Focus Stratégique - Les opérations aéroportées : la profondeur stratégique en question Focus stratégique, No. 37, May 2012
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 [1]