Les chausse-trapes de la remontée en puissance : Défis et écueils du redressement militaire
A process of military resurgence shows a government’s will to strengthen its defense apparatus, either to face new strategic challenges or, more frequently, to reverse decline of its capabilities.
The ongoing budgetary crisis, which keeps harming many countries, causes an accelerated weakening of European armed forces. Thus, the question of military resurgence is urgent, at least for those countries that deem necessary maintaining a credible defense tool. Military resurgence is everything but simple. The sharper the drop in capabilities, the more difficult, costly and long the resurgence will be. A swift consolidation may be enough to patch up an apparatus that suffers from minor shortcomings. Should these multiply up to the point of endangering the coherence of the system, a much more substantial build-up would be needed. Ultimately, only a massive, enduring and global effort of reconstruction could efficiently deal with the actual collapse of armed forces. Consequently, this paper highlights the critical importance of threshold effects when considering the development and sustainment of such an effort, effects which must be taken into account before any crippling decision is taken. More specifically, loss of either military or industrial skills has to be carefully thought on and controlled, otherwise the resurgence will fail, however ample the funding may be.
This content is available in French: Les chausse-trapes de la remontée en puissance : Défis et écueils du redressement militaire
Security Studies Center
Heir to a tradition dating back to the founding of Ifri, the Security Studies Center provides public and private decision-makers as well as the general public with the keys to understanding power relations and contemporary modes of conflict as well as those to come. Through its positioning at the juncture of politics and operations, the credibility of its civil-military team and the wide distribution of its publications in French and English, the Center for Security Studies constitutes in the French landscape of think tanks a unique center of research and influence on the national and international defense debate.
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