The Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, affirmed on Tuesday in Dakar the need for France’s defense industry to “get into stimulation” to meet external demand and the possible needs of national forces. “We have a quality defense industry, but which must necessarily be stimulated,” the minister told reporters, when asked about the ability of French industrialists to help Ukraine while meeting the needs and demands of national forces. and foreign partners.
“We cannot say that we have strategic autonomy if we need Pierre, Paul, Jacques, all over the world to manufacture our powder,” he added. A ministry official cited the example of the Caesar cannon, of which France delivered copies to Ukraine and which “everyone wants to buy”. French industry must “be able to make mass, especially for our army”, he said on condition of anonymity.
Sébastien Lecornu was Monday in Ivory Coast and Tuesday in Senegal, two close allies in a region and on a continent where the French presence is abused. It was a question of continuing the project of “rearticulation” of the French military presence in Africa, of evoking the fallout from the war in Ukraine and Russian entry into the continent, as well as cooperation against jihadism in the Sahel, a he detailed. The Russian invasion divided African countries and many of them refrained from condemning it. French soldiers were pushed out of Mali in 2022 by a junta that turned to Russia. Another junta in neighboring Burkina Faso has just asked France to withdraw the 400 soldiers from the Saber force.
Sébastien Lecornu, who met Senegalese President Macky Sall and his counterpart Sidiki Kaba, underlined the training that France can provide to both Senegalese and Ivorian forces in this “rearticulation”. His interlocutors expressed their expectations “on issues related to equipment, not equipment that France could give, but that France could sell”, he said.
Senegalese officials “feel that French industrialists lack interest in smaller markets” like their own, as they are determined to prevent jihadism from reaching their territory, a French ministry official said. “They feel it’s less complicated” with other supplier countries, he explained. The same official affirmed that the personnel of Saber were not intended to be redeployed elsewhere in Africa, with a few possible exceptions, and certainly not in Senegal, where France has a few hundred soldiers, mainly devoted to training.
