The French Navy will scale down its participation in the upcoming iteration of the largest joint military exercises between the Philippines and the United States, citing a shift in deployment due to the Middle East crisis.
France will send “between 15 and 20” troops instead of deploying about 150 personnel embarked on an amphibious assault ship and a frigate with accompanying helicopters and landing craft—a plan that would have marked its largest participation to date in the annual Balikatan exercises. The Mistral-class landing helicopter dock (LHD) FS Dixmude (L9015) and the Lafayette-class frigate FS Aconit (F713), both part of this year’s Jeanne d’Arc training mission that began in February, had earlier been announced to take part in the drills.
This year’s Balikatan exercises are expected to be one of the largest ever, even as Washington wages war in the Middle East. The drills are set to begin next week and will run until early May.
“We were hoping to have a large deployment that included the Jeanne d’Arc coming to the Philippines on the occasion of Balikatan. The deployment was requested to stay in Europe and not far from the Middle East, considering the current situation,”
French ambassador to the Philippines Marie Fontanel said in a press conference on Monday, April 13.
The five-month Jeanne d’Arc 2026 deployment was originally expected to take the task group to the Middle East, East Africa and the Indo-Pacific. Its planned stops in Southeast Asia were Indonesia, Philippines and Singapore. Instead, the Mistral-class LHD and Lafayette-class frigate made a port call in Cape Town, South Africa in early April and are now heading East to Latin America via the Atlantic Ocean.
“In a sense, it’s modification of the participation linked with the crisis in the Middle East that requires the assets to be redeployed in another area so it’s not necessarily a downgrading per se. It’s a modification because of the current situation but we still commit to this exercise as far as much as we can in the current situation,” she said.
Paris and Manila signed a Status of Visiting Forces Agreement last month, allowing both nations to expand their security cooperation to include joint military drills. The Philippines has similar agreements with the United States, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and Canada, while negotiations are ongoing with the United Kingdom. The agreement with France, the Philippines’ first with a European country, is the fourth concluded under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
French defense attaché Capt. Stephan Litzler, speaking at the same press conference, said the participating troops will take part in headquarters-based exercises, including activities in Palawan and cyber defense drills in Manila.
“We can continue getting the operational intimacy and continue to have perspectives in terms of participation in further iterations of either Balikatan or other types of exercise,” he said.
Following the signing of a Letter of Intent in December 2023 to strengthen bilateral defense relations, the two countries have since held regular talks, conducted joint naval and disaster response exercises, carried out port visits and expanded exchanges involving military delegations and training programs.
An agreement on the high-level exchange of military information—similar to a General Security of Military Information Agreement, which allows countries to share classified defense information securely—is also part of future discussions following the growing level of security partnership with the Philippines, according to Fontanel.
