Brennus 4.0 - N°1 - The CDEC newsletter

Today's world is undoubtedly more unpredictable, unstable and more armed than yesterday's world. Our forces face conventional, hybrid and irregular threats, both within and across borders. Conflictuality today is characterized by rapid and worrying changes, extending with great porosity to all fields of confrontation.

Thinking about tomorrow's war and combat is all the more difficult because this reflection must take into account the acceleration of societal and technological changes at the beginning of the 21st century, with all that they imply in terms of presuppositions about the forms of future competition. Moreover, the difficulty for a society that has been "hyper-pacified" for nearly sixty years to take into account the probable return of war is a major constraint. For many of our fellow citizens, this awareness comes up against the temptation of a geopolitical representation that is structuring, reassuring and too often subject to the effects of fashion. Now, "to be in the wind is to have the destiny of dead leaves" said Jean Guitton.

Faced with the resurgence of security uncertainty, the French Army is therefore striving to strengthen its capacity to anticipate and adapt to future shocks. Its freedom of action and its effectiveness in tomorrow's engagements will undoubtedly rest on its ability to maintain and continue to disseminate a singular way of thinking, making it possible to imagine appropriate responses and capabilities to these new threats and our ambitions. This thinking is ultimately aimed at guaranteeing the political decision-maker a broader and more graduated range of strategic options.

The development of a combat doctrine and the training of warlords, the future Brennus, are thus based on the development of innovative and immediately exploitable thinking. Fostering innovation consists first and foremost in encouraging the exploration of intellectual paths towards which conformism and pusillanimity do not encourage people to venture. Innovation is therefore first and foremost an intellectual posture. It can only be the result of a skilful decompartmentalization between the conclusions of rigorous multidisciplinary studies, pragmatic prospective intuition and reasoned risk-taking. Finally, in order to be truly operational, this dynamic can only be driven by a true spirit of conquest oriented solely towards action and victory.

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