Last Wednesday, a driver deliberately barreled his car into a French military patrol in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Levallois-Perret. Labeled a terrorist act, the attack injured six soldiers and ignited a grim sense of deja vu. For the sixth time since 2015, a terrorist had targeted French soldiers serving on French soil; for the sixth time, the event has spurred a national debate over the reasoning behind the military operation in which these soldiers were participating.
In January 2015, with a nation still reeling from the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket, the Socialist government launched Plan Vigipirate. Under the plan, completed in 1991, the Interior Ministry was tasked with the mobilization and management of the panoply of French police forces in the case of a terrorist threat or attack. Only in the document’s fine print is a place made for the use of military forces. As Elie Tenenbaum, a researcher at the Institut français des relations internationales, suggests in a sharp and sobering paper, France’s long memory played a pivotal role. The uses and abuses of the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence, when armed forces became a tool of repression and torture, made the Fifth Republic reluctant to employ them again as a domestic security force.
Until 2015, that is. A week after the terrorist attacks in Paris, the Socialist government under President Francois Hollande carved a new set of lines and arrows onto the Vigipirate flowchart, all of them passing through the Ministry of Defense. Called Operation Sentinelle, the updated plan detailed the mobilization of as many as 10,000 soldiers to assist police forces in warding off immediate terrorist threats. When the plan was first announced, public relief was palpable. The vast majority of soldiers were assigned to the most vulnerable and visible targets for radical jihadi groups: newspaper offices, Jewish centers, and synagogues. By the end of the year, their mission had metastasized: Along with police and gendarmes, soldiers were patrolling nearly 12,000 sites, including 10,000 in the greater Paris region.
The government presented a two-fold rationale for Operation Sentinelle: to deter terrorists and reassure citizens. Tragically, the first goal might as well have been code-named Operation Impossible. Specialists who had voiced doubts about the army’s deterrence capacity were proved prescient with the Nov. 13, 2015, terrorist attacks in Paris. Despite the stationing of 7,000 soldiers across France -- most of them concentrated in or near Paris -- they failed to prevent three groups of terrorists armed with assault rifles and explosive vests from killing 130 civilians and wounding more than 400 in the heart of Paris. Nevertheless, the government responded as if the problem had been an insufficient number of soldiers rather than an inadequate grasp of strategy. In the hours following the attack, 3,000 more soldiers were deployed.
It doesn’t require an advanced degree in cynicism to conclude that Hollande’s decision -- one maintained by his successor, Emmanuel Macron -- was not driven by security imperatives. In Le Monde, terrorism specialist Jacques Raillane (who blogs under the name Aboud Jaffar) dismissed the logic behind this plan. As he drily noted, the number of potential targets tends toward the infinite, while the number of potential terrorists spills into the thousands. From the very start, he declared, Sentinelle “has suffered from a crying absence of serious reflection and means. To be dissuasive, hundreds of thousands of soldiers would have to be deployed EVERYWHERE—a goal that is clearly impossible and completely stupid, besides.”
Since there is no strategic logic, Raillane concludes that politics alone are behind Sentinelle. “Whether its due to sheer panic or mere anxiety, the authorities will not risk demobilizing the soldiers only to be blamed for the next attack.” For this reason, the government is reluctant to acknowledge the mounting costs.
Like a sinkhole discovered directly below the Hôtel de Brienne (the 18th century pile that houses the Army Ministry), Sentinelle is swallowing limited manpower and resources. France has approximately 10,000 soldiers assigned to overseas operations; most notably, Operations Serval and Barkhane in Mali have proved crucial in parrying the threat of radical jihadi forces. Sentinelle threatens to weaken these real and abiding strategic responsibilities. Not only are there longer service rotations for soldiers, but the ministry’s budget must now cover unanticipated items like housing for active soldiers in Paris and elsewhere in France.
Most disturbingly, it may well be that the soldiers deployed under Sentinelle are not shields against terrorism, but instead targets. During the operation’s first year in fact they were stationary targets, assigned to static positions at various points. Disparaged as a 21st century Maginot Line, stationary guards have since given way to mobile units that move among various sites. As Raillane argues, there is absolutely no evidence that soldiers, whether on the move or standing in place, have succeeded in foiling a single terrorist attack. In fact, the only attacks soldiers have responded to have been those aimed at them.
Were it not for the presence of these soldiers, would any of the terrorists since 2015 have instead attacked French civilians? It is difficult if not impossible to say. At the same time, it is difficult, but essential for the government to come clean about Sentinelle’s evolving function from a reassuring presence to a convenient bull’s eye. As historian Benedicte Charon warns, we can no longer “avoid facing the fact that we have distributed targets across France. Will they be effective insofar as terrorists will attack them rather than civilians? If so, say so: Sentinelle is meant to be a lighting rod. And if this is a political choice, we cannot close our eyes to it.”
