Lessons from war in Ukraine for French military intelligence

While the Director of Military Intelligence left his position two weeks ago, the intelligence community defends the analysis that had been made of invasion risks while questioning the transparency adopted by the United States. United.

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After months of gradual and highly offensive disclosures on the intentions of the Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, the US Department of Defense gave a name to its new method: “Campaigning”. “Make country”, in French. This approach that has not prevented war, argues its contestors, but that has shoved Moscow’s plans, admit many, is now a pillar of the US National Defense Strategy (NDS). On March 28, the Pentagon made public the first extracts, which are observed with interest by the hexagonal intelligence community.

“The campaigning”, “will strengthen deterrence and will allow us to obtain benefits against all the coercive competitors’ actions,” assumes the US Department in its NDS, a single two-page document at this stage , preamble to the equivalent of his future white defense paper. “The United States will synchronize the broader efforts of the ministry […] to undermine the acute forms of competitors’ coercion, complicating their military preparations and develop our own combat capabilities with allies and partners”, is it also specified.

The United States does not reinvent war communication but they upset a number of secret-defense codes. One way to do the United Kingdom already rallied, and considered today as a possible “GAME change” by a French military source in a context of strategic cycle change. “The strength of an authoritarian regime is the ability to unify the speech and not accountability. The strength of democracies is transparency,” she abounds.

Differences of analysis

By forging this concept of “Campaigning”, the Americans put a word on reflections that were already underway within the intelligence community, but were drowned in the broader field of “informational struggle”. This rupture of the us and customs weighed on the eviction of the Chief of the Military Intelligence (DRM), the Prudent General Eric Vidaud, at the end of March, beyond the inimities and controversies about the anticipation of the war.

The former boss of the DRM, General Christophe Gomart (2013-2017), remembers and in 2014, it was by a courteous phone call that “the American General Philip Mr. Breedlove, Supreme Commander Allied forces in Europe, had warned former chief of staff of the armies [CEMA], General Philippe de Villiers, of the imminence of the donbass invasion by Russia “. This time, the current CEMA, General Burkhard, like the executive as a whole, had to deal with the thread with the thundering American preventive declarations and the daily tweets of the Defense Intelligence, British military intelligence.

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/Media reports.