An Interview with General Jouslin de Noray, Head of Land Equipment Maintenance and Operational Readiness Services (SIMMT for ‘’Structure intégrée du maintien en condition opérationnelle des matériels terrestres’’)
By Murielle Delaporte
Both the Covid crisis and the conflict in Ukraine, which have both shaken Europe since 2020, have revived concerns and debates that had disappeared from the public sphere since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990’s.
Autonomy, sovereignty, strategic stocks and even war economy are once again part of the lexicon used today by political leaders and medias. In fact, it was during his inauguration speech at the last Eurosatory exhibition last June that, for the first time, President Emmanuel Macron referred to the concept of a war economy for the defense and security sector.
Such a concept is sometimes considered alarmist, but corresponds to the well-known saying “Si vis pacem, para bellum”, from which any good military planner cannot escape and which serves as a catalyst to accelerate a process of reforms and administrative streamlining many players in the armaments sector have been asking for for decades.
This concept does not, however, start from scratch, far from it, thanks to the action of military leaders who have been involved for years in creating the conditions for this surge capacity to occur and have set the groundwork for such a war economy to materialize if need be.
Head of Land Equipment Maintenance and Operational Readinesse Services since 2020, General Christian Jouslin de Noray is one of the key architects in this process. This article describes his vision for an incremental land equipment support strategy and a realistic stock policy allowing French armed forces to gain the industrial depth necessary to operate in the context of any high-intensity scenario.
If one sums up the interview general Jouslin de Noray gave us, one can characterize this strategy of transformation by the following triptych :
- Frugality in maintenance thanks to more depth in the knowledge of equipement and emerging technologies.
- Restructuring of the industrial landscape based on more depth in the armament sector.
- Logistic pooling and sharing , if possible internationally, based on more depth in joint and new types pf cooperation among allies.
Photo Credit: 3D Printer © French Army
I. More Depth In Equipment Knowledge And Frugality of Maintenance
Among the many avenues of innovation explored over the past few years, General de Noray highlights in particular the digitization of workshops as a source of great progress in predictive maintenance, as well as the promising impact of new technologies, such as 3D printing, on the reduction of the logistical footprint. For the French Army, the challenge to limit the logistical footprint grows with the upcoming generation of land equipment, which tends to need more spare parts than past generations.
The virtuous circle of digitization
One of the major characteristics of land equipement maintenance is its volume. Our services deal with twenty-four thousand major pieces of equipment, which require four million pieces of equipment of thirteen thousand different types. One hundred and forty-eight million spare parts are stored in our warehouses.
Managing figures of this order of magnitude by hand on an excel spreadsheet can be challenging and automation is today welcome : Robotic Process Automation(RPA) in particular provides the assistance of small robots which can help us better position our stocks and improve our delivery system.
Automation coupled with connectivity – connectivity now made possible by the arrival at maturity of our information system which connects us to all of our partners – makes it possible to refine processes and save time and efficiency. For example, these advances allow us to deliver complete technical intervention packages: a workshop must receive all the spare parts it needs to carry out its intervention. In the event that this complete set is not available, the workshop that only needs one or two pieces in order to quickly release an equipment will be given priority.
Innovation will allow us to keep making considerable progress in the years to come. My vision is that ground equipement maintenance in five years will have absolutely nothing to do with what it was five years ago. The digitization of the workshops is indeed well advanced as all received equipment are now RFID-tracked with a chip that could be compared to a health card and enables the automation of many acts via a tablet or smartphone. The automatic inventory of all our warehouses is still a long way to go, but the renovation of the central warehouse of Moulins is indeed planned over the next five years.
We now have all the data connected to our fleet thanks to the sensors, the HUMs, placed on the equipment and we are now trying to “make them talk”: we look at the repairs we have to do; we compare with how the equipment has been performing ; we see if the equipment has been hot, if it has been cold, if it has taken a beating, if it has driven fast, if it has been conducted in over-drive, or under speed…
All these parameters can now be examined and this is where artificial intelligence will also help us, so that one day we shall be able to say: “Such equipment will break down at such a time because of such a thing”. Even before it breaks down, we will be able to change the part that will cause it to break down.
