Abstract
This paper presents an overall economic perspective of the main trends at work in the geographic pattern of the national defense in France. The framework assumes a public planner aiming to maximize the social utility of defense under a dual constraint: financial constraint and geographic constraint with an historical legacy. Through an analysis of current changes in the defense organization, we stress a play of forces between geographic concentration and geographic dispersion. On the one side, the current trends in defense organization show an economic rationalization that modifies the geographic pattern with waves of geographic concentration. On the other side, the dispersed spatial configuration of defense, legacy of several centuries of history, exercises all its influence on the current restructuring of defense. Such play of forces can be examined in the light of "decreasing cost" concept. In the framework of the "decreasing cost" concept, the paper proposes an overview of both social and regional costs caused by the rationalization process of defense.