Armenian pundit: French weapons not to increase Armenia's defence capacity

Armenian public and political figure Avetik Chalabyan has said that weapons supplied by France will not increase Armenia’s defence capacity.

"Talking about French weapons is, unfortunately, for laymen. The reality is that what matters is not weapons, but comprehensive defence capability," Chalabyan said in an interview with Armenian media, Caliber.Az reports.

For example, Armenia is buying three radars from France, which, by the way, are qualitative radars from Thales. However, from the viewpoint of integrated defence, let us understand what these three radars mean. Each of these radars has a range of up to 200 kilometres, but in our area, because of the rugged terrain, it is much less. So, the station operates at 200 kilometres in flat terrain. We actually need dozens of radars of this class to cover all our borders. In addition to radars, we need air defence systems. You said Mistral surface-to-air missile systems, but, in fact, we do not have a contract for the Mistral. There is only a memorandum. By the way, France does not give us weapons on favourable terms; we do not know on what terms we will receive these weapons.

Now let us go back to our conversation. When a country chooses its defence doctrine, there should be different components linked to each other by different systems, such as artillery systems, multiple launch rocket systems, missiles, air defence systems. There needs to be a common systems approach to defence tasks, and to understand that all these systems need to be echeloned, interconnected and integrated. Why am I saying all this? Because if we buy some bits and pieces from France, it doesn't affect your defence capability. Therefore, when the current government takes some individual deal and starts publicising it, it is just a primitive populist trick," Chalabyan said.