François Garreau, commander of the La Fayette-type frigate Aconit

A graduate of the 2003 class of the École polytechnique, CV François Garreau chose, upon entering the Navy in 2006, to serve in the submarine forces. He first served for two years on a patrol boat in Martinique before spending his career from 2009 to 2019 on attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines.

INDIAN AND ATLANTIC OCEANS

In this capacity, he participated in missions conducted mainly in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. In 2013-2014, he commanded the patrol vessel La Moqueuse stationed in Nouméa, carrying out sovereignty and fisheries patrol missions in the South Pacific Ocean. While serving as executive officer of the attack submarine Perle, he passed the submarine command course in 2019. This was followed by two years ashore, on the staff of the nuclear attack submarine squadron, then at the Mediterranean operations center. He studied at the École de guerre in 2021-2022. CV Garreau then joined surface vessels as executive officer of the multi-mission frigate Provence (crew A), on which he carried out three missions in the Mediterranean Sea between 2022 and 2024. CV Garreau is a Knight of the Légion d’honneur and of the Ordre national du Mérite, and holds the Croix du combattant and two citations. He has a total of 13,600 hours of submarine diving and 600 days at sea on surface vessels. For his part, during the 17 months of command of CF Hervé Nielly, the crew of the Aconit notably contributed to the building up of the vessel's operational power following its renovation and upgrade. Arriving in August 2023, CF Hervé Nielly was responsible for completing the technical upgrade shutdown of the Aconit and then conducting the sea trial phases. This period required a phase of intense training necessary for the recovery and reappropriation of the upgraded systems (machinery...). This was followed by a qualifying course (combat system) to validate the crew's operational capabilities before starting a three-month mission in the Eastern Mediterranean. In the second half of 2024, the Aconit took part in exercise CHEBEC with the Marine royale marocaine.

VERSATILE COMBAT VESSELS

La Fayette-type frigates (FLF) are versatile combat vessels, designed primarily to preserve and enforce national interests in overseas maritime areas and to participate in the resolution of crises outside Europe. They can thus be automatically required to provide support in this context for an intervention force, the protection of commercial traffic, special operations, or humanitarian missions. These ships are designed to accommodate a Panther anti-ship warfare helicopter and its detachment on board. The FLFs therefore primarily participate in the operational action mission through maritime surveillance, intelligence, special forces deployment, or integration into a task force in a crisis zone, but can, depending on the circumstances, intervene in the context of maritime safety. From 2020 to 2023, three of them underwent a renovation and upgrade program designed to enable them to meet their operational contract until the arrival of the defense and intervention frigates. The modernization notably includes the addition of a hull sonar to provide the FLFs with anti-submarine warfare capabilities.