Leaving the Guyanese shot in Kourou, leaving behind a long white plume, the Ariane 6 rocket set out in space on March 6, for its first commercial flight. It placed in orbit, 800 kilometers above sea level, a passenger of 3.5 tonnes of the most precious, CSO -3 – for “optical space component”. The French armies, which had already launched two satellites from this family, now have the mini-constellation of the soil supervision they were waiting for. Enough to take very high resolution shots and monitor targets.
Europe is barely a dozen such satellites. Too little for autonomous coverage: the continental armies depend very largely on the data provided by the United States, owners of dozens of CSO-type military satellites. This network is one of the American capacities essential to Europeans for their defense, and almost irreplaceable in the long term. kyiv makes it the bitter experience: in addition to stopping arms deliveries already planned by the previous administration, that of Donald Trump reduced the flow of information to the Ukrainians, to force them to accept a Leonine Agreement on their mining resources. These decisions will benefit the Russians, may increase the number of Ukrainian victims and give an overview of the impact of a disengagement from the United States in Europe.
“The greatest dependence of the Ukrainians towards the Americans concerns planning and intelligence aid, already provided before the invasion of February 2022 and based on unique capacities”, confirms Thibault Fouillet, scientific director of the Institute of Strategy Studies and Defense of the University Jean-Moulin Lyon 3. Without this aid, which includes a civilian section, with the recourse to the Starlink network of Elon Musk, Ukrainians will see the list of Russian targets to strike are reduced considerably. It would be the same for Europeans. “This intelligence part has helped us a lot when we conducted our operations in the Sahel, underlines a French general. Europeans have theirs, but it is very limited and fragmented.”
A big lack of soil-to-air defenses
If the old continent has more soldiers in active service than American forces (1.5 million against 1.3), it is far from having their means. “We have the essentials of technologies, but we lack a volume that we would take years to acquire”, points out Léo Péria-Peigné, researcher at Ifri and author of Armament geopolitics (Le Cavalier Bleu editions). As part of a major war, American officers are also the only ones to have the practice of operations on a continent. In their absence, there are only two armies left, that of the United Kingdom and that of France, which combine a recent experience in combat and an ability to control armies (two to five divisions from 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers each), even if there is a level of gap with what the Americans can do.
While the French army is organized in two divisions, the US Army has around twenty, with the command post of its 5th body in Poland, in Poznan, near an advanced armament storage site. “It is a skeleton ready to be activated for troops from the United States with all their combat facilitators: in artillery, engineering, helicopters, logistics and others, specifies our military source. In France, we plan to have a division that can be deployed in a month, in 2027, it may seem far, but we are one of the good students …” And if NATO learns the European forces, Make all these armies work today appears as a challenge without the American binder.
However, the painting is not completely black. Europeans have accelerated their bus production and provide Ukraine more than the Americans (one million produced in 2024 against 570,000 in the United States). However, they remain limited in complex ammunition. France is barely enough to “three days of combat [aérien] high intensity, even a day for the particular case of [missile] Meteor, “said A recent IFRI report. The same goes for other Europeans, in large lack of soil-to-air defenses: American anti-aircraft means are an important part of the “security net” claimed by the British and the French to hire troops on Ukrainian soil. The 150 billion euros in loans for twenty-seven to “rearm Europe”, announced by the Commission, must compensate for this. But the effect will not be felt for several years.
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