Josselin Droff and Julien Malizard, published an article co-authored with Olivier Schmitt (Professor at the University of Southern Denmark) in Defence and Peace Economics (DPE).
Title «When Military Interventions Decrease Military Power Evidence from the French Case », This article contributes to the literature on the strategic utility of field operations by examining their structural impact on the armed forces, It is therefore at the crossroads of defence economics and security studies. It therefore lies at the intersection between defence economics and security studies.
The authors study France's external operations over the last 30 years and highlight a causal relationship between the number of operations and their impact on the environment. field operations and the degradation of availability of major equipment of the French armed forces, in addition to structural determinants of availability such as the’age of equipment as well as the size of the parks and any scale effects partners.
This phenomenon is due to a excessive operational tempo, In other words, at a level of deployment that is difficult to sustain given the capacity for regeneration. The article quantifies a phenomenon that has been observed intuitively in political debates in recent years.
External operations introduce a fundamental arbitration for the public decision-maker in the conduct of defence policy: between the force structures and skills (and associated acquisition and training programmes) designed for stability and counter-insurgency operations on the one hand, and the force structure and skills designed for high-intensity warfare on the other. As a result, external operations, conducted in excess and at an intensive pace, can diminish the ability to conduct high-intensity warfare.
More specifically, the article makes three contributions to the academic literature:
- Firstly, it contributes to the literature on safety studies by identifying and measuring a «hidden cost» military intervention, thereby contributing to the wider debate on its strategic utility.
- Secondly, it contributes to the literature on the economics of defence by demonstrating a causal link between the issues of availability of military equipment and operational tempo.
- The third contribution is of a methodological nature, since the authors use a multilevel econometric model (or mixed model) to measure and study the development of a specific dimension of military power: the availability of equipment.
