021, I co-authored a study with Stephanie Pezard suggesting that the answer was no.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |