Crises follow one another, experts proliferate, academic programmes multiply. And companies are beginning to realise that they can no longer ignore a world they thought they could keep at a distance. International relations and security and defence have become a “market”. But a market for whom? And for whose benefit?
In more than twenty-five years of supporting business leaders, I have rarely met economic decision-makers who were truly aware of international relations issues in their security and defence dimensions.
For most of them, the world was an open playing field – to be discovered, conquered and used to cut costs, whether on supplies or services. Globalisation was a happy one, people said. And in this context, the question of the long-term preservation of skills and production, particularly in industry, was not raised often enough.
I fondly remember one executive who courageously chose to leave a prestigious position rather than accept, as his group’s leadership wished, a contract with leonine clauses: in exchange for short-term orders, he would have guaranteed the (Asian) buyer control over his company’s key skills in the medium and long term.
But he was the exception. Around him, few of his peers really asked these questions. Security issues? Barely mentioned. Those of “global defence”, in their economic, technological and political dimensions? Almost absent from conversations.
During those same years, I had also come to know and meet, one way or another, almost all the think tanks active on these subjects and their experts. The “market” was in fact very small. It was fairly easy to take part in exchanges between motivated representatives of “civil society” and the rare specialists in diplomatic or military matters.
All this has changed in recent years. And in these changes, I see both positive dynamics and worrying developments.
More and more programmes: good news, with perverse effects
During my student years and until the mid-1990s, programmes dedicated to international relations and security and defence could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Assas-Paris 2, Lyon 3, ILERI in the private sector – with small cohorts. Sciences Po Paris too, of course. And Sciences Po Grenoble, although these subjects were not, a priori, a specialisation there. They were rather options grafted onto law, history or political science curricula.
For those who wanted to learn without making it a career, other paths existed: for example, the open activities of think tanks and associations, or joining the military reserve. This is how, as an officer and then a senior officer over the years, I benefited from high-level training on these subjects, including alongside comrades from the active forces. And then there were the IHEDN sessions – national ones for a “happy few” and regional ones to raise awareness of these issues more widely among business leaders.
In the early 2000s, the “market” for security and defence training grew. First the 9/11 effect: the brutal reminder that our world is never really at peace. Then the LMD reform (the bachelor–master–doctorate system), which seems to have encouraged the creation of specialised programmes where, previously, only a dissertation or thesis topic could signal a specialisation. But cohorts of graduates remained limited.
Today, there is an abundance. There are between forty and sixty specialised programmes in international relations and security and defence, at all levels. Every year they put several thousand graduates on the job market, several hundred of them with specialisations that are hard to transfer to the business world. This is no doubt, as with the surge in volunteers for the armed forces, active or reserve, the effect of the 2015 attacks, which made people realise that peace and freedom are fragile goods.
It is also a necessity and an opportunity for a field neglected for too long. But the real effects – notably the building of a pool of solid experts – will only be fully felt in a few years’ time. It takes ten to twenty years to acquire real legitimacy in these highly specialised fields, and it is good to see institutions now encouraging investment in academic security and defence research. It is never too late…
But today’s specialists are those who began their studies in the 2000s, who are now in their forties, and whose scarcity is felt anew with every crisis. We saw this, for example, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when genuine experts – women and men alike – were particularly rare, and therefore in extremely high demand.
Yet this profusion of programmes is already producing negative effects. Internship offers in the relevant institutions are multiplying, without necessarily leading to lasting jobs. Too many young graduates come up against a shortage of openings. And those who resign themselves to approaching sectors further from their original career plans struggle to make the most of skills too specialised to be transferred.
They thought they had found the golden goose. Many are discovering fool’s gold.
The rush for expertise: between legitimate experts and opportunists
In this context of growing demand, not everyone loses out – at least not in the short term.
Rolling news channels need to fill their studios. With recognisable faces and confident, even divisive – “polarising”, as they say – discourse. And when the rare genuine experts are overwhelmed with requests, or honestly judge that their expertise is not the most relevant for the topic of the moment, other profiles rush into the gap. With aplomb, a certain rhetorical ease and a lack of scruples that can fascinate as much as it should normally worry. For some, media fame has become capital in its own right, independent of any proven competence.
