Noting the lack of imagination in recent strategic analyses, in particular the White Paper on defence and national security, the author recommends that effort should be focused on the intersection of geopolitics and criminality.
After looking at the state of European and global security, and asking what it is the Europeans are afraid of and what war has become, the author goes to the heart of the matter and suggests the strategy that should be adopted for attacking the triad:
dangerous entities (organised crime and terrorism), which have to be detected and confronted; their territory, the chaotic and grey areas that must be explored and an attempt made to control them; and lastly, the trafficking (in people, small arms, false and counterfeit goods), the downside of globalisation, that has to be fought against.
So the theme of the future research programme of the Higher Council for Training and Strategic Research (CSFRS) might be: where to look and what to see.
Horizon: from the Greek horizein, originally, ‘that which limits and encloses’. The horizon draws us and our thoughts towards the future and the unbounded. If we can rise above the short-term view, our horizon will broaden to give us a view of the fresh fields of the possible.
Comprehensive Security: the Enemy, Tomorrow
The future of our defence and the context in which it will be applied has been examined in three recent documents.(1) And yet each, in its own manner of exposing the official French strategic consideration of the issue, poses a problem.
Firstly, the guiding question that is asked is not in our view the right fundamental question.(2) Specifically, the guiding question posed by the text of these documents is in what context and how should we design and prepare today for France’s defence of tomorrow? However, we believe the fundamental question should be who or what is the enemy today, who or what will it be tomorrow? We shall see later that the various parts of this question lead to different answers. This starting point will allow us to conceive defence and security arrangements for our country, without serious risk of error, out to the year 2015.
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