Psychological Support for Military Personnel on Operations

2/ The likely evolution

Can or should this situation be continued ?

The situation is now as follows: the psychologists of the Air Force are exclusively in charge with the selection and depend on the high command of the training schools of the Air Force which do not deal with the psychological support.

The Navy has a certain number of applied psychology centres based in ports but the command of those centres is delegated to a psychiatrist.


The Gendarmerie has at its disposal a centre exclusively devoted to the selection of the personnel and a committee linked to the personnel management.


The Army has at its disposal a centre of studies for the selection of its personnel, but this centre will be dissolved within the next few weeks. The few psychologists are dispatched in various places where their specialty is not much valued.

Unlike the Army, the three other armies employ their psychologists to analyze the troops morale exclusively in France, but never on operations, while it is normal and usual practice in foreign armies.

The Army traditionally entrusts this task to the CHR, which is also in charge with defining and analyzing the Army's needs in specialists in social science. It is quite obvious that the French Army will not resort to psychologists in the field, for it would * undermine + the sociologist's role.

This situation, often denounced, raises our foreign friends misunderstanding.

However, a tendency is now becoming apparent: the Headquarters staff, determined to develop the psychological support of the troops, set up a commission for studies. Our centre attended this Commission but unfortunately our counterparts of the Navy, Air Force and Gendarmerie did not.

One year of reflection, exchanges, clashes of powers and abilities, led to a scheme aiming at dividing tasks.

In the slides, you will notice that the specialists of the human factor are once again mixed up. The tasks of the officers-experts in human factor were mainly established by psychologists but it was not quite possible to differentiate the roles of each party, here again for reasons of power.

It must be noted that psychiatrists have kept * individual support to people and groups confronted with difficulties + which is in their book the responsibility of the Health service, and especially that of the psychiatrist himself.

The psychiatrists have also kept both the psychopathological selection and the examination of critical incidents and accidents.

The USAMRU, the crisis psychological centre of the Belgian army or the psychological services of the Croatian army have however in this domain knowledge and skills that come from their experience as psychologists.

It is a problem of competencies and the Headquarter staff do not want to decide between one solution and the other and prefers to let the specialists take themselves the good decision. It is like squaring the circle !


This maybe too long of a bird's eye view of the existent procedures for psychological support in France shows that a lot of work still remains to be done in the French Army in order :