Transcription
Obviously, it's difficult to comment on the terrestrial domain; it's not my area, and I don't want to venture into that field. There's a Franco-German relationship that's perhaps more difficult today than it was in the past. There's perhaps a German desire to regain control of the arms industry. This will also allow me to pick up on one of the president's questions about industry and the UMM. As you all know, the automotive industry is struggling; it's struggling in France, and it's struggling badly in Germany. And so the large union Ig Metal is understandably worried about employment prospects in this industry, and about the money that has been put on the table by the German authorities to allow for the development of new military projects, with Ukraine not far away, and therefore a need that also drives these new developments in many areas, particularly terrestrial. This means that yes, there are surely some who are thinking and imagining that we will move from a declining automotive industry, declining because the Chinese are very strong, to a slightly stronger terrestrial industry. And so the battle is also engaged on the terrestrial front. I won't comment further than that.
I will, however, pick up on the fact that the French automotive industry is also suffering. The acceleration of a number of standards and capabilities has penalized our industrialists. I see this a lot, not among the major industrialists who are part of the UMM's discussions, but especially among SMEs in the regions, where everyone in the automotive sector is struggling. You have those who are lucky enough to also be in aeronautics, so they can still rebalance somewhat, but the employment areas are not quite the same, and mobility in France is not necessarily very easy. So, [grunting] we are fortunate to have a defense industry, not just aeronautics, not just combat vehicles, that is relatively well-developed. We must therefore continue this effort, perhaps develop it a little more, because we clearly sense the necessities. I would add that it is no longer a mark of shame to be in the arms sector, which was still the case a few years ago due to the infamous Brussels taxonomy on the defense and arms industry. Things have changed, I wouldn't dare say thanks to the war in Ukraine because this war is terrible, but because of the war in Ukraine, there is a European realization that things are happening. There is a European realization that the Americans are defending their interests. I mean, some, particularly in France, are not discovering that the Americans are defending American interests. It didn't take Trump to know that Americans have always defended their interests. Go and watch the film about De Gaulle, you'll see, you all know this. You've all read the General's memoirs, but despite all that, [grunting] for the younger generations, it's quite interesting to see it. It's not at all caricatured. So yes, Americans defend their interests. Are European interests part of American interests? That's a question. So this realization, like the realization about industry with the Dragu report, all of this is being put on the table. Does it at least generate a movement, an impetus? Yes, but ultimately does it bring us up to the level of what Americans can do today? We are very far from that ambition today. I think our defense sector is still something to be built. It's not for the immediate future. Today, it's NATO that could save us if we had to go to war with the Russians. Will Europeans be able to wage war alone against the Russians with their armaments, without drawing from the American inventory, without the Americans? It's not for me to answer that question. It's for the armies, it's for the politicians. It's surely one of the questions you should be working on. [grunting] And I do have a doubt today. In any case, the military organization of the Alliance is done through NATO. And from my perspective, I'm not a military person, but NATO has a chief, it has a leader. I know the word EurT. Well, yes, there is a real leader, and that leader is American. So today, we have not shed this leadership. If I take fighter jets, it's obviously the F35 that is the European fighter jet. Certainly not the Eurofighter, nor the Rafale, nor the NGF, nor the Gap. So, would making only one and bringing everyone to the table achieve that? I doubt it. I doubt it because by the time everyone agrees, you've seen, by the time the national interests of each party and the desire to reclaim a share of the pie are discussed, the Americans have brought out generations of fighter jets. They don't do that. They don't bring everyone to the table. They issue a call for tenders, they decide, and they choose the best.
