“Let us always think about it, never talk about it,” said Léon Gambetta about the lost Alsace-Lorraine. The formula has long defined the relationship to war of the leaders of the armies under the Fifth Republic, before Emmanuel Macron put his foot in the dish on February 26. “There is no consensus to officially send ground troops. But, dynamically, nothing must be excluded. We will do everything necessary to ensure that Russia cannot win this war” , he says about Ukraine. The times are no longer for soothing phrases, but for “strategic ambiguity”, theorized by General Sun Tzu in The art of War in the sixth century BC. Why warn your enemy of his intentions when you can keep him in agonizing uncertainty?
Far from press conferences, the Ministry of the Armed Forces has been working for a long time on France’s possible entry into the war. The planning and operations control center (CPCO) of the army headquarters imagines the organization of the country in the event of armed conflict. In the Army, the command doctrine and education center (CDEC) carries out the same foresight mission. Since 2021, the three armed forces have also financed the Observatory of Future Conflicts, bringing together a research consortium on threats between now and 2040 led by the Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS) and the French Institute of Relations. international (Ifri). The famous Red Team, made up of researchers and writers, is preparing anticipatory reflections for the army on the horizon 2060. From February to May 2023, the army also mounted Operation “Orion”, an exercise full-scale operation involving 12,000 soldiers in around twenty departments. Based on a scenario imagined at NATO, it was a question of repelling the aggression of a state very similar to Russia and its force of mercenaries, inspired by Wagner.
On March 2, 2023, L’Express devoted a major dossier to the military nightmares most feared by the French army, after consulting around forty experts. One of the scenarios envisaged – in November 2026, Putin launches an attack on Estonia and Lithuania – has since been given credibility by a confidential report from German intelligence. According to the German version of the media Business Insider, this official document warns that it is “no longer possible to exclude” an attack by Russia on a NATO country from 2026. The Baltic countries and Finland would be the most serious targets. Polish President Andrzej Duda declared on March 20 that Putin imagined he could attack a NATO country as early as “2026 or 2027”, citing “German sources”. In France too, this possibility is being considered – “if we leave Ukraine alone, if we let Ukraine lose this war, then for sure Russia will threaten Moldova, Romania, Poland”, explained Emmanuel Macron on TF1 and France 2 on March 14. The staffs are preparing for it.
An explosive cocktail
Alexandra Saviana, journalist at L’Express, spent a year with these strategists responsible for imagining, as a chess champion tries to anticipate the most devastating combinations, the most problematic chain reactions. She signed, this May 16, The Dark Scenarios of the French Army (Robert Laffont), a fascinating dive into the 11 catastrophic conflicts that await the French forces between now and 2030. Supported by the analyzes of 106 experts, these stories of warlike gears make us discover the “mental paths” of the great powers – the expression comes from Antoine Bourguilleau, officer in charge at the CDEC war game unit. The invasion of Ukraine showed what bias could mislead French intelligence: that of believing that other nations, Russia in this case, base their decisions on exclusively rational calculations, in the West, when their Choices are also guided by purely emotional motives.
THE war games aim to get used to the functioning of other powers, starting with China, whose “thousand cuts” technique, according to Emmanuel Véron, researcher at Inalco and the naval school, is the greatest weapon. This traditional torture requires the executioners to take their time to finish off those condemned to death. In geopolitics, he recounts Beijing’s mastery of the long term: in The black scenarios of the French army, it is by taking advantage of French naivety that the boats from Madagascar and China gradually encircle the Scattered Islands, in the west of the Indian Ocean, until they expel France, sovereign over the territory since the colonization. It is still by skillfully carrying out “soft power” operations in New Caledonia that the Middle Kingdom ultimately facilitates the independence of the island.
The history of the last twenty-five years has shown that geopolitical time is broken down into an uninterrupted use of indirect means of war – economics, influence, espionage, informational interference – and sudden blows by force. Russia masters these two facets wonderfully, and the scenarios that concern it reflect its power of disruption. In particular, it is a question of the massive financing of conspiratorial parties as well as the use of the entire range of cyber weapons to destabilize its adversaries. Based on the American example and the challenges specific to France, experts believe that the cocktail could prove explosive in our countries.
Fear of an attack during the Olympics
The work takes the effective approach of offering stories in the present tense, interspersed with comments from the specialists interviewed, including generals, diplomats, researchers and intelligence agents. “Murphy’s Law” applies: according to this American aerospace engineer, “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. The adage, known to military strategists, encourages us to consider the most calamitous scenarios, as long as they are plausible. It is sometimes a question of a French error, most often of procrastination or an underestimation of the adversary. We note, for example, the hypothesis of a sudden fall in Belarusian power, a priori favorable to the West, but which could turn into a headache in the event of bad decisions in the first weeks.
Many of the scenarios have as their starting point a change in United States foreign policy. “The worst-case scenario would indeed be the election of a figure similar to Donald Trump (or his re-election) who would turn towards isolationism, or would like to forget Europe to focus solely on China,” summarizes Camille Grand, Deputy Secretary General for Defense Investment at NATO from 2016 to 2022, now a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). An American withdrawal towards other issues would force France to take more responsibility in its military commitment.
One last dark scenario is particularly occupying the French intelligence services today: that of an attack during the Paris Olympic Games. Proof that this risk is seriously considered, the format of the opening ceremony, on the Seine, was modified last March: in order to be able to control the identity of spectators, the government chose to impose a system of ” invitations” at the initiative of 170 institutions, rather than letting the public register directly on a platform. As for the location of the event, “there are plans B and even plans C,” said Emmanuel Macron on April 15. When it comes to security, preparing for disasters is essential.
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