Rremember this acronym: BITD. Until now reserved for experts in defense circles, it is feminine and, strangely, is not directly a translation from English. Remember it, because, if the world follows its current trajectory, that of a universe dominated by the balance of power, the BITD – defense industrial and technological base – should become a tool as important for European societies as Social Security .
Should, because, listening to our strategists, we Europeans are far behind in strengthening this BITD. Opening the cycle of conferences of the Major Strategic Issues chair at the Sorbonne on January 22, the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Thierry Burkhard, painted an extremely gloomy picture of our geostrategic environment. “The new strategic grid”he says, comes down to a triptych: “competition, contestation, confrontation”. Competition is now the mode of relationship ” normal “ between states. Protest manifests itself in increasingly transgressive and brutal ways – the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 is an example. Confrontation can lead to war: “If necessary, it must be delivered. »
So you’ll have to get used to it: “competition, contestation, confrontation” have replaced cooperation, conflict prevention, peaceful settlement. That’s not all, explains the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, always reassuring under his five stars. The battlefield is also transformed. “The imposed war” succeeds the obsolete “peace operations”. Before, the adversary sought to prevent us from acting; today its objective is to “kill us”. General Burkhard also observes a “operational paradigm shift” : no more commando operations, today, the Russians are committing hundreds of thousands of men in the war. We have moved to another scale and, inevitably, the results are affected: in the French army, no one has forgotten the day when the troops deployed in Mali lost thirteen men in a helicopter collision. Today, in Ukraine, “Thirteen dead is a good half day”.
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So we have been warned. This radical change in environment implies, one assumes, an adaptation of response. Especially since, continues the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, in the dystopian register, “One day, the United States will no longer want to intervene in Europe. What interests them is leadership in the Indo-Pacific. We therefore need European awareness to strengthen our defense tool”.
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