Interview with Vice-Admiral François Moreau, Senior Official, Deputy Correspondent for Defence and Security (HFDDS) and Director for the Protection of Defence Installations, Resources and Activities (DPID)
What are the missions of the Directorate for the Protection of Defence Installations, Resources and Activities (DPID)?
The DPID is the section headed by the Senior Defence and Security Official (HFDS) of the Ministry of the Armed Forces. It is in charge of developing the policy for the protection of sites, information systems, personnel, secrecy and defence companies. The DPID was created in 2015 following incidents on sensitive sites. The State was determined that defence and security issues be dealt with at the best level. Although the Ministry of the Armed Forces has by definition a culture of defence and security, there was nevertheless at the time a need to guide and bring coherence to all of these policies.
Our first mission is to protect all the resources of the Ministry of the Armed Forces so that it can fulfil its national defence mission. The aim is to retain our freedom of action, to avoid finding ourselves one day in a position where we would be prevented from being able to act.
To this end, we ensure in particular the consistency of the level of protection within the ministry. We are not an inspection agency, we are there to help and support. For the purposes of feedback, we analyse security/defence events, for example intrusion attempts on sensitive sites and drone overflights, or attacks on soldiers. We follow this every day and we have a weekly update with the military chief of staff who is also a senior defence and security official. We draw up an inventory of threats, we observe them, we compare them with incidents and we deduce adjustments to our protection policy. Finally, we study the protection resources necessary to support this protection policy.
We have strong ties with the intelligence community. In particular, we are in close contact with the Defence Intelligence and Security Directorate (DRSD), which is particularly responsible for counter-intrusion. We exchange very regularly; the DRSD provides feedback from the field in order to adapt our tools. I also travel regularly to see the sites in person, because nothing replaces contact with the field.
Digital security is a subject that is increasingly present in the performance of your missions…
The concept of digital security has recently been added to our missions, it is an important development. I am in charge of implementing ministry policy, of guiding with the digital actors the choices and the way in which we are going to protect ourselves vis-à-vis the threats linked to the permanent digital confrontation. The DPID now exercises the function of ministerial digital security authority. Digital security was previously the responsibility of the Directorate General for Digital and Information and Communication Systems (DGNum). It was useful to clearly separate the two notions of digitization and security, and to integrate it into the DPID, because these digital security subjects are completely convergent with defence and security issues.
We have integrated seven additional people into our workforce to work on digital security topics. One of the main characteristics of the DPID is the small number of people who work there (32). We rely on the defence and security culture of the Ministry of the Armed Forces and work by seeking great subsidiarity.
Are inter-ministerial issues a major concern?
This question takes up a lot of my time. The Ministry of the Armed Forces is not evolving in a bubble and one of my major concerns is to ensure that our issues are taken into account at the inter-ministerial level, thanks to the action of the General Secretariat for Defence and National Security (SGDSN). The Ministry is permanently in contact with other ministerial bodies, for example with the Ministry of Ecological Transformation, with the Ministry of the Interior or even with the Ministry of Higher Education and Research for subjects related to the protection of national defence secrets, which is a real concern, or the protection of our scientific and technical heritage. It is very important to ensure not only that the ministerial perimeter is well protected, but also that the level of protection in the ecosystem in which it operates is indeed consistent.
What are the links between the DPID and the defence industry?
There is a functional aspect that requires us to work on the proper protection of the facilities and information systems of the defence industry in order to preserve overall operational efficiency. We do this with the support of the defence procurement agency (DGA) and more particularly its section in charge of security. Dialogue is very easy because the DGA is very well organized and has a real culture in this area. We also verify that our manufacturers are able to continue their activities at the level required in the face of an event.
Beyond that, we support industrial projects with the ministry’s capacity chain to help improve protection.
What does the Eurosatory show represent for you? Why is it important for the DPID to be present?
These exhibitions are an opportunity to get an overview in one day. We can meet actors, exchange with them in an effective way and pass on messages. This is a very useful event in that respect. It is also an opportunity to be able to look for rare pearls that I will promote and highlight. For example, at a previous show, we met a company capable of tracking microdrones from surveillance cameras. We hadn’t thought of that.
What has the war in Ukraine changed in the performance of your missions?
The outbreak of the war led us to review the level of protection of the Ministry of the Armed Forces and to raise the threshold of vigilance. This conflict is a permanent concern, but I would not say that it is a daily concern for the DPID.
In any case, the war in Ukraine confirms, if need be, the end of the strategic interlude which followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and which for a time led us to believe that the level of threat on our lands was decreasing. It also confirms the directions taken by the DPID since its creation. We must indeed be able to deal with the potential action of foreign agencies on our territory, so we must protect ourselves against them.
What are the major issues that you expect to become increasingly important in the future?
The threat is very present, as this war unfortunately illustrates. It is a question of responding to this increased threat by adopting a response at the right cost. Within the Ministry of the Armed Forces, we have a very large number of sites which do not all have the same sensitivity. We do not protect a nuclear installation like we protect an archive centre, for example. It is important to have a range of tools that can respond to this diversity. In short, we protect all locations in a manner appropriate to the risk and at the right cost.
It is also necessary to prepare for the threats of tomorrow in the digital domain, in robots, drones and miniaturisation. These threats present us with quite a few challenges. It is important that manufacturers bear this in mind.
Finally, innovation is a major subject for us. On the one hand, we need to understand how the adversary innovates, how he can exploit innovations to threaten us and obviously we need to respond. We also need to innovate in our protection to defeat his attempts. In a world where technology is changing very quickly, it is important to find an organization and a way to meet security/defence needs very rapidly.
By Julien Chabrout