A document from health worker comrades from France who we recently met at an international health workers gathering in Vienna – report to follow soon. We have written about the militarisation of our work in the UK and in Germany before.
Desertion applies as much in our imagination as it does in everyday life, across all spheres of production. Refusing the fragmentation of one’s life also involves knowing where and for what purpose we are doing what we do. “It is not a question of being against war, but of knowing how to be in it”, as an old man with syphilis once said.
Our collective and individual health has also changed as a result of technology; how can we preserve our current capacity to treat and heal without forgetting to ask ourselves at what cost, for whom and to what extent? The healthcare system is a matter of social and political power that we must fully reclaim. Currently, across much of Europe, states are manoeuvring within civil institutions to secure acceptance for their involvement in the war.
Having already worn us down with their ‘armed peace’, it is now ‘war for their peace’ that underpins the arms race and the tacit support for the massacres still taking place today. These manoeuvres take different forms in each country, depending on their history of resistance and their specific industrial circumstances. The idea of anticipating an armed conflict is sold to us as a long-term prospect, as an endless exercise channeling resources towards the military sector. We will not collaborate with the current war effort. It is not ours.
Militarisation is the industrialisation of the state’s war machine. France ranks as the world’s second-largest arms exporter. On the 19th of March 2025, the ‘Rearm Europe’ plan paved the way for a massive increase in defence investment, enabling up to €800 billion in additional defence spending in the coming years. This military Keynesianism is also coupled with support for the banks in their speculative schemes, involving ‘defence savings accounts’, and a €37 billion investment injection in France for industries that serve the armed forces.
To ensure this goes through without too much resistance, the state must secure the public’s support. This concept of the population evolves in tandem with the concept of war. Modern warfare increasingly favours counter-insurgency doctrine, which treats civil society as the foundation of the war effort. Counter-insurgency is a psychological doctrine for controlling populations, based on military intelligence aimed at maintaining order and internal pacification. The aim, therefore, is not to allow oneself to be defined as part of the population.
“A hospital is better than a regiment” for imposing colonisation, said General Lyautey, one of the military figures who contributed to the development of counter-insurgency doctrine. This is a French military doctrine born of the frustration of colonial officers upon their return from Indochina. In the 1960s, despite their military superiority, it was an imperial defeat.
They began to rethink their strategy based on the concept of integrating civilians into the apparatus of military objectives. At that time, behaviourism – the idea that one can mould the ‘new man’ – paved the way for experiments in psychological warfare and torture techniques. This was put into practice in Algeria, serving as a testing ground for the doctrine – a theory subsequently elaborated and developed under US supervision during the coups d’état in Latin America. In Algeria, manuals were circulated to impose military personnel on the civil service. Social control and torture were practised simultaneously with a view to achieving total control. Whilst in the post-war period the main doctrine of counter-insurgency was anti-communism, it is now being deployed against any potential subversion through the military-civilian complex.
The military model penetrates society through a state of emergency, fuelled in particular by a lack of public resources. The diversion of budgets towards the military sector deprives public services of funds, leaving them to call upon the army to compensate for their inability to provide care. However, this diversion is primarily evident in the very nature of the care provided or the organisational model that is being established. The military model is hierarchical and geared towards the objective of getting people back to the front line. This is nothing new, as the Western organisation of hospitals is largely shaped by the legacy of wars, from triage to the development of surgical technologies. It is as much in opposition to the general war effort as to the model being imposed on hospitals that we reject social militarisation.
Imagine if the army were to become the last remaining public service, with a budget that would cripple all others – health and education in particular – whilst claiming to be their saviour in the event of a crisis. What the war effort sets out to save is nothing more than this sinister definition of power, in which the state acts as the guarantor of industrial profits. The welfare state was won through a struggle for power, which had its sights set on far more than the current compromise. What some are defending behind the call for a return to this state is nothing more than the face of the defeat of post-war revolutionary aspirations, when the notion of the public sphere was seen as a shared necessity rather than a field for investment.
It is the same concern that leads us to defend access to healthcare for all as it does to reject bombs, from their manufacture to their deployment. Quite simply because the hospital belongs to us, whereas as for the arms industry, we do not even wish to reclaim it. Drawing on observations from Germany, England, France and elsewhere, we would like to share perspectives on how to anticipate, reject and oppose the mobilisation of the population in the arms race. We are already seeing the handling of Covid held up as an example of civil-military collaboration. The use of the armed forces is presented as a benefit, whilst in reality it reveals a widespread lack of staff and resources. What is described as a crisis of resources is nothing other than a conflict over who controls those resources.
