Engagement on and near the ground aims at physically dominating the enemy and taking moral ascendancy over him, until his destruction if necessary. In the future, this confrontation will continue to take place in the state of confusion that distinguishes the land environment. However, the inherently chaotic nature of the conflicts will be amplified by foreseeable changes in the defence environment and the likely hardening of the conditions for air-land engagement. This transformation is already marking our times and is gradually changing the purpose of our military interventions.

Still motivated by the desire to stabilise crisis zones, tomorrow they will aim more directly at defending our major interests, even our vital interests, here and there. This effort will involve land forces in each of the five strategic functions in a necessarily global approach to conflict resolution. Prepared for this context, combining permanent and changing tasks, they will play a decisive role in this overall partition, always joint or even combined and interdepartmental.

Permanences: the theatre of air-land operations

The environment: on the ground, over time and among men

The first of the requirements is to return to the invariants of an air-land combat that takes place in three dimensions:
- in a physical dimension first of all, that of the territory. Heterogeneous, difficult, rough and compartmentalized, it will continue to be the scene of the emergence but also of the resolution of conflicts and the dispute of vital issues;

- in a human dimension then, the terrestrial environment being above all that where man lives. Because of its density and its central role in conflicts, the population will continue to have a very direct influence on the modalities of confrontation and very often on the definition of the aims of war;

- finally, as a consequence of the viscosity of the earth's environment and the human heterogeneity of theatres, in a temporal dimension, strongly dependent on decisions sometimes outside the armed forces. It will require the coexistence of perseverance, to overcome enemy resistance and restore disturbed human equilibrium, and of lightning to surprise and astound the adversary by brutally accelerating the tempo of operations.

The conditions of chaos

The intertwining of these three dimensions - physical, human and temporal - is at the root of the complexity that characterizes the earth's environment more than any other. It imposes a triple challenge on land forces:
- a physical challenge, because the disorganization of the terrain - prior or subsequent to confrontation - amplifies the obstacles naturally opposed to observation, movement and communication. It requires physical and moral endurance ;

- an intellectual challenge, resulting from the interconnection of intertwined human groups and organizations, which must be grasped and grasped;

- a cognitive challenge because of the mass of data generated by the very nature of the Earth's environment. Their distribution by information technologies and their amplification by the increasing connectivity of objects and people produce information chaos. It is a major challenge in the same way as the viscosity and opacity of the terrain or the complexity of societies.

The capability approach to the terrestrial environment

The terrestrial environment, which is conducive to many approaches to combat, will require the ability to fight against opponents alternating dilution, concentration on key points, saturation or withdrawal to sanctuaries that are favourable to bypassing power (urban areas, mountains, forests, deserts, jungle). The capability response will thus be played at three interdependent levels: the combatant level, because breaking through the opacity will continue to involve physical engagement on contact; the weapon system level, in a duel logic that will continue to give pride of place to observation and mobility performances.Finally, the force system as a whole, whose completeness and agility will enable engagement on extremely varied terrain and complementary effects.