For a large country, and even from time to time to have two engines for the fighter jet, two fighter jets, they have colossal means. So, in my opinion, pragmatic cooperation between states will be necessary. This is where the NGF was not necessarily a bad idea at the outset of cooperation. And the European Commission can contribute, since European budgets now include significant lines for defense, and can contribute to these projects that are initiated at the state level. So, that's a little bit of what I wanted to tell you and also to address one of the questions that was asked. Yes, history sometimes repeats itself, and we see that the hope of a more peaceful world after the fall of the Berlin Wall has not materialized. That's a first lesson. So we must continue to make development efforts. The history of cooperation on the Typhoon or the Rafale led us to the idea in the 2010s, I think some of you remember it well, you were present, to say, "Let's try to cooperate with the British." We know they are very close to the Americans, there's no doubt about that. But so we tried to say we could make a combat drone, since the combat drone, if countries hadn't followed the launch of a program, we would try to do it, and we were part of the Lancaster House agreements, which were quite advanced defense agreements between France and the United Kingdom, to try to find solutions. I worked a lot at Rolls, at BAE, at Select to find ways to cooperate with the British. It wouldn't have been easy. We had started, it would have been complicated, but it was a path. Well, this path evolved towards the Franco-German approach. Most certainly due to the Brexit effect, the change in head of state, several things happened that made us shift towards Germany. The subject nevertheless remains the same, which is that, [groan] we can do it alone, we can do it in cooperation. So, I'll clarify this because the press sometimes doesn't understand. When I say I can do it alone, I'm not saying we necessarily have the financial means to do it alone. I don't know, I'll come back to that. I'm saying technically, technologically, I know how to do it alone with my partners. It's not doing it all by myself. It's that I have, and the first of these partners I need, because that's how it is with an airplane, is the engine. An airplane without an engine doesn't fly. You saw, I had to change the engine on my Falcon 5X to make a 6X. I know what that costs and I know what it means. So the first issue is the engine. So, is there an engine to power an aircraft the size of what our armies are projecting for the horizon of 2040-2045? That's question number one. That's really the critical path issue. So we're not alone, it's not Dassault alone. So it's Safran. Can Safran cooperate with others? It has shown that it is ready to cooperate with MTU. But as an observer, I don't want to put myself in Safran's shoes. But it was a cooperation in which the architect was clearly expressed, it was Safran. It wasn't a co-leadership, even if there's a JV. JV doesn't mean much. We need electronics. A combat aircraft without electronics doesn't work. They make a system, and we're working on that with Thales, which I believe, and I might be wrong, is a leader in these fields of radar, electronic warfare, and optronics. So it's not all this expertise alone. So it's indeed a question of means. Now, in terms of means, there are two things. There are development costs. Indeed, if you do a cooperative program, you want to share. So that can offer an advantage. If you're two, you divide by two. If you're three, you divide by three. Provided, of course, that we don't increase the bill too much because we're duplicating because we want to build everything together, and ultimately, if we multiply the number of engineers and the deadlines by three, we'll end up with it costing more, even divided by three, than etc. And then there's the issue of buying the planes. And you see, and you all know, since you work on defense budgets, that buying Rafales for France isn't that simple. You need to allocate a budget. Now, the Rafale, in its category, is the cheapest aircraft. It's cheaper than a Typhoon, it's cheaper than an F35, whatever some people say. And well, you have to find the money to buy the planes. If you make a cooperative aircraft that has grown so much because everyone had to be accommodated and didn't have the will to maintain the size, then you'll make a more expensive aircraft. So you might gain at the beginning, subject to what I said before, and in addition, you have to buy the planes, and it costs. And thirdly, if the aircraft is expensive, if it's complex, etc., it will be exported less, and therefore the financial return to the country will be less. So the issue of means needs to be looked at precisely between doing it alone or doing it in cooperation. And so the path that could be a good one is the one we explored in the Neuron. The Neuron was a combat drone demonstrator. It was a stealth demonstrator, but it was also a European cooperation demonstrator to spend as little as possible and therefore maintain effectiveness. It's this way of cooperating that, in my opinion, is the right one. It means we can cooperate. We know how to cooperate. We were six countries, each in its own area of expertise, and with the will to not always do the biggest, not always duplicate, we organized ourselves accordingly, and we are fully prepared for that. If we manage to find countries with whom, and especially industrialists, because it's not just about political cooperation, we also need to have industrial cooperation where industrialists feel good. If they don't feel good, it doesn't work. We've just demonstrated that again. So, somewhere, that's what we need to find. So we can do it alone, it's possible. We can also find partners. And should these partners be exclusively in Europe? That's another question we're asking ourselves. No, no, I'm keeping the names to myself for now because I need to be in line with the State. I can't do it alone. You know my immense respect for the State.
