Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 76

Operation Sangaris

Sudan

(December 2013–January 2014)

Deployment and confidence building
Chad

Cameroon

South
Sudan

Main cities

Congo

French military
presence

Democratic Republic
of Congo

(Graphic by Simon Fauret, French Institute of International Relations [Ifri])

Figure 1. Operation Sangaris, First Phase
to control after the departure of Battlegroup Panther
(about eight hundred to one thousand soldiers make up
a battlegroup) in February 2014 to more remote areas.
Battlegroup Amarante had to control Bangui, population
over one million, with only two reinforced companies
(about three hundred soldiers). Accordingly, some neighborhoods had to be left unsecured, and French troops
had to focus on the center and south of the city. The four
hundred additional troops that arrived in February 2014
were used to gain more freedom of action.
In the rest of the country, faced with the vastness of
the territory, ti ming was important. To accomplish their
missions, French forces had to be in the right place at the
right time with the right amount of force. This means
that they could only have a favorable strength ratio for
an action that had been anticipated and planned, while
retaining sufficient mobility. However, the lack of road
infrastructure in the CAR made intratheater mobility
challenging, to say the least, so freedom of movement
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at the operational level depended largely on the ability
of the force to recognize, open, and maintain secondary
airstrips in good condition.10
The fact that French units were equipped mainly
with light vehicles facilitated mobility at the expense
of protection—only 50 percent of French battlegroups
were armored at the beginning of the operation. The
use of the air proved crucial, even if the scarcity of the
resources deployed (ten helicopters in June 2014) and
the absence of heavy helicopters were limiting factors.
Centralizing these assets at the operational level was
essential for optimizing their use.
The maneuvers chosen at the operational level reflect
the fact that Sangaris forces had a full range of capabilities, but their low numbers imposed successive actions.
It was therefore decided that maneuvers would unfold
in three phases. First, from December 2013 to January
2014, the focus was on Bangui—where the majority of
the population and expatriates lived—in order to gain
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW