L’armée de l’Air & de l’Espace va renforcer ses liens avec l’US Air Force
The French Air Force to strengthen ties with the US Air Force
The French Air Force already has close links with the US Air Force, notably through the Trilateral Strategic Initiative (TSI), which was launched in 2010 and also involves the Royal Air Force.
The TSI is based on a Trilateral Strategic Steering Group, which is responsible for deciding on "structuring subjects to be explored in greater depth", and a Trilateral Operations Steering Group, whose purpose is to encourage the sharing of technical and operational know-how between the French, British and Americans, particularly during the Atlantic Trident exercises.
And these links, forged over time during exercises [such as Red Flag] and joint operational engagements, led, for example, to Operation Hamilton, conducted against the Syrian chemical weapons programme in April 2018. And Air Force and RAF aircraft are still operating regularly alongside them in the Levant as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.
That said, as General Philippe Lavigne, then Chief of Staff of the French Air Force, pointed out shortly before Exercise Atlantic Trident 21, the ability to act jointly is never definitively acquired. "Interoperability requires constant effort", he said.
Indeed, last year, General Frédéric Parisot, Major General of the AAE at the time, expressed concern about the lack of interoperability between the Rafale and the American F-35.
"We would like to be able to operate in the same way as we did in 2018 during the raid on Syria's chemical programme" but "I'm not sure that's possible at the moment, because there are more and more F-35 squadrons within Nato and our interoperability between the F-35 and the Rafale is still a work in progress", he told Breaking Defense.
As a reminder, the F-35s use the MADL [Multi Function Advanced Data Link] data link system, which enables them to communicate discreetly with each other. But for them to be able to transmit information to other aircraft [and receive it from them], they need a communications gateway, called a BACN [Battlefield Airbone Communication Node].
Has the problem raised by General Parisot been resolved? The fact remains that, on 19 September, two French Rafales and two American F-35As took part in a "joint operational flight" in the Iraqi-Syrian zone... This is a "concrete illustration of the high level of coordination and cooperation within Operation Inherent Resolve", as the French Defence Staff [EMA] simply commented via X/Twitter.
On the same day, General Stéphane Mille, the current Chief of Defence Staff, signed a letter of intent with his American counterpart, General Charles Q. Brown, with a view to strengthening and intensifying cooperation between the AAE and the US Air Force.
The content of this letter of intent was not specified... But General Brown used the expression "integration by design", which refers to a concept he has been promoting for several months. It aims to ensure that the US Air Force and its partners work together from the outset of a project to make the right decisions in terms of interoperability, capability development and information sharing.
The "Integrated by Design" concept "does not replace our current efforts, but it embodies the idea that we need to collaborate and make decisions together on interoperability, resource investment, information sharing, force development and strategy from the outset", explained General Brown in July 2022.
"There are some things that frustrate me: we tend to drift away from our allies and partners because we don't think about how we integrate them from the outset," he had previously told Aviation Week. "If the goal is to be truly integrated with allies or partners, then we need to start with that from the beginning, rather than developing a plan solely from an American perspective and then trying to get our allies or partners to buy into it," he added.
bear witness to a partnership based on trust, for the benefit of regional stability. The fight against terrorism [ISIL] continues.
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