Eurocorps and other multinational Headquarters are not planned to deploy in Mali

On a pretty regular basis I can read on the requests leading to this humble blog (I claim the word 'humble', when I compare the content of this blog to the ones listed in the blogroll), that some people had typed 'Eurocorps' and 'Mali' as keywords. My conclusion is that some pedagogy on European Defence is still needed. Therefore this article will be useless for those who are skilled in defence matters and is intended to the newcomers.

Well, let us start from the very beginning: there are three types of multinational operational headquarters. As the French operation in Mali is of land-centric type, i.e involving mainly land forces, let us focus on land headquarters.

Some Reasons for which France will remain alone in Mali

Now that French Army has reached a deserved initial military success in Mali, time has come to look forward and check whether its allies will at last decide to join and support France in its efforts to expel islamists from this country (as far as I could understood it seems to be the final objective).

For fun, I will not make use of a traditional strategic analysis, but I will try to make use of Mr Ben Polak's lectures at Yale, available on the Internet (here). Being an absolute math-, eco- and calculus-phobic I will try my best.

France in Mali: a military success and a strategic dead end

Usually I am a great fan of O. Kempf, the author of Egea, the must among the blogs dedicated to strategic studies, at least in French language. However, some days ago I was surprised by one of his articles, titled: "Mali, les permanences géopolitiques s'imposent...", that could be translated as: Mali, the standing geopolitical rules still prevail...".

What does then O. Kempf deal with?