The US military-technological revolution and the ‘Europeanization’ of the French defence industrial sector during the 1990s
RUSI JOURNAL FEBRUARY 2004 This article suggests a possible correlation between the United Statesled military-technological revolution and the cab for 'Europeanization' of the French defence industry during the 1990s. It presents French views with regard to the US-promoted 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA) and points to elements that fostered an intensified European orientation of the French defence industry during the 1990s. I
France and the Revolution in Military Affairs
The 1990s saw massive changes in French defence policy and a growing debate about the existence of a revolution in military affairs (RMA). Throughout the history of the Atlantic Alliance, France was seen as the most critical of the European allies of American strategic initiatives like Flexible Response and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Given this history of critical views of strategies within the alliance and the current Anglophone dominance of the RMA debate, incorporating the French perspective can be valuable in order to have a more complete picture of the concept. This study shall investigate French reactions in order to see if issues similar to the RMA debate played a role in French defence reform, and the views of French officers and academics of the RMA in general. The RMA entered the larger debate of rethinking western military doctrine after the Cold War. It became prominent in the US defence establishment, under the influence of Andrew Marshal, of the Office of Net Assessment, and Admiral William Owens, formerly of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Given that the RMA is an American idea, other nations were mostly absent from the RMA debate. Although some of the closest allies of the United States, Great Britain and Australia, displayed an interest in it, nonAmericans figure rather minimally in the RMA debate. They appear usually only within the general worry over the ‘transatlantic technological gap’ – that in pushing through with developing RMA capabilities, the US will outpace its allies technologically and coalition operations will become increasingly difficult. As several observers noted, France was relatively unprepared for a conflict like the Gulf War. The American military’s strengths in power projection, information and electronic warfare, intelligence gathering, and stand-off weapons (like stealth aircraft and ‘smart munitions’) was a massive contrast to the hastily assembled French Division Daguet, which seemed like an anachronism from the era of colonial bush wars. French reliance on American intelligence and communications (in particular spatial
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.