Posted on 08/12/2013 8:05:41 PM PDT by neverdem
France’s campaign in Mali exposes Europe’s unpreparedness for 21st-century war.
WITH WELL-ARMED radical Islamist insurgents closing in last winter on Mali’s capital, Bamako, French President François Hollande suddenly decided to defend Western civilization. Plunging in the polls as the most unpopular French president since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958, he just might have had ulterior motives; diverting hostile public opinion at home with a military escapade abroad is a tried and true tactic for floundering chiefs of state. Be that as it may, French troops, mainly Foreign Legion, began deploying to Mali in Operation Serval on January 11. The French applauded his unwonted boldness. He got a brief bump in the polls.
But it quickly became clear that Hollande, for maximum go-it-alone swagger, had ordered the operation without prior consultation with his potential allies. Even less had he assembled an operational coalition. France’s great new friend Germany quickly ruled out sending combat troops, proving that the ballyhooed Franco-German Brigade is useful only for creating a façade of European military cooperation and parading down the Champs-Elysées on Bastille Day. The European Union hemmed and hawed, finally promising a modest training mission for African troops in Mali. Even NATO, eager for new missions to justify its existence in the absence of the Cold War, declined to get involved.
The European Defense Agency (EDA) in Brussels, created nine years ago ostensibly to further European defense cooperation? Count them out: They’re too busy with visionary projects like using solar power to reduce military energy needs. As retired French Air Force General Étienne Copel, a former assistant chief of staff, scoffs, “The EDA is incapable of even doing a feasibility study. The lack of an operational European defense effort is a catastrophe.” That left Britain to volunteer a couple of military transports...
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
I never understood making the F-35 with those possibilities at hand.
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