Les opérations aéroportées : la profondeur stratégique en question
Airborne operations draw their strategic importance from the scale and magnitude they provide to air-land operations. Yet, their concept of employment, shaped by their historical legacy may seem unfit to contemporary requirements - especially regarding their vulnerability during dropping and penetration phases when troops are isolated and highly dependent on external support.
Recent trends in the global strategic environment make a shift towards more precision and polyvalence necessary. Addressing the challenge of interoperability requires an improvement of pooling and sharing within the forces, not to mention strengthened support tools and command and control capacities. If airborne operations surely are a crucial instrument for the Western power projection, they are also a combating lab that has to adapt constantly to evolutions of the nature of war in order to remain relevant in spite of its cost.
This paper is published in French only – Les opérations aéroportées : la profondeur stratégique en question
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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