To ensure the expansion of the military-industrial complex, its social acceptance must be guaranteed. Public consent is one of the psychological battlefields that is adept at varying its strategies. There is governance through fear, through isolation, and through economic blackmail. And the choice of words, such as the term ‘enemy’.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, people spoke of ‘special operations’ and ‘surgical strikes’, not of ‘war’. Today, by contrast, we are witnessing an escalation in military rhetoric. Whilst social consent is paramount, it is precisely here that they will find it difficult to accept an internal enemy, and this is where our refusal begins. If war is won first and foremost at home, social and police repression forms the basis of military operations. Refusing to be mobilised for a war that is not our own invites us to better discern what remains for us to defend, what we wish to create, and also where we stand. In this struggle, healthcare is a strategic arena for the state and the army; likewise, we believe it should be so for us.
Whilst, on the one hand, this is to ensure people are fit for the front line or for work, from our perspective it is the starting point from which true autonomy can be conceived – a solidarity that takes account of all our contradictions, far removed from the charity and violence inherent in the commodification of care.
The current situation in France regarding collaboration between the army and hospitals
“The scenario of a major deployment of the French armed forces in a high-intensity conflict is not a figment of the imagination. […] And so, if [they] were deployed as part of a coalition – of which they could, of course, take command – there would obviously be casualties” [1]
In August 2025, the Ministry of Health sent a circular to the ARS (Regional Health Agencies) instructing public hospitals to prepare, by March 2026, for a possible “major military engagement”. [2] The objective, announced with the utmost discretion, was to be able to admit up to 100 patients a day for 60 consecutive days across the whole of France. The military model is infiltrating the civilian system through ‘emergency response’ frameworks. Under the term ‘’exceptional health situations’, plans known as ORSEC [3] and ORSAN [4] are drawn up jointly by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Defence, allowing for military command to be established if necessary.
Not so long ago, the management of the Covid epidemic served as a testing ground for this whole policy of militarisation. Lockdowns, health passes, the redefinition of essential services and emergencies. We accepted bonuses to keep our mouths shut, national unity in the name of war, being conscripted to applause, being exploited in the name of our calling whilst studying, triaging patients and obeying simplified protocols. This taught us the basics of wartime medicine. For war is viewed as a crisis, a disaster like any other. The digitalisation of healthcare, which has been imposed through financial incentives and propaganda in this context, has become a means of control that facilitates, for example, the triage of patients using algorithms and the monitoring of public spaces via QR codes.
Furthermore, the Armed Forces Health Service, which reports to the Ministry of Defence, currently comprises 16 medical centres and a biomedical research institute, an Armed Forces Centre for Epidemiology and Public Health, an Armed Forces Blood Transfusion Centre, an Armed Forces Radiological Protection Service and eight military hospitals to which military personnel are required to turn for their initial medical care. As part of its new strategic plan, unveiled in 2024, the Armed Forces Health Service aims to “align the organisation of peacetime command with that of wartime command”. To this end, we are now witnessing a growing process of collaboration between the civilian and military sectors. In both the public and private sectors, hospitals have signed agreements in recent years to form ‘joint civilian military teams’. In Brest, the University Hospital (CHRU) has been gradually implementing a mixed public hospital model since 2009, under which “patient referrals and the movement of healthcare staff will be planned by mutual agreement” between the military and civilian hospitals. In Lyon, the Hospices Civils and the Desgenettes Armed Forces Training Hospital have been pooling healthcare, research, training and crisis management exercises since 2017. In Bordeaux, the Robert Picqué military hospital, which currently also treats civilians, is set to close its doors and focus exclusively on care for the armed forces.
Whilst most military hospitals still admit civilian patients for the time being, it is above all the entire social infrastructure – from training programmes to the choice of medical specialisms and research – that is ultimately being harnessed for the purposes of militarisation. When future military doctors undertake placements in civilian hospitals due to a lack of training placements, the ‘healthcare in a military setting’ option is being introduced for medical students. For its part, the Ministry of the Armed Forces is funding doctoral theses related to the areas of healthcare that interest it (traumatology, burns, chemical hazards). The number of vacancies for reserve healthcare staff has increased, offering a much more attractive salary than positions for care assistants and nurses in the civilian sector. The armed forces also offer to fund the training of healthcare students in exchange for a service contract. A simulation centre for large-scale ‘disasters’ is being inaugurated in Toulouse in 2024, whilst the A&E department at the same university hospital is set to close for a few days due to staff shortages. Furthermore, the joint military exercises ORION 2026 have collaborated with the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Lyon to simulate scenarios involving the deployment of emergency psychological support teams in a war zone.
