Frances defence ministry and armed forces are to get a new Pentagon-style headquarters in southern Paris under plans unveiled on Thursday intended to boost military co-operation. Fifteen key ministry and armed forces divisions, currently scattered over a dozen sites in and around the capital, are to move to the new HQ, to be built by 2014 on a military-owned site in the far south-west of the capital.
"Our armies work together in operations all across the world. They have to stop working as separate entities at command level," Defence Minister Herve Morin told reporters as he presented the plans. Architects will be invited to put in bids this year for the site in Balard next to the Paris inner ring road, which will eventually host 10,000 people, with the chosen project to be unveiled in 2011, Morin said.
Built under a public-private partnership, the new defence headquarters should have a design "worthy of the 21st century, and of the planets fourth biggest military power," the minister said. Under the plans, the defence ministry will move from the 18th-century Hotel de Brienne south of the River Seine, where it was installed by General Charles de Gaulle after World War II. The armed forces chief of staff will leave an underground bunker in the Latin Quarter.