Has Operation Sentinel ceased to be relevant? In any case, this is what the Court of Auditors seems to think. In its current form, anyway. In a report published on September 12, the sages of rue Cambon believe that it is no longer “relevant” that the mission be given to the military. For two main reasons: first, because the terrorist threat has changed since January 2015, when the Sentinel mission began in the wake of the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Kosher hostage-taking.
Then, because the soldiers – the numbers have risen to 10,000, before falling to less than 4,000 soldiers today – are often deployed there for missions far removed from their profession. For the court, it “should only be used when the means of the civil authority are considered unavailable, unsuitable, non-existent or insufficient”. But “recourse to the armies was not a choice by default but a deliberate choice (…). It was not a question of reinforcing the failing security forces but of showing that in such aggressive attacks, the France responded with its soldiers”. However, between 2015 and 2020, the soldiers of Operation Sentinel intervened more than 18,400 times, but only six times for acts of a terrorist nature.
For the Court of Auditors, a new distribution of missions between internal security forces and the military has therefore become “indispensable” with the war in Ukraine. “It is up to the internal security forces to take over the sectors of activity which are their priority and for which they are better equipped than in 2015 insofar as the human and material resources have been significantly reinforced to enable them to cope to the terrorist threat”, estimates the report, which indicates that the operation has cost three billion euros accumulated in five years. To decipher these recommendations of the Court of Auditors, L’Express spoke with Bénédicte Chéron, historian, lecturer at the Catholic Institute of Paris, author in particular of The unknown soldier, the French and their armies: inventory (Armand Colin, 2018).
L’Express: Are you surprised by the conclusions of the report of the Court of Auditors?
Benedicte Cheron: This budget review is a good opportunity to raise the question of the uses that the political authorities make of the military on the national territory, with regard to history and the state of knowledge in military sociology. Sentinel has a cost, and behind this cost arises the question of the coherence that we give, collectively, to the missions of such and such a public service. After its start, from 2016-2017, when this operation was made permanent without time limit, the question arose: when do we consider that the internal situation makes it possible to put an end to it? According to what criteria? How to evaluate the effects it produces? The armies have obtained the right to modulate their deployment, and to be able to ask the question of the expected effects, but the operation has never been canceled and, in practice, has introduced a precedent which is a trap because everyone has accustomed to this available workforce.
Before Sentinel, Vigipirate had already laid the groundwork in this direction, but with this operation, its scale and its sustainability, a threshold has been passed. Few were those, at the time, who wanted to see that having this workforce in the public space produced a major shift in our conception of the use of armies. This deployment, which could be understandable, even if it was already debatable, at the time of the shock of the 2015 attacks, has gradually become a tool for displaying the military for internal security purposes. However, internal security cannot be a habitual and continuous mission of the armies.
Does Sentinel no longer fulfill its original mission?
At its inception, Sentinelle was able to allow the French, in the particular context of 2015, to rediscover the protective function of the armies. But this mission has become a routine and trivialized element that contributes to blurring the understanding that society may have of the role of armies.
This is all the more the case since its primary purpose has been gradually erased in the eyes of the general public in favor of a broad objective of public security. It is a routine of permanent deployment, accompanied by media images, in very varied contexts which first produces this effect. Moreover, politicians themselves have contributed to this shift; this was the case, for example, when Benjamin Griveaux, then government spokesperson, suggested in March 2019 that Sentinel soldiers could be part of the deployed law enforcement systems. However, this type of use of military forces would constitute a profound challenge to a balance acquired over the decades and some tragic moments in our history. A balance according to which the military does not have to be mobilized against their fellow citizens, but only against external enemies who threaten the existence of the national community. The creation of the mobile gendarmerie in 1921 was an important milestone in this history.
So the Sentinel mission is no longer a suitable tool for the fight against terrorism?
In practice, the effects of this operation are currently impossible to assess. The specificity of terrorist action, moreover, is to adapt quickly to the social context in which it unfolds in order to produce major psychological effects. For a moment, we wondered if the Sentinel soldiers had become a sort of lightning rod, attracting terrorists to them who could see in them symbols of the state to be attacked. A few years later, the deterrent function remains a challenge; one cannot keep a military operation running for years if it is based solely on a bet.
But politicians have fallen into their own trap by perpetuating and publicizing this mobilization. Sentinel has been a very visual government tool on the subject of terrorism. This character, accompanied by political declarations, has so instilled the idea that Sentinelle plays a major role while it is the police and justice that are the pillars of this action of the State.
More generally, Sentinel participates in this now recurrent political temptation to display the military in any crisis situation, including non-military, for the purpose of demonstrating the power of the State when, precisely, it feels caught out. We saw this at the time of the eruption of Covid, which triggered the use of a very warlike semantic register by the President of the Republic, accompanied by political communication which very largely highlighted the mobilization of the armies in this moment. This is also the case when faced with what is diagnosed as a crisis of social and national cohesion, the political authorities are increasingly calling on the military for socio-educational and integration tasks and communicating extensively on this recourse to the armies. We are in a particular moment of crisis of confidence between the French and their political leaders. Deploying the military, which enjoys an image of great reliability and efficiency, is gradually becoming an ordinary tool of government.
Does the Russian invasion in Ukraine, and the reminder of a risk of high-intensity conflict, provide arguments against maintaining the operation on national territory?
In terms of military learning that accumulates over the long period of history, Sentinelle has enabled armies to relearn how to evolve on national territory. But an army perpetually distracted from its function by all-out solicitations is an army that is poorly prepared for the possibility of war. His training is cut off from the time and general consistency necessary for his effectiveness. There is also the question of the feeling of incomprehension among the military: they are now informed of this mission at the time of their engagement, but many archives and data testify that these recurrent all-out mobilizations, when they exist, always have consequences on how they feel understood by their fellow citizens.
Finally, the question of the link that unites a society to its armies is a central question in the course of a major conflict. However, the recurrent and massive involvement of armies in measures, for example security or socio-educational which are in fact a choice of domestic policy, can harm their relationship with all citizens. The more the military is involved in domestic politics, the more they appear associated with divisive political choices. Over time, the risk is to call into question the idea that the armies, in a democracy, are at the service of all citizens, whatever the political project they adopt, to defend them against a threat external to this political community.