However, predictive maintenance is a long-term achievement. We have been talking about it for a few years and progress is not made by huge leaps and bounds, but each year brings its small dose of progress. This is why we can be confident about our ability to make significant progress over the next five years, in particular with the integration of sensors and vetronics which makes it possible to collect data automatically on the new generation Scorpion equipment. One of the key advantage of such data-driven knowledge is the ability to maintain the equipment in a much more frugal way.
We shall be able to maintain as needed, whereas today scheduled maintenance requires all vehicles with a specific mileage, or when reaching a specific number of hours of engine use, to undergo the same inspection. Tomorrow, we will be able to say: “I can delay a visit” or on the contrary: “I must program it earlier because I know how my equipment is going to act”. Predictive maintenance is one of the major areas of progress, but we are not really there yet.
This is why a show like Eurosatory is particularly interesting, because many companies are working on the subject, and we call on them to come and support us.
Another advantage of digitisation and the automation it generates is the fine management of stocks, the needs of which we know. The problem however is financing. Every year, we make a complete inventory of the stocks that the civilian world holds for us, and we are in the process of interconnecting our logistics information systems. So we can say that SIM@T, the land maintenance logistics information system, is the first ‘’LIS’’ for ‘’Logistics Information System’’, to be connected to the logistics information system of its suppliers.
Being able to move from our system to the civilian internet is not only a technological achievement, but a real revolution. Today, we are able to know direcly the state of stocks at our manufacturers’. It informs us in real time if these parts are there, se we can place an order directly and be aware of the delivery time.
Innovation to reduce the logistics footprint
Innovation will also help us to lighten the weight of our logistics: additive manufacturing – or 3D printing – will be one of the solutions to enable us to move towards a much more reactive and frugal logistics. In overseas operations, it is sometimes necessary to order a part in a hurry in France. It is therefore clear that having a 3D printer capable of manufacturing the missing part will prove particularly beneficial.
At the moment, we are only deploying polymer 3D printers in operation, but we have started to plan for the deployment of the first metal 3D printer. We are now in a position to take advantage of the experience we have gained in the field of 3D printing in terms of designing, testing and certifying parts. All the processes we have put in place to acculturate ourselves to polymer 3D printing are identical to those we will find for metal 3D printing. The important thing was to get this process and the necessary network of skills in place.
We should thus be able to move quite naturally from polymer to metal, knowing that a metal 3D printer, which allows us to make parts that correspond more closely to what we need, is much more expensive. So this acculturation phase that we have acquired on the polymer and which has already enabled us to produce tens of thousands of parts in operation, is already an excellent experience. We are not starting from scratch, far from it, in the field of 3D printing and we are in a phase of constant progress.
However, the certification of the parts remain a real difficulty in 3D printing, as they need to match all desired standards. We need to certify the printer, but also the process. That is something that we would like to do in partnership with manufacturers, because of the large number of parts involved. As an example, we intend to ask formally in a bid that a portion of the parts necessary for the renewal of our fleet of trucks be manufactured natively in 3D printing. This will ensure we do not have to go through the certification process when we want to produce them ourselves.
At the moment, polymer manufacturing is mainly used for small crucial parts, ranging from a door handle or a gauge to the dashboard of the PR4G [poste de radio de quatrième génération] As far as 3D metal is concerned, the first part we made was an inertia booster lever.
As far as the supply of raw materials is concerned, everything depends on the theatre of operations and what is available on site. We have the ambition to deploy printers in Romania. It is generally easier to transport bags of metal powder or rolls of polymer thread than to have to bring lots of different parts to a theatre, because again, you don’t know in advance what parts you will need.
This is all the more important when it comes to the deployment of the new generation of equipment, which is more part-intensive. When reasoning in terms of initial projection autonomy, deploying a company of old generation armored vehicles ‘’VABs’’ (for ‘’véhicules de l’avant-blindé’’) requires deploying the equivalent of a container for spare parts. The same initial projection autonomy when we first deployed the new generation Griffon required four containers. Even if we had planned for a large number of containers, we had multiplied our logistical footprint by four. This is normal, because the new equipment are much larger and contain many more spare parts. If we are able to do without some of the spare parts, because we will be able to manufacture them ourselves on site, then we will be able to make our logistics much more frugal, lighter and more agile. These are indeed the very objectives we are pursuing.
