PARIS — As he stood on the stage to deliver a keynote speech, Gen. Fabien Mandon, France’s military chief of staff, summed up the theme of the Paris Naval Conference in six direct words.
“Today,” he said, “we are preparing for war.”
The tone of the event, which saw leaders from NATO sea services gather in Paris Feb. 2-3, was decidedly direct: that France and its allies need to consider the reality that high-intensity conflict is likely in the near future. And, according to Mandon, France is not yet fully prepared.
He warned that currently France has an “insufficient number of ships and armaments” and especially needs “more missiles with greater range and lethality.” As a result, he has “to make a bet that whatever we order today will still be appropriate in 60 years time.”
Vice Adm. Alban Lapointe, the deputy chief of the French Navy, later added that Europe must be prepared by 2030 for war “in every compartment” and “to achieve that we must reinforce our means, our support and our minds.”
The vibes were matched by a panel of the naval chiefs of staff, featuring Adm. Nicolas Vaujour of France, Adm. Giuseppe Berutti-Bergotto of Italy, Vice-Admiral Harold Liebregs of the Netherlands (and Benelux), Gen. Sir Gwyn Jenkins of the United Kingdom and Adm. Daryl Caudle of the United States.
In their respective speeches all five mentioned the diversity of threats, but only Caudle mentioned China. The others, perhaps naturally given that Moscow is waging a war in Europe, earmarked Russia as the principal threat.
Vaujour remarked that the “tools of international regulation are no longer functional” and that the threat is diversifying not only to include states and proxies such as the Houthis in the Red Sea but also “from the sea-bed to space” which was not the case a decade ago. Noting the remarkable success of Ukraine against the Russian fleet using drones “this shows us that the key to success is in agility and so the navy must be adaptable by design” — something, he admitted, was “real tricky.”
Caudle remarked that the “cost of entry for very significant capabilities” was “ever lowering” also mentioning the ballistic missiles the Houthis had fired in the Red Sea.
Jenkins said that the combination of the pace of technological change and the “very difficult to predict” fragmentation of the world order “lead to uncertainty.” He regretted that “we’ve almost normalized the war in Ukraine” with media attention captured by other events such as Greenland and the Epstein files. But, he warned, “the Russian investment in the northern fleet is undiminished” and therefore “frigates and subs are not enough, we have to develop a different approach.”
Liebregs noted that “Russian affiliated ships loiter over vital infrastructure, drones fly over our territory, we suffer from GPS jamming and denial. We should not accept this as the new normal.” And he stressed that “we need to step up the game and prepare for war.”
Speaking to media after this speech, Liebregs added that “if the war in Ukraine ends we’ll be facing a new war by this adversary.”
Italy’s concerns are more tuned to the Mediterranean than the Baltic and the Arctic but there too “the southern flank of the Alliance is not very stable. New players are entering and old ones are coming back.” Berutti-Bergotto pointed out that the Mediterranean is a relatively shallow sea, its deepest point is the 5,112 (16,771 feet) Calypso deep off the western coast of Greece but elsewhere the deepest areas are about 3,000 meters (9842,52 ft) “and today these depths are accessible with modern technology.”
They all talked about sharing the workload between manned and unmanned systems and the modularity of ships. “The key is how to get humans and machines to work together,” Jenkins said.
Industry, Technology Keys For Naval Future
But all is not lost, according to attendees. Officials pointed to two key roles industry can play to support NATO’s naval capabilities: expanding the speed of production, and helping navies understand the use of data.
Gen. Marie David of the DGA French procurement agency said Paris is purposefully spreading its naval build orders across several different shipyards, which provides resilience for both the military and industry’s bottom line.
“There are about 1,000 companies in the French naval defense sector, of which 250 are critically important. These are not saturated with public sector contracts at the moment so the model we’re aiming for is that about 20 percent of their turnover should be from military contracts,” David explained.
For example, the contracts to build the 10 “patrouilleur hauturier” (ocean patrol vessels) designed by Naval Group were awarded in 2023 to three different shipyards: CMM Naval, Piriou and Socaranam meaning they will be delivered much faster than if just one shipyard was building them.
David remarked that another key to speeding up delivery of assets is “to cut down on our specifications and simplify our needs.” She added that “European cooperation is part of our strategy.”
Thierry Weulersse, Thales’ “ReArm Europe” vice-president, told attendees that his company is attempting to raise the speed of production on radars by two-to-four times and of dipping sonars by even eightfold.”
He added that industry was also responsible for ensuring that “the materiel we deliver remains in good working order so we must provide more support [in situ].” He added that hundreds of Thales staff were also military reservists “so if they need to go into a combat zone to maintain or repair one of our bits of equipment that is not a problem as they would not be considered civilians.”
Former French navy Captain Olivier Burin des Roziers, now director of navigation programs with Safran Electronics & Defense, suggested that another key was for industry to “build-up our stocks of critical materiel and be able to produce large quantities of inexpensive equipment.”
As to how to use systems at sea, Capt. Bryan McCavour, deputy assistant chief of staff for information warfare in Britain’s Royal Navy, said that mastery of data as “essential for military operations.”
He said that “if we don’t have mastery of data we’re going to lose,” explaining in firepower terms that “data is the ammunition, but we need a gun and that gun is computing power.” For him “computing power, both ashore and at sea, must be resilient and redundant. We need this capability and this power as a society, not just within the military, in order to make sense of data. Therefore, we need to look to the commercial sector; we cannot rely solely on sovereign military capabilities for computing.”
However, Capt. Jérome Henry, currently head of training with the French navy, made an interesting counterpoint — saying that he needs his sailors to go “back to the 80s” to relearn how to use sextants and other mechanical equipment, which cannot be interfered with by hacking or other data impeding actions.
He added that after the experience of being the captain of the Alsace frigate which had to fire Aster missiles against ballistic missiles launched by the Houthis in the Red Sea, “We realized that our crew were suffering a level of stress they had not been trained for” so “now we are using simulators to put our crews into high levels of stress after they’ve run or done some push-ups to get their heartbeat rate up even before the exercise.”
Marc Aussedat, a retired Vice Admiral who commanded FRSTRIKEFOR from 2019-2021 and was deputy director of the DGA from 2023-2025, raised another concern that needs to be addressed: the supply chain to the front lines.
“By essence the navy is expeditionary, so we have built-in knowledge of what we need [fuel, food, ammunition etc.] before we have to stop,” he said. “Everything is front-line, every node is a front-line,” so “we need to design and train for resilient logistics from the outset.”
He revealed that France, like China, is looking into the feasibility of using civilian ships to support the military.
