Constituting Task Force 473, the French Carrier Strike Group (GAN), articulated around the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, will leave Toulon in early February for its annual deployment. Baptized “Clemenceau 22”, this mission will be, which is a first outside of the crisis, entirely conducted in the Mediterranean. Unless new circumstances make it necessary to dispatch the GAN to another region of the world, it will therefore evolve until April exclusively in the waters of the Big Blue, from the western Mediterranean to the Syrian channel, with even an incursion into the Adriatic. Elements of TF 473 should also push to the Black Sea.
Mark the French presence at the gates of Europe and strengthen cooperation within the EU
While France has just taken over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union for six months, this decision to focus the deployment of the GAN in this area, planned for a long time, aims in particular to demonstrate the full commitment of the French armed forces in the security of the immediate maritime approaches to Europe and its borders. Paris had already made this choice in 2020, when the Charles de Gaulle had evolved from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, where we had only seen it in 2010. But it is true that since the commissioning of the French aircraft carrier, in 2001, its deployments mainly led it to the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific zone, the latter being clearly presented as a priority in recent years. Certainly with systematic sequences in the Mediterranean, but the symbol is not the same when the presence is registered only on the occasion of transits towards a more distant final objective. “Although we have a constant naval presence in the Mediterranean, what our partners sometimes criticize with regard to the carrier battle group is that we focus on distant deployments. The geographical choice for Clemenceau 22 thus makes it possible to clearly show that we have not forgotten the protection of the approaches of the European Union. This is also part of the dynamics of the PFUE (French presidency of the EU, editor’s note), one of the objectives of which is to increase cooperation with our European partners, ”explains a general officer to Mer et Marine. And in this, the aircraft carrier has always been a powerful catalyst for cooperation: “It can…
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