National Defence: Cultivating Resilience and National Cohesion

The war in Ukraine has reminded Europe of a reality that several decades of peace had at times pushed to the margins of our collective imagination: the defence of a nation is not the business of its armed forces alone. It calls for a broader mobilization, a shared understanding of the threats, a capacity to accept the effort required, and a common will to preserve our freedom of action. In an environment marked by the return of high-intensity warfare, the hybridization of conflict and the weakening of international balances, national cohesion is becoming a condition of collective security.

By Lieutenant General Hervé de Courrèges, Director of the Institute for Higher National Defence Studies (IHEDN) and of Higher Military Education

Facing up to it

We must reason by placing ourselves "on the balcony of the present." Before our eyes, high-intensity conflicts are setting the planet ablaze, to the misfortune of the soldiers and civilians who lose their lives in them. These conflicts say a great deal; they give us keys to understanding modern conflict that we must analyze with the utmost precision. These transformations of war are proving today to be very substantial.

One of the main conclusions is that traditional bayonet combat has not disappeared, but that it is now combined with far more technological forms of aggression and destruction.

The challenge, therefore, is not to give up the fundamental aptitudes and capabilities of the fighter, but to add to them a further layer of digital technology, robotics and AI. This calls for agility, creativity and risk-taking, but also ruggedness, mass and power.

Our armed forces are thus preparing for this type of conflict while also carrying out, at the lower end of the warfare-intensity spectrum, the missions assigned to them on national territory to protect our fellow citizens—not least against the terrorist threat, which persists. Preparing for tomorrow does not suspend today's missions; it is added to them, in a continuum of commitments that demands endurance, clarity and constancy.

National cohesion: a foundation

In the current context, national cohesion can no longer be reduced to mere social harmony; it has become the indispensable foundation of our collective security. It is defined by the shared capacity of a nation to stand united in the face of hybrid threats and to accept the constraints of a demanding defence posture.

This inner unity is in itself a weapon of deterrence, for it denies the adversary any possibility of fracturing our political will or our economic resilience. It guarantees that, in the ordeal of high-intensity warfare, every citizen takes on the role of an active and resilient link in our defence.

Defence: a common effort

The conflict in Ukraine imposes on everyone a paradigm shift, in keeping with the mission the IHEDN has fulfilled since 1936: defence is not a matter reserved exclusively for the military; it requires an effort by the entire nation. This self-evident truth, long dimmed by decades of peace, must regain its full place in our public debate. To strengthen the nation's resilience, the armed forces and our Institute alike work actively to make leaders and citizens aware of the sharpness of the risks and threats, in order to instill a powerful spirit of defence—one meant to take shape, when the time comes, in a firm will to defend. We must imperatively move beyond the circle of the initiated, to make a society that has enjoyed a long period of more than eighty years of peace on its soil realize that this peace is never a given, and that it is a good worth defending.

The IHEDN carries out this work with the aim of leaving no one behind. Its action is conducted as close as possible to the territories, through regional sessions that bring together elected officials and local stakeholders to anchor the reality of national defence as close to the ground as possible. The strength of our armed forces, who bear the nation's arms, is deeply nourished by the lucidity and the strength of that nation. In other words, national defence can be fully understood only as an overall dynamic, in which the armed forces and the nation reinforce one another.

Reaching out to young people

As for young people, the IHEDN and its community of auditors have been deeply involved since the 1980s in keeping the "academic triads" alive among middle- and high-school students. Defence and global-security classes, as well as citizenship rallies, are organized by the Ministry of the Armed Forces and the Ministry of National Education to develop this spirit of defence. Today, following a parliamentary proposal, we are going to broaden this effort to reach the defence liaison officers who sit on municipal councils. Strengthening this bond between citizens and the armed forces also runs through the greater development of the citizen and operational reserves. Familiarizing young people with defence issues cannot rest on a single lever, for it is the synergy of all these mechanisms that guarantees a lasting civic awareness. Schools play the role of an indispensable intellectual foundation by forging critical thinking, while the reserves and, today, the voluntary national service offer a concrete experience of the collective and of discipline. In parallel, involvement in associations and roots in the local community allow young people to grasp the realities of resilience as close as possible to their daily lives—as I see in our community through the many activities of the "Jeunes IHEDN." It is the coherent articulation of these different vectors that transforms theoretical knowledge into a genuine culture of sovereignty and resilience. By bringing these paths together, we enable every young person to feel fully invested in the protection and the destiny of the nation. In recent years our youth has lived through a great many major crises that have shaken society—economic, terrorist, pandemic, environmental, and war—and so this generation is sober in the face of a future it senses to be dangerous. We must give it the keys to understanding this complex environment, within which conflict occupies a growing place, so that it mobilizes alongside its elders to remain master of our collective destiny.

By giving value to these forms of involvement, defence gradually becomes a shared responsibility, making each citizen a conscious actor in the nation's overall resilience in the face of present and future crises. In a more unstable world, our foremost strength perhaps lies there: in a nation capable of understanding the threats, standing united, and remaining master of its collective destiny.