With this issue 250, which marks the start of its eleventh year of publication, La Vigie reaches the magic number of 500 published posts. In their own way, they describe the stages and hazards of the decade of strategic transition that France has just undergone in Europe and Europe in the world.
So this is an opportunity to take stock of the decade. This annex to the regular issue will therefore take a different form: Each contributor will give his or her assessment, even those who have joined along the way: for once, the signatures will be individualised instead of the collective signature we are used to.
How short a decade is!
Launched in autumn 2014, La Vigie is primarily a fortnightly online publication. It certainly conducts other activities (studies, seminars, training, etc.) which are aimed at its clients and therefore remain discreet. But the point of reference remains the newsletter, whose format is now well established: two articles barely three pages long and a free-form spyglass, more open to the mood of the moment, when the articles want to get to the heart of the matter. So we rarely react to immediate news. As a matter of policy, we prefer to wait for the dust to settle, for events to become clear and finally known, so that we can concentrate on the essence of our work: strategic synthesis. Not analysis, but synthesis.
The reader is a decision-maker who knows his or her environment, has little reading time available and is looking for a background tune-up every fortnight. But what is this ‘strategy’, a word we keep using? Without going back to some of our doctrinal pieces, it is not only a diagnosis but also the establishment of the goals to be reached and the paths to get there.
The DNA of La Vigie is still very much military: for example, regular authors must have served in uniform (regardless of rank, active or reserve) and in central administration to understand the difficulties of choosing central staff. Similarly, they should have experience of high-level strategic analysis, if possible in research teams. Without being obsessed with qualifications, we have five PhDs among our authors. We follow in the footsteps of military strategists: Foch, Castex, Gallois, Poirier and Lacoste, the last of whom educated the oldest among us.
Rereading the summary of the 500 articles, what conclusions can we draw? That we often look at countries and regions from a primarily geopolitical angle, but always try to conclude with the consequences for France. We talk a great deal about European countries and, above all, our neighbours, whom we know better. We talk about Europe, both in terms of the Union and NATO. Of course, we also take a close look at the major powers: the United States, China and Russia. The Maghreb, Africa and the Middle East are regularly scrutinised. Admittedly, we pay less attention to South Asia, Central Asia, English-speaking Africa and Latin America, even if these areas are not out of our sights.
As military strategists, we obviously follow conflicts closely: Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, and the Sahel have of course been examined. The recent war in Ukraine has been the subject of regular updates (free to read) which will soon reach their 100th opus. However, the summary forces us to take a closer look: firstly at environmental strategies (land, sea, air, cyber, space) but also at cross-cutting issues: first and foremost deterrence, but also subjects such as escalation, high intensity, the notion of threshold, denial of access, etc. Technological and defence industry issues are also raised. Finally, we closely follow the debates and in particular the official doctrinal documents: French, European or allied White Papers.
This underpinning leads us to broader pieces: firstly on major themes (demographics, ecology, innovation, energy, religion, intelligence, sport, media, influence) and then on global strategic summaries, all the more necessary as this decade has been particularly turbulent and has profoundly challenged previous balances.
Finally, since we are French strategists, we return regularly to France: to some extent on domestic issues, but above all ‘in search of the lost strategy’, so much so that we deplore the disappearance of very high-level strategic thinking and action. This project also aims to provide food for thought: we regularly publish (free to read) articles by outside authors, either to give them a chance or to give them a voice. Each time, we bring a point of view that we hope will be different and therefore complementary; above all, so that we don’t lock ourselves into our own certainties, while maintaining our own tone.
Ten years and counting. For the new decade, we’re announcing a redesign of the site, with a more attractive interface and easier access. We’ll tell you more about it later, but if we want to keep La Vigie, we’re obviously going to have to make some changes. We are counting on your loyalty in these new developments.
O. Kempf
A decade of transition
When we launched La Vigie in 2014, we set out with solid methodological principles and multiple points of observation. We could see that since the end of the Cold War in 1999, the world was becoming increasingly erratic. The strategic infrastructures built up during the Second World War had crumbled and the regulations dating from the Cold War were withering away.
We deeply deplored the fact that security issues had become the subject of far too conventional work. The strategic debate in France and Europe was becoming impoverished and France seemed to be losing its sense of its interests, its responsibilities and its potential. There were fears of strategic marginalisation as a result of the dismantling of inspired French military thinking, the temple of which used to be the École Militaire in Paris. We therefore proposed to take up the gauntlet of strategic synthesis off the beaten track of the patent institutionalists, and chose to do so with no resources and no support other than that of attentive and loyal readers.
