As the doors open onto the 54th edition of the Paris Air Show, this special issue of Revue Défense Nationale focuses on the interests of the French Air and Space Force in the current international context.

The complexity of this unsettled geopolitical environment, together with increasingly tense balances of power between states, is creating new challenges for aerospace power, which are discussed in the first part of this review.

It is essential for France to have guaranteed freedom of action in the third dimension and in space.

However, with apologies to Plato, if you seek the end, you have to want the means.

Material resources, human resources, activities and organisations need to be permanently examined, adapted and adjusted.

Moreover, the air arm and technological progress are so intimately linked that the innovations of our Defence Industrial and Technological Base (DITB) are of strategic importance to our forces.

All consideration of the defence economy must allow us to breathe new life into them.

With that in mind, this edition of RDN is almost a reflection of how air strategy is conceived: starting with the objectives to be sought, it proposes a number of ways to achieve them, and offers some outlines for the future to enable us to maintain an advantage in the concert of nations.

I would like to thank those who have contributed to this edition of RDN for their effort in highlighting French military aeronautical and space expertise.

I wish you a good read and a pleasant visit to the Paris Air Show! ♦