The academic programmes that continue to develop also attract speakers of variable quality. Among them, fortunately, are academics whose training and intellectual rigour allow them to broaden their initial field without sacrificing the quality of their contributions. These profiles are precious, as they ensure serious teaching continuity amid this profusion of programmes. But the same programmes also include speakers more attracted by fame or financial rewards than by teaching, who impose themselves with more conviction than proven competence. Speakers whom programme directors accept, often for lack of anything better or for lack of discernment, but because students have to be attracted somehow.
Curiously, few recognised experts come from the diplomatic world. Is this due, with a few well-known exceptions, to a natural reserve acquired over a career that teaches discretion? Or to a status that encourages such reserve? It is a pity in any case, because the diplomatic approach has its own specificity, its own reading of crises, different from that of the military or academics, and complementary.
On the other hand, many former military officers have taken on this role of public expert. Their presence is partly explained by a very specific structural reality: career management for senior officers and generals could not guarantee all of them a move into defence companies, especially in recent years, which have been difficult for the sector. With the reduction in the number of units, and therefore of their commanders, many high-ranking officers were pushed out of the institution while still fully eager – and for some, obliged for personal and family reasons – to quickly start a “second career”.
Among them, genuine experts – those who have really worked on strategic, geopolitical and operational issues – are in fact rare. As is their voice. Others, less scrupulous about the gap between their actual experience and the claims they make, skilfully trade on the prestige of the institution, of their predecessors and of the most deserving of their contemporaries, wrapping themselves in it. Presented, at least implicitly, as seasoned warriors and high-flying strategists, they were often above all peacetime administrators. Useful cogs, certainly, but executors within a large bureaucracy that has little to teach a world seeking agility, innovation and rapid decision-making in an uncertain environment.
For some of them, the multiplication of programmes is an additional opportunity, particularly outside the university world, which is strictly bound by precise qualification criteria. So is the creation of new “think tanks” with often opaque statutes and funding, which multiply public statements without anyone being able to really assess the seriousness of their expertise. These structures seek in particular to enhance their facade with “2S” generals – generals in the “second section” – a term most recruiters and journalists do not even fully understand. (As a reminder: in theory, general officers placed in the second section could be recalled to command in time of war. Which may legitimately worry, given some of the profiles appearing on television today…)
Companies: a new clientele or a call to mobilise?
In theory, companies are a natural outlet for all these people trained in the challenges of a changing world. Not only in the arms or security sector. Not only because conflicts are increasingly hybrid and technologies increasingly dual-use. But because all these dimensions must now be built into the strategic management of any organisation with an international dimension – in its supplies, its markets, its partners.
But do they need the specialists available on the market and those produced by today’s programmes?
When programmes remained “generalist with individual specialisation”, highly specialised profiles found work – in academic institutions and think tanks, which are more numerous elsewhere than in France. And more open profiles could put their knowledge of international issues to use as one asset among others, serving broader skills: risk management, international commercial negotiation, strategic intelligence. A “little something extra”.
The growing specialisation that now accompanies the multiplication of programmes has become a real obstacle to employment. Crises and geographical tensions are multiplying, certainly. But no company, outside dedicated institutions and think tanks, can permanently employ a specialist for each country or area of tension. Highly specialised new graduates arrive on a narrow, quickly saturated market, with skills whose transfer into organisations remains hard to put to use.
They thought it was the golden goose, when it is more likely fool’s gold.
The “warriors”: fascinating, but rarely transferable
There is another type of profile finding a growing echo in companies: former special forces operators – real warriors – and, more recently, a few former intelligence officers who openly embrace and promote that past, in contrast with their predecessors’ tradition of discretion. The “Le Bureau des Légendes” or “Cœurs noirs” effect? Or simply the cult of the ego spreading to every part of society?
These profiles fascinate. Their stories make people dream. The “team-building” sessions they run are often unforgettable.
But their capacity to inspire – and above all to genuinely transfer skills – is extremely limited. Olivier Schmitt’s work demonstrates this well: wartime military organisations and civilian organisations are radically different in nature, culture and decision-making mechanisms. Peacetime structures (including defence and security organisations) can be compared. Wartime structures cannot be transposed.
For the crises that companies and civilian organisations go through, even the most violent, have nothing in common with war except the name some give them a little too quickly. Unless a company literally finds itself under fire – in which case it is no longer about producing, but surviving.