La Vigie has been helped by the abundance of current events and the many accidents that have occurred in France, Europe, Africa and around the world, which it has tried to put into perspective and decode in order to assess France’s strategic challenges. Based on what we observed, we tried to assess the real and evolving strategic framework facing France. We wanted to ‘do strategy differently’ in order to reassess the ‘war phenomenon’ in the 21st century by outlining the main lines of security for France in Europe and for Europe in the world. This was a demanding approach, as it is not easy to write short, but it is true that we chose to target an informed audience and not to saturate it with information. By publicly announcing its work every fortnight, La Vigie has gradually gained in notoriety and has been able to open up a number of high-quality dialogues. We have also taken care to produce an annual strategic review to summarise the key events of the year just ended and prepare for the year ahead. This is how we have set our course for the world. We will be publishing a dossier of these annual reminders.
This exciting adventure, involving 500 eclectic posts published to date, is continuing as the world’s conflicts diversify and amplify, turning it into a violent and uncertain ‘strategic wasteland’. The current strategic transition is turning into a profound change in which France’s security challenges must be addressed more than ever. Hindsight, debate and reflection with a view to action are the conditions for a fruitful strategic synthesis. The French military school has always contributed to this.
J. Dufourcq
La Vigie, 10 years on …
True to its founding commitment to make the world’s major upheavals accessible to its subscribers, in order to extract a coherent and useful strategic synthesis, La Vigie has been working for ten years to identify the risks, opportunities and benefits of developing a major security and defence strategy for our country in its political-military, diplomatic, economic, technological and industrial aspects. This need remains, at a time when France and the European project it supports are going through an acute crisis of confidence.
Our current leaders are confronted with the consequences of a failure to structure a global strategic vision since the 1980s, a lack of critical analysis of acquired certainties, and an inability to establish priorities and compromises to defend the national interest at a time when major uncertainties are affecting the viability of a robust budgetary and security policy capable of countering hybrid destabilisation operations below the threshold and, once the threshold has been crossed, open conflicts between states.
In this context, La Vigie’s work is not limited to debating ideas and publishing a bi-monthly strategic newsletter under a generic signature.
With its research directors, associate researchers and network of contacts in France and abroad, based on an appetite for dialogue, credible operational experience and a proven track record in national sovereignty and international cooperation, La Vigie is charting its course. It continues to publish thematic dossiers, write specific studies, and organise or take part in refresher seminars for business and government executives, with the aim of consolidating and enhancing strategic, reactive and forward-looking thinking, open to the reality of a rapidly changing world.
It also organises and moderates open and closed symposia designed to create the conditions needed to establish a climate of trust between participants, enabling them to take a step back, examine in greater depth and clarify the issues involved in taking joint action, and identify concrete measures to achieve this. Finally, La Vigie has the capacity to involve young researchers in its work or to guide them in their work.
Among the areas of expertise in which it has distinguished itself since 2014 are: Geopolitics and strategy in the Mediterranean and African worlds, European security and nuclear deterrence, internal security and societal issues, cybersecurity and the digital revolution, naval strategy, security and the droning of maritime spaces… Its avenues for future development concern issues related to space, robotics and connected objects, contributing to the consolidation of the spirit of defence and resilience in society, and the appropriation of a sense of strategy and grand strategy by the citizen.
Ch. Pipolo
Retrospective and prospective
In the methodological toolbox of the futurist, retrospection is a form of analysis often considered to be minor. Taking an interest in the past – in this case the last ten years, as La Vigie is celebrating its tenth anniversary – means looking at how the trends that shape today’s world came about. In the military world, retrospection mainly takes the form of Retex, introspection on one’s own actions, in order to retain the best orientations and discard the least relevant.
In ten years, the strategic context has changed radically. Of course, 2014 above all marked the start of Russia’s invasion – camouflaged at the time – of Ukraine, leading to the attachment of Crimea to Moscow and the de facto autonomy of the Donbass territories, as a result of what is now known as the Maïdan Revolution. However, over the last ten years, we must not allow ourselves to be blinded by the halo of events in Eastern Europe, because it is in fact the whole world that has seen changes such as have rarely been seen in the space of a decade. In 2014, the tipping point was already being reached between the United States and its Gulf allies, with Saudi Arabia’s attempt to impose pressure on oil prices in order both to coerce the ‘bad partners’ of OPEC and to hit the US non-conventional sector hard. Unfortunately, the failure of Saudi Arabia’s manoeuvre vis-à-vis Washington led, a few months later, to the formation of OPEC+, opening up the producer cartel to Russia. It also brought these same producers closer to an important but inconvenient customer: Beijing.
China had just launched the Belt and Road Initiative and was finally asserting its military capitalism through the doctrine of civil-military fusion. It was emerging from the position of a power focused solely on economic issues. However, there was still a long way to go before Beijing could impose its views on the major players on the Central Asian-Arabian plate, even if China took advantage of the first European sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons to negotiate the Force de Sibérie gas pipeline to its advantage.
The Russia-Turkey-Iran triangle was taking shape – at that time outside Chinese tutelage – around the major issues of Syria, the Caucasus and Iraq. At the time, this triangle was rather conflictual between the three players, but it has since calmed down, thanks to a policy of exchanges between the three regional powers. While Daech was still only an embryo of Evil, the Syrian question focused solely on the survival – at the time highly unlikely – of B. El-Assad’s regime.