Another aspect highlighted in the circular concerns budgetary decisions and the location of healthcare facilities. The management of hospital buildings is moving towards the centralisation of facilities, which would ideally be situated near railway stations and airports. Small maternity wards and outpatient psychiatric services are closing, with services being centralised into healthcare hubs in major cities. Another area where the army is involved in practical operations relates to the production of medicines. Production licences are reserved for private laboratories, and apart from a civilian hospital branch in Paris, only the Armed Forces Central Pharmacy in Orléans also holds such a licence. Medicines adapted for military use (around 60 products available) are then managed by the Armed Forces Medical Supply Depot in Marseille. Here is a non-exhaustive overview of the information we have been able to gather.
Also worth mentioning is the booklet ‘Tous responsables’ (‘We Are All Responsible’) and the Red Cross’s calls to ‘prepare for disaster’. This government initiative is part of a strategy to accustom the population to fear whilst promoting the army’s reserves. ‘We are all responsible’, but only to the extent that this responsibility takes the form expected by the government. By appropriating a theory of individual psychology and adapting it to an entire society, governments are co-opting the concept of resilience, primarily to bolster their counter-insurgency efforts.
Resilience is, at its core, the ability of materials to withstand an impact without breaking. In psychology, it is a theory used to characterise a person’s reaction to trauma in order to overcome it. But when extended to a society’s reaction to trauma, it takes on a different meaning from that in an individual healthcare context. In recent years, the concept of resilience has been promoted by governments after they have either caused or facilitated a disaster. Following Fukushima in 2011, the Japanese government has consistently used this term to describe the population’s reaction to the severe consequences of a nuclear society. To respond with the notion of resilience means to tell society that it must survive the crisis by continuing to function as a society, without questioning the system that caused the trauma.
Without missing a beat, the military sector has been reclaiming the term ‘resilience’ in recent years. The French army has been theorising this psychological doctrine since 2008 in its White Paper. And the examples cited reveal a certain inspiration drawn from highly militarised societies: Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. NATO has its own ‘resilience committee’, which is presented as part of the rearmament process – specifically, to anticipate and influence public reaction. This is what can facilitate the acceptance of societal change: constantly talking about the ‘crisis’ and war, whilst diverting those who suffer it from harbouring mistrust towards those who cause it. We highlight and emphasise our ability to withstand shock and overcome trauma – and who wouldn’t want that? The question is rather what we render invisible when we talk about resilience.
War at the heart of politics is usually avoided in public discourse. Macron treats it as a new reality, but what is striking today is the lack of response on the streets. And this tacit acceptance of an arms industry that operates in a market based on the profitability of massacres. The foundation of the National Socialist or fascist seizure of power was conceived on the basis of industrial and military support. Carl Schmitt’s concept of the ‘total state’, put forward in Germany in 1932, was presented to industrialists gathered in the Association of Common Interests of Rhineland Westphalia before being taken up in Hitler’s speech in 1933 at the Leipzig Lawyers’ Congress. What has changed today is that in 1933, it was fascism that heralded war in Europe.
Today, war is already here. It is everywhere and takes ever-increasing forms, as technology has advanced to the point of making it an everyday reality. The continuation of war is the necessary foundation for the survival of capitalism, which, without it, could not endlessly expand into new fields of financial speculation. Control over energy, the arms market, the conquest of space, and a tightly woven network of communications and surveillance are what openly underpin the government’s interests. This capitalist cannibalism draws on old imperialist and racist doctrines based on the division of peoples and the exploitation of all lands. And it permeates every corner of society, not forgetting that modern warfare relies on a civilian workforce across all sectors, on transport and logistics infrastructure, as well as on our acceptance.
The stories of rebellious draft-dodgers who opposed military service in various ways were largely lost when the transition was made from conscription to voluntary service and a professional army. Because at that time everyone who was conscripted had to ask themselves this question, it was political from the outset. Because war could not become an abstraction for those who benefit from their situation far from the front lines. The dispossession of the body – which this called into question for each individual and for society as a whole – is reflected today in the dispossession of the body politic. What is frightening, therefore, is to look squarely not at what is coming, but at what we have let slip by day after day. We must admit that we have inherited an old defeat when it comes to global militarisation.
Solidarity with those who are fighting today or have fought in the past, and with deserters from all armies!
Here’s to the proletariat, our comrades and the rebellious masses!
To our shared madness and our childlike dreams!
Footnotes
- General Stéphane Groën, senior officer of the South-West Defence and Security Zone, speaking to France 3, in July 2024
- Article in *Le Canard Enchaîné* dated the 26th of August 2025
- Civil protection response organisation, led by the prefect
- Organisation of the healthcare system’s response to exceptional health situations
