I'm very pleased to be with you at the end of this afternoon and in this major place for culture and multilateral exchanges, to conclude this symposium.

Since, unfortunately, I haven't been able to attend the deliberations, I'll have to ask you to forgive me if I repeat some elements that have already been said earlier. And please don't be surprised if you hear me talking about others that may have already been refuted! I'm not looking for unanimity but rather for diversity of approaches. Only diversity can enable us to respond to the complexity of current wars and crises. The intellectual debate might thus be the only media enabling us to establish a communication between environments that, at first sight could appear to be totally different such as the military and humanitarian ones. It allows to go beyond prejudices, to get rid of taboos and sometimes to bypass protocol issues. Debating is thus useful for us, military, to better understand our environment. I do believe, and your presence here today is a sign of it, that it is also useful for the relevant civilian actors involved in war theaters' reconstruction. That debate is even indispensable to achieve the convergence of our efforts, which is the central theme of this symposium. Convergence is indispensable; not achieving it, would put all individual activities at risks as well as the desired end state, i.e. returning the theater back to normalcy. Whatever might be the profound motivation for the various engagements in the field, religious, philosophical, economy based, our fates are linked together because we all operate in support of the same population and, because, with our own ways and our own means we all produce security: military, police, administrative, economic, human security. It is also because the population is a priority as well for those who oppose our intervention. And this opponent systematically compensates for its military inferiority by taking advantage of our weaknesses. Too systematic a dissociation of the efforts that would be caused by the fact that each actor would be involved in his own business only, would result in considerable risks. Risks for the security of the different actors and especially for the most vulnerable ones', i.e. the civilian actors; and also risk of not achieving the overall objectives. Since any action that would be conducted, without dealing with the humanitarian issues, in front of an opponent that deliberately melts into the population to induce us into committing errors, could rapidly transform the military into an occupying force. Similarly, the fact of limiting the action to distributing food assistance when in a war situation would reinforce the general insecurity as well as the power of those who are looking for subverting the population through violence.

For all these objective reasons, we have a common interest in operating together.

Two, different but complementary, approaches exist.

The first one is the direct approach. It concerns mainly actors from the national governments, and possibly those private ones who would be willing to join it. The concept is, as it has been proposed last year by the Minister of Defense, to "develop an interministerial structure which, within a more comprehensive perspective, would be in charge of the strategy, the coordination and the conduct of the interventions of the different institutional and private actors engaged in operations of reconstruction on theaters of operations". But that interministerial structure still doesn't exist.

That structure was also missing in 2003 in Iraq, which prevented the Americans from being able to immediately conduct a civilian effort as significant as the military one, in order to meet the overall security challenge. The wasted time has been exploited by the insurgents to transform the liberators into occupants.

More recently in Lebanon, we have been able to observe the difference between Hezbollah's reactivity and flexibility to regain the population support and our own CIMIC capabilities. On the day that followed the cease fire with Israel, Hezbollah was already distributing cash money allowances to the Lebanese civilians whose houses had been destroyed by the combats. The competition is not fair anymore. It has now become urgent to move on.

I would like to remark here that, once again, and to the contrary of the outside appearance, the Defense and the Army are the only ones that attempt to make things change in order to find solutions to the concrete problems linked to interministerial coordination in a crisis area .

The second approach is an indirect one. The main concept is to promote, outside of the crises, a mutual knowledge of the individuals and of their collective courses of actions which would thus provoke or facilitate the development of lasting links. Today's symposium actually participates to that type of approach as well as the development of common training and education does, and also the reserve service. It is by integrating all specific sensitivities, by exchanging freely our experiences, that we'll be able to reinstall fluency within the overall domains of concepts and information.

It would actually be paradoxical that we could not reach a better level of communication amongst ourselves here and in the field, while we are systematically achieving that objective with the local authorities or populations of these countries in which we operate !

I'll now conclude by refocusing on the Army, which is under my command, and by reminding you or telling you what are the specific challenges that current operations constitute for us. The current operational engagement, by your side, which is our priority, shouldn't make us forget our other missions for which we commit the same people and the same equipment .

It's actually our soldiers who must be able, for 4 to 6 months, from Africa to Lebanon, in Kosovo or in Afghanistan, to use their weapons with discernment and to distribute food aid.

These same soldiers will have to be able, when the day has come, to confront, not terrorists anymore but rather a conventional force like in Iraq in 1991.

The same soldiers, when back home, have to be available to intervene in case of a medical emergency, a weather catastrophe or an industrial disaster.

That kind of polyvalence is unequaled in any other organization. It has a cost that we must collectively keep in mind.

A cost for education and training that must be differentiated in accordance with the different types of engagement, with the risk that, if that cost was not taken into account, we could have to face the same troubles as our American allies in 2003 in Iraq. They were extremely well trained for a conventional war and thus they crushed the Iraqi forces in the desert, but they didn't succeed to transition towards stabilization because they hadn't been specifically trained for that task.

A cost in term of personnel. Operations amongst the populations require many people to hold and secure the entire physical and human environment, in order to allow the actions by the civilian actors in charge of the reconstruction, during a rather long period of time, possibly several years. Similarly, these same troops, engaged for four to six months in a theater cannot simultaneously train for a conventional type of conflict, neither can they be available on the national territory or in case of an emerging crisis abroad.

By telling you that, I just want to draw your attention on our difficulties to respect the right balance between operational priorities and the other strategic parameters and thus on the importance to maintain the manpower of our forces .

And lastly, whatever might be the angle under which one tackles the symposium theme, be it by wondering how to conduct civilian and military activities in the field or by studying issues more specific to the Army's future, all arguments converge to reinforce the synergies that will enable us to achieve our common objective: reconstruction and a lasting peace. Thank you very much for your attention. I now suggest that we continue our discussions with a drink in our hand.