PARIS: France is preparing to publicize with fanfare the transfer to Saudi Arabia later this month of the first of three revolutionary stealth frigates — all of which have been designed and assembled by computer.
Because of the reduction in the amount of time required to construct the vessels, all three will have been delivered within the next nine months, and should become operational by next summer.
With the arrival of frigate No 812 in Saudi waters later this month, France also plans to take on a more aggressive posture with regard to the marketing of the armaments it exports — a new stance which should see the Middle East make a return as one of France’s most important defence markets.
Under former prime minister Lionel Jospin, France had considerably cut down its investment in defence construction, to the point where President Chirac lamented during a July 14th talk with reporters that France had taken a “backseat” to Great Britain as a world class arms exporter.
When he ran for re-election as president, Chirac had promised to considerably expand the size of the French defence budget.
In a statement issued the other day, the president of the Conseil des industries de defense Francaises (CIDEF), Philippe Camus, also co-president of EADS, urged President Chirac to uphold his promise to significantly expand the French defence construction industry, which last year represented some 79,000 jobs and a revenue of 13.2 billion euros.
The increased amount of orders from clients in the Gulf should also allow France, say defence planners, to expand the size of the country’s defence construction budget.
President Chirac promised earlier this month that the country’s new five-year military appropriations law — the loi de programmation militaire 2003-2008, which is to be introduced before the parliament — would be considerably expanded to allow France to “protect its citizens and have its say in world affairs”.
The stealth frigates — which are technically referred to as “fregates furtives” — are the first in Europe to be entirely designed by computer, bringing about important reductions in both cost and the amount of time required to build them.
According to Vincent Martinot-Lagarde, director of the stealth frigate project at the Direction de la Construction Navale (DCN) shipyard at Lorient (eastern France), designing the frigate’s hull by computer brought about savings of 17 per cent over the previous generation of hulls.
Moreover, he notes, planning and assembling the new-generation frigates wholly by computer took around two-and-half years.
“In that record amount of time,” he notes, “the frigate went from a simple drawing to a real frigate measuring 133 meters and weighting around 4600 tons.”
Not only did the computer allow for the elimination of life- size wooden models of different parts of the frigate, it also permitted the Saudi Arabian Navy, which commissioned the three new-generation frigates, to follow on a daily basis construction of the vessel.
“The client,” notes Martinot-Lagarde, “now can have a better idea as to what the finished vessel will look like, and this without having to make his way to Brittany (where the furtive frigates are being built).
According to Martinot-Lagarde, computers are also being used to oversee cutting of the individual parts of the frigate, allowing all three vessels to be identical with each other.
Meanwhile, French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said that France might build its second aircraft carrier as a joint venture with Great Britain.
She, however, said it is yet to be decided whether the vessels “will be nuclear or classic.”