Photo Credit : TRM2000 Line of production at Saint-Nazaire © Arquus
II. Industrial depth and strategic thickness
For General de Noray, gaining strategic depth and autonomy requires, on the one hand, an increased participation of the private sector in the regeneration of equipment – a process which has been underway for several years -, and, on the other hand, a better visibility of the supply chain allowing a targeted stock policy.
The Restructuring of the Armament Industrial Landscape and the Reappropriation of Regeneration by the Private Sector
The SIMMT is in charge of elaborating maintenance strategies to meet the objectives of the chiefs of staff, and of allocating the missions, some of them being outsourced to the private sector.
When I arrived at the SIMMT in 2017 as deputy director of operations, the Army had lost about five thousand personnel assigned to the land equipment maintenance regiments (RMAT) and support bases (BSMAT) in ten years, i.e. about 30% of the workforce dedicated to land equipment maintenance.
This period was characterized by a very low technical availability rate compared with a high operational activity rythmus. Let me just remind the fact that Serval [Counter-terrorism operation in Mali] started in 2013, while we were following the operations in Afghanistan. This decade of uninterrupted operations had resulted in a rather large volume of broken equipment that we had not been able to regenerate. To give you an idea, more than four thousand items of equipment and about four thousand vehicles were awaiting regeneration, i.e. more than 20% of the major equipment in service.
For this reason, a transformation plan initiated in 2016 and approved by the Minister of the Armed Forces in 2019 was put in place. A very clear distinction was made between, on the one hand, the equipment regiments and the regimental maintenance sections in charge of rapid repairs and operating under the authority of the Commander of the Land Forces, and, on the other hand, the support bases in charge of in-depth regeneration, i.e. the ‘’Service de la maintenance industrielle Terrestre’’ or SMITer.
We have de facto distinguished between emergencies and priorities. The urgency is to always be able to do tomorrow’s activity, i.e. to be able to repair. But as we have always been driven by emergencies, we forgot the priorities, namely the need to regenerate equipment that required hundreds of hours of work.
This distinction between operational maintenance and industrial maintenance has since then become very clear, while at the same time – the second reason for this reform – the share given to private industry was becoming increasingly important. A single figure speaks for itself: until 2017, 90% of industrial maintenance, i.e. deep regeneration maintenance, was carried out by the military within the equipment support bases. Today, this share has been reduced and our objective is to achieve a redistribution of the load between the public and private sectors of 50% each by 2024.
A similar evolution is taking place with regard to operational maintenance, since we are now entrusting a significant part of operational support to private industry. We have even entrusted the management and maintenance of our training fleets to private industry. While this sector is developing rapidly, the proportion of operational maintenance hours carried out by private industry can be estimated today at around 30%.
Most of the operational maintenance is carried out in the industrial facilities (ARQUUS and IVECO for instance) or in our training centres, but always keeping in mind an essential imperative, namely that our maintainers must absolutely keep all the know-how that they will need once deployed.
What I would like to emphasise is that this transformation has paid off, since we have gained more than ten points in technical availability. Our ambition is to gain another five. From a technical availability of 60% in 2017, we are now at around 72% on average in mainland France (knowing that we are at more than 90% in operation), and our goal is to reach 75% in 2025. Today, the number of vehicles technically unavailable has fallen below 10%, i.e. around 2,000 out of 24,000 in stock, which means that we now have a dynamic fleet. Equipment returning from operations are returned and quickly regenerated to come back out. The fleets are no longer on a waiting list to be regenerated.
This is of course an average between very new fleets easier to maintain (such as the Griffon), which have a much better availability, and on the other side of the spectrum, heavy armoured fleets, which traditionally have a lower availability rate. I don’t know any NATO nation whose heavy tank availability is above 65%. Not that the industries of all these countries are not efficient, but because there is a volume of maintenance to be done which is quite standardised, and quite high. The unavailability is not due to breakage, but is due to repair time.
It is also logical that the older fleets have a poor availability because of the spare parts’ scarcity : the armoured engineering vehicle, which is still on an AMX-30 chassis, or the light reconnaissance vehicle VLRA, which is very popular with our special forces and is more than fifty years old, are examples among others.
As far as new fleets are concerned, one or two years are always necessary to get used to the equipment. But of course, the manufacturing plants are still running and there are usually fewer problems with the supply of spare parts, hence very good availability rates.
How do these reforms respond to the high-intensity problem we are currently facing? The first thing is that we understood that we had to combine on the one hand the reactivity of the maintenance carried out by the military and, on the other hand, its resilience. During the pandemic, the equipment continued to be maintained by the military in an unchanged manner. The devices were adapted, but the personnel showed great resilience. In terms of reactivity, we are able to project what we need to project: we can have equipment companies working for fifteen days, twenty hours a day, as was the case when we deployed vehicles in Romania.
So we do have a high level of reactivity as well as a high level of resilience. But we need to go further and we are in the process of acquiring the industrial depth that we do not have on our own via contracts with the private sector. We know that the day we have to fight a high-intensity conflict, we will need a strong hand from the private industry. Since the American Civil War in the XIXth century, no nation has been able to win a conflict without relying on a strong private industry.
Budgetary visibility and sovereignty assessment
We are lucky in France to still have a civilian defence industry, but we must organise it through our contracts and give it the capacity to surge as well. It may seem a little strange, but we have an industry which manufactures extremely well, but as we did not use it for repair, this industry did not particularly focused on regeneration. In the civilian world, you don’t regenerate a ten-year-old truck, you change trucks, whereas our machines last forty years. So we had to give the private industries working with us not only the culture of regeneration, but also the techniques and technologies of regeneration. When you manufacture, you need people who assemble. They are not mechanics, they are people who do the same thing almost all day long. When you regenerate, you need people who are able to make diagnostics, to know what is not working, to know which parts need to be changed. These are not the same jobs at all.
Our contracts, in which we entrust an increasing part to private industry, allow the latter to become acculturated to these regeneration tasks. And since we give them a long-term vision, they can invest and create chains intended to industrialise regeneration. Such a partnership with private industries is one of the major cornerstones of the transformation of land-based maintenance. This is why it has been crucial to capture our contractors’ interest by granting them multi-year contracts and long-term visibility. Our contracts are today signed for a seven to ten year period. These contracts are also very comprehensive since we no longer order spare parts, but a certain amount of kilometres. In 2022, for example, we ordered tens of thousands of hours of infantry armoured vehicles VBCIs [“véhicules blindés de combat d’infanterie”] from the expert, who was to supply all the spare parts needed to complete these hours.
It is actually quite impressive to see how our manufacturers are organising themselves to be able to meet the requirements of these different contracts that we entrust to them. Y Roanne is agood example where the lines set up by Nexter have almost doubled. The same goes at Saint-Nazaire, where ARquUS has completely transformed the facility. And in Strasbourg, you will see that SOPRAM has invested the same way in order to be able to respond to our contracts, etc. We are seeing this regeneration industry gradually emerging, complementing the manufacturing industry that we had.
Since 2018, we have seen a real surge in the civilan regeneration industry, which is visible in terms of results, but also physically. When you go and see the factories, you see, here, a new warehouse, there, a new production line…
But what is our weak point, both as far as governement and private industries are concerned? The skills, they do acquire then ; the industrial machine tool, they also acquire. Today, clearly our weak point in the field of defence – both government and private sector – concerns stocks and spare parts. We do not have the logistical depth we need today.
One of the key points to achieve this is to perfect the traceability of spares, i.e. to know where the spares are initially manufactured. And this is what we are trying to do in conjunction with all the companies that belong to the French land industrial association GICAT [“Groupement des industries françaises de défense et de sécurité terrestres et aéroterrestres”]. Even if a particular type of spare part arrives from a specific country, from Asia, Europe, or elsewhere, it often turns out to be a product that has already been assembled with some parts originating from another country. If I take the example of the VT4 light command and liaison vehicle, which is a Ford Everest transformed by Arquus in Saint-Nazaire, the Ford Everest is manufactured in Thailand, but some of the parts come from other Asian countries.
We need to take stock and assess our dependencies by asking ourselves, component by component, the following questions to measure our degree of vulnerability:
- Is this component manufactured in only one country? If so, we are very vulnerable.
- Is it manufactured according to the European model? If so, it limits our degree of vulnerability.
- How long does it take to acquire it?
- How long would it take us to manufacture it at home?
Depending on these different parameters, we will have to take decisions on whether to reshore the manufacture of some of our components, or, in the case of components whose manufacturing process escapes us, to increase our volume of stocks.
One of the major lessons about moving towards high intensity is the intensification of global competition and the occurrence of supply chain tensions, for spare parts, but also for raw materials, such as titanium, electronic components, etc. We must therefore be able to either have an autonomous production capability or create sufficient stocks. But before that, we need to assess with precision our needs and our vulnerabilities. This is what we are doing. Knowing that all this is obviously not free. Securing our supplies has a cost that must be taken into account in the upcoming Military Program Law.
If our Constitution grants the President with the authority to decide when to use our armed forces, – which gives France a great reactivity -, the sizing of stocks, on the other hand, has to come from budgetary adjustments and parliamentary work. We know our needs and we have an industrial ecosystem capable of delivering spares, but obviously funding is needed to order them.
Photo Credit © Erwin Ceuppens & Vincent Bordignon, Belgian Defense Ministry and French Armed Forces Ministry
III. Depth of Cooperation and Pooling and Sharing In Logistics
The third factor of potential transformation, the mutualisation of logistics between allies similar to the Franco-Belgian CaMo programme, is for General de Noray a particularly promising novelty, while the mutualisation of stocks is already part of NATO practices.
The CaMo Ripple Effect
As far as the Scorpion vehicles are concerned, there is another innovation, not in the technological field, but in the field of an unprecedented cooperation with the Belgian Army, which has chosen to equip itself with exactly the same equipment as the French armed forces do within the framework of the CaMo programme (Motorised Capability program).
This unique strategic partnership will enable us, under conditions that have yet to be worked out, to pool and share all our logistics, as well as maintenance and training. A new type of interoperability is emerging that is extremely interesting for both the Belgians and the French. It goes beyond the Scorpion program in the strict sense of the term, since Belgium has also acquired Caesar guns and Barage anti-IED jammers.
One of the major objectives is of course cost savings. But we have never gone so far in cooperation with a partner nation. Since the summer of 2021, we have a Belgian officer in the SIMMT who works with us on the conditions of support for Belgian equipment, so that we have maximum interoperability between all this equipment.
The aim is that a spare part that leaves a Belgian warehouse can be fitted to a French Griffon, or that a spare part that leaves a French warehouse is fitted to a Belgian Griffon. We are currently developing the processes necessary for this development. With the Germans, we are trying to develop equipment together, but the question of common logistics has never been addressed: each partner has its own stocks and its own training. What we are doing with the Belgians in the field of maintenance, but also in training and doctrine, is indeed a real novelty. We are only at the beginning of the story and our intention is to attract other nations to participate in this upcoming success story. The nations that will acquire the Griffon cannot go wrong…
The NATO Ripple Effect
The operations that we are carrying out within the framework of NATO in Estonia and Romania might lead to a desire to have much greater interoperability among some countries.
Within the Atlantic Alliance, there is already theNATO Support and Procurement Agency, which allows the various allied countries to propose supply items or replenish their stocks. When we have common equipment, we sometimes buy some of our own from other nations through these contracts. This is the case, for example, for the tracks of our high mobility armoured vehicles.
For logistical interoperability, we have to share the same equipment. Our equipment is combat-proven and more and more nations are acquiring Caesars. A CaMo dynamic could well emerge and it is clear that a show like Eurosatory contributes to this.