Allow me to salute General Pascal Façon, Director of the Centre for Doctrine and Command Education, for holding this colloquium. I remember your hearing, General, before the committee shortly after the last colloquy. The theme chosen this year is a bit a continuation of the one chosen last year, which was devoted to victory, and I will try to participate in the deepening of this reflection, on the theme: "War at a distance, winning through contact".

The Command Doctrine and Training Centre will hold an international forum on the principles of war in 2035 on 12 and 13 June 2019. This study is a continuation of the reflections initiated in 2017 by the Joint Centre for Concepts, Doctrines and Experimentation (JCCDE)[1] and the CDEC[2].

"War at a distance(s), winning through contact" is the theme of this third annual colloquium on military thought organised by the Centre for Doctrine and Command Education. This meeting between civilians and soldiers aims to address the problem of the relationship between the phenomenon of "war" and the notion of distance. This is a central issue for the Army, at a time when technical developments and the practice of proxy warfare could distort the link between the armed force, the battlefield and the population.

Moscow's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was based on its perception of the conflict, on its internal problems, not on global international political considerations. A strategic defeat, the war waged by the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 was not a military failure. Through innovation, decentralization of command, taking the population into account, the Red Army kept the Mujahideen at a distance, which only the American Stingers saved from annihilation.

THE CHALLENGES POSED BY THE NOTION OF DISTANCE

Distance, against who?

When facing an opponent, making contact means abolishing, at least partially, the distance. Our recent engagements remind us that in order to track down a determined opponent on difficult terrain, it is sometimes necessary to go as far as hand-to-hand combat, and therefore to go to zero distance. However, even in contact, good soldiers know that they must keep a distance, which will then be called retreat, composure and discernment, in order to provide a firm, safe, appropriate and proportionate response - as we have seen recently on national territory.

This book, published by the Command Doctrine and Training Centre, is a collection of speeches given at the Military Thought Colloquium held on 31 January 2019 at the École Militaire.
The purpose of this book is to provide food for thought on the use of the Army and more generally on defence issues.

Amazing. Very interesting and well written by a British historian - Giles Milton - very well documented. Some of the archives were only opened in 1978 or even more recently. The work opportunely completes what is already known about the British SOE (Special Operations Executive), and especially about the institutions of secret warfare that Winston Churchill set up in July 1939 with few means and for which he was the sole responsible.

On a "history" page of a regional site, it says¹ the following judgment: "The victory of the English at Crécy was a victory of obedience over indiscipline, of organization over improvidence, of the English bow over the crossbow...The battle of Crécy is a considerable event in history, as for the first time chivalry was defeated by infantry. "There is nothing extraordinary about this summary, nor does it prove any particular incompetence: we regularly hear such stories in our amphitheatres and workrooms. Usually, the purpose of the subject is to make the arguments of anyone who questions the relevance of the tactical doctrines we will call "retrograde" in advance. doctrines that are at least partly based on the idea that technical innovations will solve tactical problems.

The quantum computer

Moore's famous law predicted that the number of transistors on a microprocessor would double every eighteen months. Based on these calculations, by 2020, the size of a transistor will approach that of an atom, marking the end of Moore's Law as the need for computing capacity continues to increase. It was therefore necessary to imagine a new type of computer using the quantum properties of the atom.

While a security gap often takes several years to close, the interconnection of systems continues to grow exponentially, paving the way for new threats. While today's computing power remains relatively limited, massive attacks with increasingly serious consequences are multiplying and highlighting the system's shortcomings. At the same time, the advent of quantum computers in the near future will call into question the very basis of our concepts for securing transmissions. Battalion Commander Morales considers that cryptographic research today is of strategic importance in order to face tomorrow's threats.