The November 13 killing spree in Paris came as no surprise. The Islamic State had threatened France explicitly and repeatedly for more than a year, and French government officials high and low issued warnings as well. Most pointedly, Judge Marc Trevidic, who was in charge of antiterrorist investigations in France for ten years, disclosed in September that IS was planning “something big” against France. He spoke of an “overbid logic” among competing jihadi groups: “Each group is eager to strike further and in a heavier way than other groups. They all want to win the Pulitzer prize of terrorism–that is to say to do something as grand and as lethal as 9/11.” Hence ISIS in Paris on November 13, and al-Qaeda in Bamako on November 20.

If the French were not surprised by the November 13 atrocities, they were nevertheless bewildered. We thought we understood terrorism well, and we thought, especially after the January Charlie Hebdo attack, that we were mobilized and able in our own defense. We had activated a low-key state of emergency, Plan Vigipirate, following the 1995 bombings by Algerian Islamists in Paris, and maintained it constantly ever since. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, Vigipirate was supplemented by another security program, Sentinelle. However, November 13 was different: It was not merely terrorism, but war: not just in the sense that this enemy controls territory in the Middle East and is undertaking a state-building and governing process such as no previous terrorist enemy has ever done; but also in the sense that it trains military style units to operate among us, using complex and sophisticate plans, and ultimately to secure enclaves or bridgeheads on our soil.Nonetheless, people here wonder why, if French officials knew so much and talked so much about the threat, they failed to neutralize it? And even deeper questions are still in the process of being formed and answered.First, as has been widely remarked, to some extent the failure to prevent the attack came down to the failure of the state to keep up with the threat level. Governments usually move much slower than non-state actors on the prowl. So the combination of the outflow of the Syrian civil war, the power vacuum in Libya, and the increasing pace of French engagement against terrorism (in Mali and in the Levant most prominently) combined to overwhelm the budgets of the security services. All true, but the problem goes beyond that.The French people are slowly coming to appreciate that the state lacks the tools required for war, on either the domestic or the foreign front. The deficit starts with numbers. According to Vincent Desportes, a former Army general who now teaches at Sciences Po in Paris and author of La Dernière Bataille de la France (France’s Last Battle), the French security apparatus has been overstretched since before the Syrian civil war. Operational strength fell by 25 percent under the conservative Administration of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–12), and by another 25 percent under the first three-and-a-half years of the socialist Hollande Administration. These cuts together have shrunk the force from 200,000 combat-able personnel to just a bit more than 100,000 in a delayed French version of a “peace dividend”—but it has been a reduction in truth propelled more by recent anxieties about a growing national debt, a consequence of the very difficult math involved in reconciling a still-generous welfare state with a stultified economy.On the other hand, France is still eager to be seen as a global military power, so much so that about a third of its remaining combat force—30,000 men and women—are dispatched to permanent or semi-permanent missions abroad, from the Sahel countries to the Middle East to Afghanistan. To have nearly a third of the country’s active-duty military forces overseas in the absence of a major war is unprecedented, and it is both expensive and dangerous.

Read the article “France May Face Civil War with Islamists” on the-american-interest.com.