Jean Belin and Josselin Droff took part on November 27, 2024 in the Defense and Aerospace Advanced Training Course (CopDa), organized in Massy (Safran University) by the Defence & Aerospace Chair, led by General (2S) Laurent.
For the past 6 years, the Chair has been taking part in this event, which is an opportunity to present the work of its research team to an audience that includes industrialists from the defence sector.
After tracing the links between the defence economy and the economy of conflict, Jean Belin presented the fundamentals of the defence economy. He also discussed the specific characteristics of defence companies when compared with companies in the civilian sector. The issues surrounding the financing of defence companies were detailed, from the perspective of technological and financial change in the global economy. The conference concluded with a discussion of the war economy and the many challenges it poses.
Josselin Droff presented a paper on cooperative armaments programmes. After outlining the state of the art in the evaluation of cooperative programmes, he emphasised the advantages and limitations of such programmes. He then proposed an empirical exercise on production times for fighter aircraft. A symbol of prestige and military power, fighter aircraft represent a particularly complex market, subject both to financial constraints and to political and diplomatic uncertainties.
The discussions that followed with the participants focused on the issues surrounding the renewal of combat aircraft, but also on more general questions such as the factors of a country's strategic autonomy, the preservation of industrial skills within the DTIB and cooperation between defence companies in Europe, particularly in terms of R&D and innovation.