So, regarding the engine, it's fundamental, the T-Rex, because it opens the way to an engine that would push in stone, which therefore leads to the path of an engine that would power a future combat aircraft a little above. That was one of the subjects we put on the table for the future combat aircraft, but there was a desire from some to make a very large combat aircraft. If you make a very large combat aircraft, you need an engine that pushes much more, even if you put two. So, in a way, that raised the bar even higher for Safran. So I think this iterative and realistic approach will serve the Rafale program and will serve the future combat aircraft, whatever it may be. So this is quite fundamental to see this incrementation of the engine in the development. So, we must continue to develop this, and when we do F5, when we do all these elements, we have the future in mind. Regarding the combat cloud, I remain perplexed. The cloud is a cloud, a cloud is water vapor. You see, we have to, I mean, at one point we thought everything could be dematerialized. Not everything is dematerialized. We see that in all conflicts today. What makes military effectiveness, unfortunately, is the ability to fire weapons. Weapons are good, that's it. Now, you have to fire them in the right place, you need the right information, and so on and so forth. So, the combat cloud, for us, for example, today two Rafales are working in the cloud. They are together to achieve collaborative combat. In reality, the real word, the word cloud is a bit of a misleading word. The real need, it seems to me, when we observe the Americans, it's the same, is to have a command system at all levels, whether it's C2, C3, C4, that can provide information to the different effectors, to the different shots towards the military. And so, there is a need for this large system. Today, it's a large system made for NATO by a center of companies, including Atos. Well, that's the future system. So, what needs to be taken into account today, it seems to me, is that this system will take into account space, satellites, observation. We see that in Ukraine Starlink has had a certain impact, so these are constellations of this elite. You know that our president and France want to develop Iris Squared, so a European military constellation. Well, let's ask ourselves what the Germans want to do. I understand that the Germans, when I read the press, when I talk to them, they want to create a German constellation. Well, so how will the cloud survive that? I don't know, I can't say, but it's quite surprising. I think there is a real German desire to return to these areas. We cannot ignore it. We cannot, it's just that there's money on the table, the automotive industry is declining, the chemical industry too, by the way, but but well, the industry needs to be fueled. You know that in Germany, industry is fundamental. Now, in France, we want to reindustrialize. I would remind you that today, depending on how you calculate it, we are at 10%, or even a little less than 10% of GDP. Germany must be at 16%, Italy at almost 20%, Switzerland at almost 20%. We are a deindustrialized country. So we welcome all those who say we need to reindustrialize. I don't want to get into the problem here, in front of you, but to reindustrialize a country, you really need to do what it takes for industry to be listened to and heard, and for that to lead to actions, to bills in parliament, so that we can create the environment. And I repeat, the goal is not to do industry without considering the environmental aspect, and it is through industry that we will create the right conditions for the environmental aspect, but it is not by punishing industry for the sake of the environment that it will work. So, it's that, and then, well, you know, French competitiveness is what it is. In defense, we deal with it in a certain way because it's very geopolitical. In the civilian industry, we have competitors, the French market is not sufficient. We have competitors in Europe because, as you haven't missed, there is no harmonization, neither fiscal nor social, in Europe. So there are more competitive countries within Europe with free movement of goods and people. And then you have very competitive countries not far from us, in North Africa for example, you have competitive countries now, well, it's India, for some it's China. The automotive sector is massively forced to go to China to try to counter competition and survive. So it's not by increasing taxes and social charges again that we will succeed. Now, that doesn't mean we have to liquidate the social model. Quite the contrary. How do we save the social model, which is a system that is protective for our fellow citizens? But something will have to be done. But here I'm getting into a subject that would go far beyond the scope of this morning, but which, in my opinion, is all linked at some point. Sorry, I haven't answered the last question, which was about the demonstrator, the 6th generation demonstrator for 2035. [clears throat] Yes, it's possible without the engine. The