Focus Stratégique - Toward the End of Force Projection? I. The Anti-Access Threat Focus stratégique, No. 20 bis, July 2011
Force projection has become a general posture and a fundamental dimension of the influence Western powers intend to exert over the world by means of their armed forces.
However, for the last fifteen years, Western states' adoption of expeditionary postures has encouraged the proliferation of certain technologies. The latter favor strategies based on naval and air interdiction, and threaten to render foreign interventions too costly. This article thus seeks to provide some clues for understanding and assessing the threat anti-access strategies pose to Western, and especially European, force projection capabilities. In order to illustrate in a concrete way the potential problems regional adversaries can pose, this article will focus on assessing the Iranian anti-access threat.