The United States has long enjoyed undisputed supremacy in international air, sea and submarine space. Today, that era of supremacy is coming to an end.

Léon MALCOLM considers that the strategies of denial of access and area exclusion allow China to create a zone within which any foreign power wishing to deploy there would risk heavy material and human losses.

The weapons systems deployed along its coastline effectively provide a conventional deterrent.

The urban environment is becoming an essential terrain for modern warfare, as we have seen in Bosnia with Sarajevo, in Iraq with Falluja or in Grosny in Chechnya. It is highly diversified: residential areas which can be more or less dense and which alternate with industrial and commercial areas, office buildings, railway stations, airports...

In a historical field study, one officer, somewhat teasingly, said of the German offensive in the Ardennes in 1940: "Guderian is daring because he succeeded. If the offensive had failed, he would have been incompetent". Is audacity not inherent in the nature of daring? Is it only a subjective notion, a viewpoint of the spectator who judges the action a posteriori? Is it just a matter of chance, a roll of the dice whose success depends on his lucky star (or his opponent's unlucky star)? In short, is the audacity we cherish so much a fantasy of dreamy kids? The author of this article passionately provides his personal answers to these questions.

In the LBDSN 2013, the gun is no longer mentioned as a major weapon in the French arsenal... Is this an oversight or a sign of decommissioning?

There are many examples in France's military history where the size and capabilities of its army are described by an inventory in which the gun has been mentioned since the Middle Ages. Must the cannon now be an outdated system or revolutionized by technology so that its digital evocation is no longer mentioned in a document such as the White Paper on Defence and National Security of 2013 (LBDSN 2013)? This observation, which may go unnoticed due to the appearance of new equipment, nevertheless raises questions about the symbolic, tactical and technical roles of firearms at the beginning of the 21st century.

The history of armaments cooperation shows that resounding failures rub shoulders with very fine successes... It also says that successes are in fact unpredictable, and that the best-built projects are not always the ones that succeed....

For SAG (2S) Patrick ALABERGÈRE, it is on the right track, even if there is still room for improvement in certain areas.

After discussing the conditions for interoperability of our armed forces, Lt(N) (2S) Eric MARGAIL reviewed the current state of the art before proposing avenues for progress.

For Lt-Gen (2S) Jean-Tristan VERNA, the acquisition of common equipment may come up against the need to preserve some of the sovereignty that is essential for defence. In addition to industrialists, it is up to the military to come closer together to ensure that their force system requirements converge.

Each of the partners of the Franco-German couple distrusts the other, both in terms of the capacity of its military and its control of arms exports. SAG (2S) Arnaud SAINTE-CLAIRE DEVILLE advocates pragmatism to overcome our mutual prejudices by accepting our differences.

Often highlighted, including in the field of defence, the Franco-German couple presents weaknesses due to certain divergent national interests. It is these weaknesses to which General (2S) Olivier de BECDELIÈVRE draws our attention.