engine will take time. So we might be able to put a T-Rex in it. But there you go, the engine takes a long time. That's why I've always said, even 2040, it's not achievable to have an engine that we will have sufficiently developed and perfected for an operational aircraft. We said 2045, that's already quite ambitious if we don't stop now. The question is very interesting. First, I try to nip in the bud all the little drones that fly will never replace the big effectors because the problem is the size of the payload. Small drone equals small payload. Small payload equals small damage. It's as simple as that. If you want to make a hole in a bunker, you need a heavy weapon. This heavy weapon is carried by an increasingly large aircraft. The Americans have carried sophistication to the point of having enormous strategic bombers with weapons that can penetrate deeply and so on. You'll never do that with a drone. So the combat aircraft remains the tool of air superiority that allows you to then carry out air missions and all the plans of the Western armies, let's call them that, Western armies. It's first to do that, an air campaign, to take the sky, to be able to clear it. You've seen, we saw it in Iraq, we saw it in Libya, the Americans always do it that way. That's what happened recently in Iran. Except that at one point, the air weapon is not sufficient. It's not made for it, it's made to clear, prepare, and then normally you have landing armies or armies that arrive, and you have ground troops who do the job. So, in a way, that's the plan. The arrival of drones accentuates a certain dimension. That is to say, when you have an army of drones that can individually target almost individual objectives. You know very well that in Ukraine today, a manually piloted drone will fire to prevent soldiers on a front line. They fire soldier by soldier. So it's really very particular. They can also go and fire, but if you take, for example, Middle Eastern countries, they haven't suffered much from drone attacks. Obviously, if a drone enters a hotel, it's visible, it damages the hotel room, it can kill, there's no doubt. What also kills is the fallout from air defenses because there are very strong fragments. If you are underneath, well, you risk it. But it doesn't do the damage that deep-strike armaments, whether ground-based or air-launched, will do. So it's a new way of waging war. So you're right, we know how to make these high-level materials, and we've chosen to partner with very small companies to make the low-level materials, with which we are working, and we are working. We have chosen, at Dassault Aviation, to partner with a company that already produces thousands of drones, almost in garages, with, moreover, for Armator and for us, a logic of developing artificial intelligence to fly drones, acquire targets, and be capable of. So we are developing partnerships between these two companies, the small one that knows how to do things almost by tinkering, and the large one that knows how to do it with, and then the standards are not the same, the needs are not the same, and so we will also learn to respond in a certain way, can we not do it faster, differently, etc., but we need public power to simplify a number of constraints that are imposed on us. I remind you that the precautionary principle is enshrined in the constitution, so everything is done to make things complex. So we will need to be helped to be less and less complex. Which is not easy for an airplane because an airplane has to fly, it has to be able to fire weapons in the right place and not elsewhere, etc. So it's a new dimension. It's taken into account in all ways. We now need to make drones, small drones, to counter enemy small drones, because in any case, you see that swarms of drones flying over a city must be very, very stressful for the population, and it's part of psychological warfare, and not just psychological. It causes destruction, and in a city, it's terrible. So you see the arrival of, [grunting] nets. Now, if you drop a 1000 kg bomb, with or without a net, it will destroy the building. So you see, these are very complementary things with very different costs, etc. It needs to be integrated into future planning and forecasts, and the employment tactics need to be found, because between a Ukrainian employment tactic and an Iranian employment tactic, or an employment tactic with artificial intelligence, it's very, very different, and it will lead to very different materials. It also opens the way to how we deal with artificial intelligence in the field of armaments, how far we go, how the human is still in the loop, and how much he delegates certain missions to this artificial intelligence. This raises real questions that we will have to answer in the coming years. One of the Eurodrone, it's almost Freudian that I forgot the question. For us, it's simple. Perbus told us, "Out." Well, so, we don't agree, and so we're discussing, we're discussing why we're out. So I can't tell you more about where the program stands since the bridges are cut in a