Finally, for France, 2014 was a time when, far from thinking about the Indo-Pacific, Paris was focusing on military interventions in Africa in support of partner countries, in a form of continuity of the multiple operations conducted since independence. At the time, we had no idea what would happen next and that the French presence would come to a sorry end.
Looking at all these changes and the speed with which they have occurred, it is easy to see that today, more than ever, there is a fundamental need for high-quality, independent strategic analysis. That’s why La Vigie has been in existence for 10 years now.
N. Mazzucchi
Terror and emptiness
In December 2014, two years after Mohamed Merah’s bloody epic, the attacks in Tours, Dijon and Nantes heralded the year 2015 under the sign of the Islamic State: Charlie Hebdo, Saint Quentin Fallavier and the Thalys left their mark. 2016 Magnanville, the Promenade des Anglais, Saint-Étienne du Rouvray; 2017 the Champs-Élysées; 2018 Arnaud Beltrame; 2019 the Préfecture de police de Paris; 2020 Samuel Paty… so many dates and events that show the vitality of terrorism in France. Is it still possible to respond to these attacks only by developing new resources and tactics? Regular reports on the number of attacks averted abound, but is it still possible to focus the forces of law and order on the terrorist threat, which justifies many repressive laws, without developing a strategy to combat the many manifestations of crime (including terrorism)?
At the same time as these cases are taking place, there is concern about everyday insecurity, not just because of the increase in ‘incivilities’, with some deaths leading to riots that escalate until they collapse of their own accord, organised crime is on the rise, and the violent protests of the black blocks are only lightly repressed. Repressive measures accompanied by ad hoc legislation will increase.
It’s as if internal security, a regalian domain if ever there was one, has been sucked in by terrorism and is struggling to find its way out. Is terror the black hole in strategic thinking? While France has long been renowned for the originality of its thinking, we have witnessed a decade of intellectual sterilisation. How do we maintain order so as not to have to re-establish it? How can we take in refugees while at the same time being able to prevent communal clashes like those that took place between Chechens and North Africans in Dijon in 2020? How can we crack down on online crime? What is the real record in terms of effectiveness in the fight against fraud, following the attachment of the Gendarmerie to the Ministry of the Interior? How effective is the fight against money laundering and financial fraud? What lessons can we learn from Bukelism in El Salvador? Note that this sterilisation of security thinking is also found in private companies: terrorism is a major risk, but €100 million is an acceptable loss for Kiabi…
These questions only elicit quick, conventional answers that don’t hold up in the long term. Internal security, however, is not a trivial matter, because if it is not guaranteed, the door is open to clan or community-based withdrawal. These structures will stand up to the State, and even forbid it to enter the territory they consider to be theirs.
The renewal of domestic thinking is not a French exception. The sterilisation of strategic thinking seems to be a common feature of many European Union countries, which succumb to the temptation to increase resources even though their finances do not allow them to do so. This is a vicious circle from which only strategic thinking can extricate us.
Ph. Davadie
10 years on
The days are long, but the years are short: for a decade now, La Vigie has been scanning the strategic horizon from a resolutely French promontory. We felt it was crucial to have an independent viewpoint, a focal point in the storm of current events, with a unique military bias. We all have (had) a link with the armed forces and strategic analysis is close to our hearts, which sometimes gives us a special vocabulary and concepts, such as ‘tactical’, ‘operative’, ‘centre of gravity’, ‘major effect’, or ‘poliorcetics’ to give you a small selection… because not everything is strategy!
The prism of military analysis is all too little used at a time when we are faced with paradoxes: the military fascinates, helped by the return of unrestrained war on our doorstep, while society has never been so ignorant of its armed forces and the issues at stake. After the suspension of military service, the new elites have hardly ever served in the armed forces, but this makes them wonder, and we sense a lack.
After years of good times and peace dividends, which were not used in a counter-cyclical way but were used to increase France’s debt, we are now experiencing the full force of the bad times, and we find ourselves unable to provide our armed forces with new resources to meet their needs, at a time when we feel the need to do so the most, due to the budgetary crisis.
Thousands of additional reservists are being recruited, but the activities of operational reservists already in post are being cancelled because of a lack of budget: a cruel disillusionment…
The premise of La Vigie is not to confine ourselves to the sometimes painful observation of a generalised feeling of decline, but to try each time to sketch out glimmers on the horizon and to provide a framework for regaining that ‘freedom of action’, which is so dear to us and which is the prerogative of sovereign countries. As Faust said, ‘in the beginning was action’! So let’s certainly show ‘economy of means’, so that we can ‘concentrate our efforts’ and win! But all of this presupposes thinking about and formalising strategic objectives, a process of reflection that we intend to nurture and even stimulate, for a new decade now! The next ten years will be exciting and will require exemplary discipline and rigour to preserve, safeguard and promote France’s interests, for the greater good of the French people, whom we all wish to protect throughout the world.
V. Fèvre