The French Army is a capable military instrument whose history nourishes its ambition to remain powerful and innovative. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the US-driven transformation of land warfare has come on the Army’s agenda. However, several factors account for the doubts and criticisms that find their way into the Army’s organization, and almost all of them relate to the technology that is at the heart of the transformation paradigm. The strategic question is whether new technologies result in high-tech military forces that are ill-suited for today’s asymmetric wars. People, not technology, are what war is about. The budgetary question is whether France can afford it. After all, it takes a certain number of troops to run large-scale military operations, and, as the capital-per-soldier ratio increases, so do costs. The political question is whether a high-tech Army is what France needs to realize its international leadership ambitions, not only in Europe where the ambition to unify and lead Europe is long standing but also in the wider Mediterranean region marked by social and political upheaval.

These questions linger in France. As this chapter will demonstrate, the Army’s transformation agenda is both coherent and ambitious in its own right. As this chapter will also demonstrate, however, lingering questions feed doubts and controversy, and the result is a tenuous compromise behind the transformation blueprints. Put differently, land warfare transformation in France does not build on an overwhelming politico-military policy advocacy coalition. Transformation has sometimes been driven by military necessity, sometimes by strategic foresight, and sometimes by political ambition, and the outcome is a less ambitious but ongoing policy of “modernization.”