programmatic sense. After the drone, I remember, I was one of those who built it with the president at the time of Finmeccanica, it wasn't Leonardo yet, and EADS, it wasn't Airbus yet. So, you see, it's been a long time. There were three of us around the table, and I said, "One of us must be the leader," and we decided together that it would be Airbus. Now, they don't contest the fact that there shouldn't be co-leadership, right? There is a leader, but when it comes to combat aircraft, no, that's more complicated. So, the Eurodrone, I don't know, the military also needs to know. France has launched into this program. Things have evolved. A Eurodrone over the Sahel, it's true that it flies for a long time. It observes well. A Eurodrone must have relevance in an armed conflict where the sky is not completely controlled, and at least the solar threat is still there, the Rire threat is still there. [grunting] It's surely a rather easy target. So it's not for me to answer. I understood that the French no longer want to buy Eurodrones. I understood that because I read the press. It's that's it, but there were parliamentary works within it. So there is no purchase of Eurodrone in the military planning law. There is a development that is underway. Will it stop? Will it not stop? I don't know what to tell you. Yes. To address the last question, Americans first. That hasn't escaped you. Again, this is not exclusively a Trumpian political issue. It has always been the case. So, when you have operations that have been quite dense in the Middle East, you see that the munitions are mainly channeled towards the American army to conduct these operations, and we cannot criticize them in that regard. Regarding the F35s, well yes, they have sold many F35s, many more than Rafales, and particularly in Europe. And contrary to the legend, often repeated by journalists who like to bash certain capabilities, when we saw the Swiss buying F35s, our Rafale deliveries would have been made long before the F35s arrived. Same for Belgium. So we see that deliveries, even before the war in Ukraine, so we see that delivering an F35 takes much longer than delivering a Rafale. So there's no. After, they say, "Yes, but you already have orders, you'll never have to ramp up production." Well, we are ramping up production, we will deliver our aircraft, we will continue to ramp up production, we will be very busy in the next 2-3 years, but a delivery of an aircraft every 3.5 years on average. So, in any case, after 2030, we have the capacity to take on contracts immediately. Especially since France is delaying its aircraft deliveries, so we are finding ourselves with production gaps in 2031-2032, for example. We won't have any more after that. That's what Serge Dassault always told me. What you don't deliver right away is good news because you'll deliver later. Well, after, I'm not speaking for the Air Force, which will tell you very directly what it thinks, and rightly so. So, so somewhere, that's for the combat drone. I don't think we will ever replace, but I could be wrong because you should never say never, human intelligence and human sensitivity when you are in the middle of combat. That's what will make it, because if everything is automated, you'll have algorithms when algorithms. Well, it's sure that it will play, there will be some. But the pilot has this in addition, he has been trained, he has been, and in aerial combat, it's this capacity that will make the ability to succeed a little more. So that's in RR and the R threat exists. And in air-to-air, it will also be the ability to reconfigure not in the book. So I think there will always be pilots. When you conduct an operation in Iran, you say zero deaths, zero pilots captured, etc. Yes. Well, but when you wage war, if you wage World War II, there are deaths. There are deaths in every war. To wage war with zero deaths, that doesn't exist. In any case, from my perspective, etc. So the problem of saying the pilot risks being taken prisoner is not a subject. It's a communication battle. It's true that we saw it in Yugoslavia, a pilot shown on TV is very unpleasant. But like hostages, hostages are not necessarily pilots, it's always very unpleasant. It won't prevent the man who needs to be closest to the combat to understand better, and it won't prevent automation with AI, which will arrive. And so it's the combination of the two that will make the strength of modern armies. It's to be done, it's not yet done. No one is doing it, not even the Americans. Be careful, the Chinese are advancing quickly in these areas. So it's very important to develop algorithms, and we will do so within the framework of F5 as well, to develop algorithms and to be able to start working with combat in conjunction with the combat aircraft. And this is not done separately. Those who believe that we develop combat in one corner, combat aircraft in another, etc., that doesn't work. Whoever believes that by creating a cloud, that is to say, by creating water vapor, he will be able to direct everything. That doesn't work either. Tak.