Such a rally had never taken place. In Paris, thirty-seven chiefs of staff (CEMA, or their representatives) met on March 11 to discuss the security of the continent and support for Ukraine, at the invitation of the generals at the head of the French and British armies, Thierry Burkhard and Tony Radakin. A moment all the more historic than Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada and Ukraine were present, alongside the member nations of the Atlantic Alliance. Only absent, and not least: the United States.
This event marked an unprecedented week of exchanges around European defense, with France at the center of the game. At a time when the most star generals sat at the same table, tensions were at their climax between the continent and the American “big brother”. He had just cut abruptly, a few days earlier, his military aid to the Ukrainians, stopping arms deliveries and closing his military intelligence tap.
How to move forward without Washington? The French authorities were able to take advantage of the calendar hazards. Because the Chiefs of Staff have timely gathered on the occasion of the second edition of the “Paris Defense and Strategy Forum”, organized within the Military School, near the Champ de Mars, from March 11 to 13. At the opening of their work, Emmanuel Macron offered to pass “from the concept to the plan to define credible security guarantees, so that a solid and lasting peace is possible in Ukraine”, because “it is the moment when Europe must weigh all its weight, for Ukraine and for itself”.
“This sequence with the CEMAs, in the rest of the meetings held in Paris in mid-February around the President of the Republic, is at the heart of the question of security guarantees in Ukraine, because it is necessary to know, at the military, what presence could be sufficiently dissuasive on Ukrainian soil without being too close to the front, and with which aerial component, confides a source at the heart of the events of the last days. possible deployment of troops. On March 12, it adopted a resolution to strengthen support for Ukraine, calling for a seizure of frozen Russian assets, to which the government is opposed. The next day, Prime Minister, François Bayrou, received the chiefs of parliamentary groups with the Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu. This information meeting on the Ukrainian file and the consequences on national defense was held at the seat of the armies, in the south-east of Paris, in Balard, with the staff and the intelligence services. The same evening, the minister continued his media tour by participating in a special program on France 2, in prime time : “France in the face of threats.”
A “fortnight” of countries leaving
There is not detailed the form that a deployment of European soldiers could take in Ukraine. It will probably take time to achieve a solid plan, while most allies claim an American “security net” for any presence on Ukrainian territory. How many countries are interested? “About fifteen,” said Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu, after the meeting on Wednesday in “E5” format with his British, German, Italian and Polish counterparts, in Val-de-Grâce, to discuss aid to Ukraine and European defense. The next meeting for this “fortnight” of voluntary nations should be organized “within 15 days”.
Program changes could occur by then. Already, when the “E5” meeting ended, the United States raised the suspension of its aid to Ukraine. The discussions held in the Saudi city of Djeddah between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Volodymyr Zelensky led to the acceptance of the principle of a cease-fire by the Ukrainian president. It remains, for Washington, to obtain the agreement of Russia. However, this is in the reconquest of its territory section taken by kyiv, in the Koursk region. The city of Sudja, among other localities, could be quickly reconquerful. Vladimir Putin is waiting to have recovered the whole oblast and plays the watch: he pushed, without excluding it, a thirty -day truce.
The Russian president capitalizes on the conciliatory approach, towards him, of Donald Trump. At the heart of the Paris Defense and Strategy Forum discussions, we find the Russian threat and American brutality vis-à-vis its allies. It is notably a question of the future of the Atlantic Alliance, faced with the disdain displayed by Donald Trump. “The fate of Ukraine and that of NATO are linked. If Ukraine comes out weakened, the allies will have to make it much more than expected to strengthen their defense [face aux Russes]”Said a diplomat, worried about American disengagement. If that were to happen, he calls to” Europeanize NATO, who knows how to militarily do things that the European Union is not capable of “. This departure is not impossible: the billionaire Elon Musk and other close to Donald Trump call him.
In any case, an increase in defense expenses is inevitable. “With 2 % [de dépenses par an du PIB]we can barely correct the capacity shortcomings of the past, notes a senior NATO official. We therefore logically come back to defenses between 3 and 5 %, as in the time of the Cold War. “And to recall that it is lacking to Europeans – which remained in” niche logics “when they did not” abandon certain capacities ” – anti -missile and anti -aircraft defenses of all worn, means in the field of intelligence and recognition of enemy and electromagnetic war capacities.
Make or buy on shelf, the European dilemma
Is it better, for Europe, to make these armaments of all types itself, or to pass, for the sake of speed of acquisition, by purchases on shelf from the United States? “We swim in the middle of a dilemma, all the participants in the recent forums admit that it takes more strategic autonomy from Europe, more Europeanization of its defense, but without moving away from the United States, estimates Guillaume Lasconjarias, director of studies at the Ihedn. We are in full break in love with Washington, but we hesitate to go to the mourning phase.”
As pointed out, at the PDSF, many practitioners of defense issues, industrial mobilization is at the heart of the challenge of military power of Europeans. “Ukraine’s defense industries produced for an amount of one billion euros in 2022 and increased to 30 billion in 2024,” insisted the European Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius. “We can therefore do it at European level,” he argued, recalling that the “rearming Europe” plan envisaged facilities and aid for 800 billion euros in the years to come.
These new tools, including a common loan, should be used full by France. But they will not be enough. The defense budget currently reaches about fifty billion euros, double what it was in 2017. The military programming law gave a target of 67 billion euros in 2030. The acceleration of threats led Sébastien Lecornu to bring it rather up to a hundred billion. Emmanuel Macron has summoned the government to exclude any tax increase and any worsening of the deficit, while the country’s finances are in suffering. On the Bercy side, we rather propose to “mobilize” private savings.
In this perspective, Emmanuel Macron received on March 14, at the Elysée, the major French defense manufacturers (Mbda, Dassault, Thales, Naval Group, Knds, Safran, Airbus). He asked them to further accelerate their production, even though they find it difficult to solve their bottlenecks (Dassault only released twenty bursts in 2024, when he counted up more than thirty). “Industrial time cannot be shortened,” recalls Guillaume Lasconjarias. Civil companies could be requested: in Germany, it is already a question of using Volkswagen production lines, an emblematic company currently in difficulty, to build armored vehicles.
But that will not be enough to solve one of the major problems of Europeans: the fragmentation of the market for their equipment – more than a dozen different tanks. Harmonization, as is the case for the American army, would ultimately make it possible to facilitate the maintenance in operational condition of all these armaments – and to reduce their initial cost. Ukrainians experience this daily difficulty: they use a dozen different cannons models, with just as different spare parts … “The big industrialists do not have a huge appetite for cooperation”, recalled a specialist in one of the many round tables. Without strong political pressure, it will not change.
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