Toujours plus chers ? Complexité des armements et inflation des coûts militaires
While French military expenditures have remained relatively constant over the last ten years, equipment production tended to decrease, resulting in capability gaps. This situation highlights the increasing costs of both acquiring and maintaining highly complex modern military equipment.
By decomposing the cost factors, this paper contends that technical complexity is one of the most prominent causes of “military inflation” - albeit by no means the only one - in the production as well as in the support phase. While efforts to reduce costs have focused on organizational issues, uncertainty over the conditions of future warfare compels actors to produce high-tech and multi-purpose material, at the risk of exceeding operational requirements. For this reason, it is necessary to define more clearly the military’s expectations so that technical complexity matches operational sufficiency.
This study is in French only: Toujours plus chers ? Complexité des armements et inflation des coûts militaires
Author(s)
Related centers and programs
Discover our other research centers and programs
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.
Find out more
Discover all our analyses
Return to the East: the Russian Threat and the French Pivot to Europe's Eastern Flank
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, has flung Europe’s Eastern flank into a new phase of strategic confrontation. It has had a major effect on France’s position, which was previously somewhat timid, leading it to significantly reinforce its deterrence and defense posture in support of the collective defense of Europe, in the name of strategic solidarity and the protection of its security interests.
Military Stockpiles: A Life-Insurance Policy in a High-Intensity Conflict?
The war in Ukraine is a reminder of the place of attrition from high-intensity conflict in European armies that have been cut to the bone after three decades of budget cuts. All European forces have had to reduce their stocks to the bare minimum. As a result, support to Ukraine has meant a significant drain on their operational capabilities. A significant amount of decommissioned systems were also donated, due to the lack of depth in operational fleets.
France’s Place Within NATO: Toward a Strategic Aggiornamento?
With a rapidly deteriorating security environment, a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, internal disputes exploding into public view, and questions being raised about the scope of its security responsibilities, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) seemed to be in dire straits at the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Towards a European Nuclear Deterrent
While major European powers may have to contemplate nuclear deterrence without America, the national flexibility and European financial support required to make it feasible is currently difficult to imagine.