The hills, the scrubland, and the Mediterranean Sea which sparkles at daybreak. Frontignan, a seaside town adjoining the town of Sète, looks like a movie set. This Saturday, February 25, we are playing war. A catamaran silently advances towards a pontoon, where several soldiers are already gathered. Suddenly, a siren sound sounded. About fifty soldiers, all in arms and fatigues, rush out of the ship. A few minutes earlier, heavy gunfire was heard. But don’t panic: neither the Aude nor the Tarn are trying to invade the Hérault.
This simulacrum aims to prepare the French soldiers for an external aggression – a real one. Operation Orion brings together 7,000 soldiers in around twenty departments. It is a question of defending a fictitious country, Arnland, victim of a destabilization carried out by militias, Tantalus, in the service of the Mercury State. Some will have recognized a Baltic country, Wagner and Russia. This is not fortuitous. France seeks to train in conditions close to a real confrontation, in anticipation of D-Day. The one where it will have to fight for good against a powerful enemy. The invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that force remains the easiest way to achieve our ends. The corollary of this principle, somewhat forgotten during the triple decade of military budget cuts, also called post-Cold War “peace dividends”, is now obvious: to be free, you have to be strong. “A respected country is a dissuasive country”, summarizes General Bertrand Ract-Madoux, former chief of staff of the army and chief of staff of the DGSE. The opposite is true: to undergo a military decommissioning is to risk being excluded from the information loops of the countries “that matter”, to no longer weigh when it comes to imposing an agreement favorable to its interests. economics or to his vision of the world.
With its ballistic missile submarines capable of sending a nuclear bomb anywhere in the world, France seems almost immune to an invasion of its territory. But the H-bomb does not immunize us against attacks, attacks, hacks, misinformation and all hostile acts that weaken us. For a long time, the microcosm of defense hailed the “complete” French army model, that is to say capable both of protecting its territory, including overseas, and of projecting itself into a foreign country to provide assistance to a friendly state. Then the prospect of a fight against a great power reminded us that versatility and know-how also concealed a “sampling” model – the word could have been used at the Elysée. The army lacks ammunition and equipment, beyond the famous Caesar guns given by France to Ukraine. “In a high intensity conflict […]the air force would have no more planes in ten days and probably no more missiles after two days”, recalled General Bruno Maigret, in a parliamentary report published six days before the invasion of France. ‘Ukraine.
Forty experts solicited
When preparing the military programming law for the years 2024 to 2030, the Ministry of the Armed Forces asked the Chiefs of Staff to detail the threats hanging over our country. Clearly, to propose credible scenarios justifying the use of force. Independently, L’Express wanted to develop its own “black scenarios” in order to question the preparation, the possible flaws in the French defense, and thus fuel the necessary public debate on these questions at 60 billion euros per year. .
Around forty experts – researchers, diplomats, generals, former executives of the DGSE – were asked to deliver their analyzes of the main threats threatening France between now and 2030. These scenarios are in no way forecasts. Their plot was developed from a credible geopolitical situation, to which was integrated Murphy’s law (an American soldier): “Anything that is likely to go wrong will go wrong.” They sometimes, but not always, include a French parsing error. The majority of these hypotheses coincide with those on which the armies are working, with the notable exception of a rise in tensions with Algeria, which is totally taboo within the State. Military strategists, on the other hand, have gauged the possibility of a new intervention in Lebanon, or the responses to be made to an attack on our satellites.
Scenario 1: 2026, Russian tanks enter Estonia and Lithuania: “The area is a weak point for NATO”
Scenario 2: 2028: Madagascar takes over the Scattered Islands from France, China pulls the strings
Scenario 3: 2026: four Chinese hypersonic missiles sink the aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle
Scenario 4: 2024, Mali falls into the hands of jihadists: “A new Daesh could emerge”
Scenario 5: 2027: a major cyberattack plunges Paris into darkness for seven hours
Scenario 6: 2028: Erdogan’s Turkey attacks the Imia Islands, France flies to the aid of Greece
Scenario 7: 2029: France and Algeria get angry, Algiers asks Russia for help
Robotic killer drones, ultra-thin bulletproof vests
And then there are all these scenarios that we think are far-fetched, wrongly. “We will inevitably be subject to a strategic surprise by 2030, perhaps a technological breakthrough”, warns General Jean-Marc Vigilant, director of the School of War between 2020 and 2022. The high-ranking officer advised his students to read The Ghost Fleet, a novel by August Cole and PW Singer, researcher and consultant for the US State Department, on a China-US world war around 2030. We come across killer lasers from satellites, trapped aircraft chips, military GPS hackers. “By 2030, we could have robotic killer drones, bulletproof vests as thin as a shirt,” imagines General Vigilant.
It will also be necessary to adapt to political upheavals. The real dark scenario for the French army, say almost all the experts, would consist of a victory of an isolationist candidate in the American presidential election of 2024. “If the United States disengages from NATO, it will be a very hard blow for Europe”, judges General Michel Yakovleff, former number 4 in the chain of command of NATO, who already considers 2025 as a year at risk: “If the new American president is isolationist, there In 2025, there will be a window of vulnerability for Western countries because their military effort will not yet have fully borne fruit. We cannot say that we did not know; but preparing for the worst also means knowing that it is never safe. Even for a soldier.