He launched his bold proposals for a new EU aircraft carrier task force, along with a common air transport and logistics command and common procurement systems, on June 16.

This was the anniversary of Napoleon's victory over the Prussians at the battle of Ligny in 1815, which was then followed by the more famous Anglo-Prussian victory at Waterloo two days later, which finally ended Napoleon's empire. The French, naturally, prefer to remember June 18 as the day that Gen. Charles de Gaulle launched his famous call to Free France in 1940, with Hitler's troops marching down the Champs Elysee. "France has lost a battle, but she has not lost the war," he declared, in a speech that all French schoolchildren know.

Europe has so much history, most of it composed of Europeans fighting one another down the centuries, that it may not be easy to find a neutral date. But if successful, this week's proposal is likely to be remembered as the real birth of the EU as a great military power.

Sarkozy first raised the idea of creating of a European naval unit during France's presidency of the Council of the European Union, which begins July 1, in a regular summit meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the Bavarian town of Straubing last week.

Characteristically, Sarkozy was very generous with other countries' assets. He suggested the German navy contribute frigates and logistics units to an aircraft carrier battle group that will sail under a European flag. The carrier itself, however, would have to come from Britain's Royal Navy, since France's Charles de Gaulle carrier spends so much of its time in harbor being repaired. Despite earlier promises of a joint design and construction plan with Britain for new carriers, Sarkozy has now put off until 2012 any decision to build another carrier, with its estimated cost of $4 billion.

The reason is simple: There is no cash left in the French treasury. He also told Merkel that France probably will have to delay building a planned new nuclear submarine.

Sarkozy's explanation to Merkel of his financial squeeze puts a new cast on the grandiose unveiling this week in Paris of the country's new defense strategy, to trim and restructure the French military.

The army will lose 10 percent of its troops, some 13,000 men. The air force will lose more than 20 percent, another 13,000 personnel, but 88,000 of the future army of 130,000 are supposed to be available for swift deployment overseas. The navy will also lose 20 percent of its effectives, another 10,000 sailors. The civilian support staff will also lose 18,000 jobs. The idea is to build a leaner and more deployable military, more attuned to fighting terrorism, helping with humanitarian emergencies and U.N. missions and mounting swift expeditionary forces and working with coalitions.

Defense Minister Herve Morin, writing in Le Monde this week, said the idea was to make the French more like their British allies. France currently has 60 percent of its troops in support and administrative roles and only 40 percent available for operations -- the reverse of the more agile and leaner British forces, Morin noted. France could not really operate alongside its British and U.S. allies on the same battlefield, and that had to change.

So the new defense plan is to try to save money while shrinking and modernizing the military, phasing out many of the 471 military bases in France and in Africa, closing the vast barracks that used to house the country's conscripts and cutting back 150 tanks from its armored divisions. Money will go instead to intelligence satellites and to a new generation of small and agile armored vehicles and cruise missiles and submarines.

But by deploying these forces within a European defense structure, with common units like the aircraft carrier task force, France hopes to get far more geopolitical bang for its buck. One aspect of this will be, if the terms are right, to bring France back into NATO's joint military command for the first time since 1966, when President de Gaulle walked out in protest at being refused a say in the deployment and use of U.S. nuclear weapons on French soil.

In return for rejoining NATO as a full member, France is insisting on a top-ranking command, preferably a French admiral in charge of the Mediterranean, although the United States would not want its Sixth Fleet under even the most nominal French orders. And neither France nor Italy wants the Mediterranean airspace coming under French command.

Above all, NATO as a whole and the United States and Britain in particular look with deep suspicion on French proposals to put more resources into the EU's military capability, since they fear these would lead to fewer resources going to NATO. They suspect a longstanding French strategy to replace NATO with an EU force, and thus ease the Americans out of their traditional military leadership in Europe.

The problem is that the current U.S. military presence is but a shrunken form of the 300,000 U.S. troops deployed on NATO's front line in Europe during the Cold War. Most of the 60,000 or so troops there are logistic and administrative forces, with most of the combat troops being rotated in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Sixth Fleet frequently has no operational carrier.

Even if these suspicions are misplaced and Sarkozy has resolved on a new and cooperative Atlanticist strategy for France, he still is seeking a very high degree of French military influence in both NATO and the EU for less money than France currently spends on defense. This is unlikely to work: The British and the United States have found that trimming the size of a military while trying to modernize and streamline its fighting capabilities tends to cost more money rather than save it.

And the irony remains that the EU country with the most wealth and the highest population remains a military pygmy. Germany spends less than half the proportion of GDP on defense that France and Britain spend. As long as Germany stays this way, grandiose plans for the EU becoming a great military power will not get very far.

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