What our companies really need
In these troubled times, international relations and security and defence issues thus appear as a new El Dorado. The major consulting firms, which have appeared quite recently in spaces devoted to strategic debate, now offer dedicated expertise – or rather their usual teams, flanked by one or two “big names” more responsible for opening doors than for truly enriching the services. And the self-appointed experts mentioned above thrive on a general lack of knowledge of the fundamentals, amid a now widely felt sense of urgency.
For genuine experts, the period is no doubt favourable – and that is a good thing, as for too long they worked without real recognition of their added value. But these benefits are structurally limited: maintaining a high level of expertise requires continuous time for monitoring, reading and exchanges – time that cannot be monetised without being sacrificed.
Yet companies urgently need to make progress on these subjects. For several reasons that are no longer a matter of debate, but of the concrete reality of running an organisation.
You can no longer invest anywhere and with anyone without asking the right questions – something some should have had in mind well before today’s crises forced them to. Every company has a moral and legal responsibility for the safety of its employees, its partners and their families, whether in areas of geopolitical tension or in the face of new forms of hybrid threats, be they physical, technological or cognitive. Our collective future and the preservation of our freedoms also depend on the strength and durability of our companies, which are political actors (in the sense of actors in the life of the city) as much as economic ones. And international relations should now be part of the general culture every decision-maker needs in an interconnected, competitive world where the rules of the game are changing at unprecedented speed.
These needs are real. And to meet them effectively, companies need two very different – and complementary – types of profile.
Recognised specialists, first of all – to provide in-depth, rigorous expertise based on years of serious work, and to genuinely inform strategic decisions. Experts who must be identified beyond the high-profile media figures, whose availability is often low and whose up-to-date competence, as we have said, is sometimes debatable.
But also, and perhaps above all, translators. Because when two worlds are too far apart, the lessons of one cannot be fully transposed to the other. The most brilliant specialist, if they do not speak the language of business, will not be understood – or worse, will be misunderstood. The “culture shock” is too great to bring about real ownership and change. It can fascinate, sometimes. It often paralyses.
These translators are by nature “marginal secants” – a sociological concept describing individuals who belong to several groups at once, able to move between and connect worlds that, without them, would not talk to each other. Women and men with a foot in both worlds. Who speak both languages. Who have that “little something extra” that enables and enriches exchanges between experts sometimes locked in their own world and decision-makers and managers reluctant to open up to these additional constraints, or overwhelmed when trying to integrate them.
These “translators” are not “new specialists”, like the “chief geopolitical officers” some are calling for. Creating such a function with such a title, as some did with “chief digital officers” at the start of the wave of “digital transformations”, risks isolating a competence that should be shared as widely as possible. Unless the aim is to make an impression (but is that virtuous?), briefly create momentum and then disappear as quickly as possible, as was the case for CDOs.
They may be former military officers. But of the kind who have also knocked around the genuinely civilian world, and not only in the defence industrial and technological base, which keeps its players in a sometimes misleading closed circle as regards their understanding of business dynamics. These profiles are rare. But they exist (I know at least one), and their value is real.
They are also former students of programmes that were “both generalist and specialised”, who acquired solid foundations, kept them up through curiosity and practice over the years, while developing other skills – management, negotiation, complex project management – directly useful in organisations.
Tomorrow, they will also be those who have resisted the temptation of overly narrow specialisation, which stifles both curiosity and employability. Those who have understood that the value of a profile in a company or a large organisation is measured not by the depth of a niche, but by the ability to connect worlds.
And finally, they are those who, through their unusual paths and personal commitment, have cultivated knowledge and practice of both worlds and their practitioners. Those who can make the right connections, beyond labels and titles, building bridges of understanding between cultures that, without them, would look at each other from afar without ever really talking. “Go-betweens” who seek not to impress but to mobilise and move things forward.
These “translators”, these “marginal secants”, do not make magazine covers. They do not fill television studios. But they too are the ones who will enable our companies and their leaders to move forward in a world that neither warriors nor television experts can, on their own, help them understand and take in hand.
Alexis Kummetat
This article reflects only the views of its author. Article originally published in French on LinkedIn on 12 March 2026.
This article was translated from French by Claude (AI). In case of any discrepancy, the French version prevails.
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