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The Avro Vulcan was a hot ship in 1960, and not even the hottest in the RAF, that would be the Handley Page Victor, and several Vulcan flights did indeed confound US Air Defences and get into a position to bomb US cities. Unfortunately the lessons of the exercise - Operation Sky Shield - were quickly learnt, to the detriment of manned bombers like Vulcan and Victor, the result of one of the worst errors of technical intelligence in the Cold-War.Roy Chadwick, who designed this beauty, learnt his trade with carpenter’s tools and sewing needles before the first world war.Background:Eisenhower’s last term as President (1957–1961) wasn’t much fun for American aeronautics. It had begun well, the USA was the unrivalled superpower in nuclear bomb delivery through the mighty Strategic Air Command. Jimmy Stewart had just stared in a film of the very same name, all-aluminium death tubes carrying instant sunshine were as all-American as baseball and apple pie.Any excuse to get Jimmy Stewart air time.America had increasing numbers of the only deployable thermonuclear bomb, which could be carried almost anywhere in the world by the USAF’s growing fleet of bombers: Swept-wing jet-powered B-52 Stratofortress were replacing propeller driven B-36 Peacemakers in the intercontinental role, while the supersonic B-58 Hustler was on the horizon to replace the shorter ranged fighter-like B-47 Stratojet. The KC-135 Stratotanker was just about to take to the sky putting these aircraft (almost) anywhere in the world inside half a day.The competition?Russia had upset a few intelligence estimates by getting an A-bomb and an H-bomb tested earlier than expected. The fast and nimble MiG-15 pushes the envelope, and they really startled government plane spotters when they deployed the Myasishchev M-4 Bison bomber in 1954. It couldn't reach northern Canada, but it wasnt supposed to exist at all.Say what you like about communism, but their graphic design department was superb.Soon after that the Tupolev Tu-16 Badger arrived on scene, just able to reach parts of the US coastline. In 1956 came the Tupolev Tu-95 Bear which could put nuclear weapons into the continental USA for the first time - providing the prop engined interloper could get past the wall of century series supersonic fighters guarding US airspace.The big red star still looking good, even over Idaho. The propellors less so.US bomber barons wanted more money to keep ahead of this ‘bomber gap’ which saw Soviet Aviation closing the door on US superiority. They assumed these bombers must be getting built in fantastic numbers to offset their limitations of propellers, speed and range. They envisaged huge fleets of these things making their way inland, overwhelming US Air Defence with human sacrifice just like they had done to the Germans.They were comforted by the old quantity vs quality argument, because the answer to this was more money for SAC, money for more speed, more range, more altitude, and they had to remain the firstest with the mostest.Defences:The bomber gap scare spurred the development of the century series fighters to defend the continental USA. By 1958 US air space was well covered by no fewer than four purpose built interceptors.You’ve got a Super Sabre at your 6, a Voodoo at your 12, a Dagger at your 3 and a Starfighter at your 9.This was the only nuclear game in town in 1957. Britain had only just joined the nuclear club with limited fission weapons, it looked like the RAF would get - not one but three - nuclear bombers into service before they had thermonuclear weapons to carry. France and China had yet to test any nuclear weapons at all.Galactic sums of money were to be spent countering the Russian bomber fleet over the next 20 years and the Pentagon shifted the bulk of rR&D and factory space resources to accommodate it*. They gave little thought to countering RAF aircraft.Skyshield took place in the last year of Eisenhower's term of office. During that term the USAF had bought four different homeland air defence interceptors into service, while wings of the most modern bombers remained permanently flying on station around Russia.On the eve of Skyshield they were still adding the Mach 2+ Convair F-106 Delta Dart and B-58 to their armoury. 10,000 air frames in four years.The First Problem:The last year of Eisenhower’s first term also saw the first Lockheed U-2 spy mission over Soviet Russia. It went out looking for solid evidence of the narrowing bomber gap, expecting to see vast armadas of bombers and tankers on ready alert over hundreds of dispersed bases. Just as SAC had built.A quarter of all Soviet Bisons in one picture, sharing one runway.U-2 came back with evidence the bomber gap was a chasm. Russia really wasn’t in the long range bomber business, in method or numbers. No tankers, few airbases, few bombers. People were tempted to celebrate - the Russian bear was a koala not a grizzly - but no one gives you money to hunt down koala’s. To be fair no one uses koalas to scare off attack.This is where the intelligence team continued to get it wrong: they kept looking the in same direction.They had assumed a technical superiority based on what they had been looking for so far; they assumed a single best option existed for delivering nuclear weapons based on that technology, they assumed the Russians faced the same problems as they, and countered them in the same way. The assumed the Russians had the same priorities.Much of this is good common sense, the rules of physics work for both sides, so the solutions often end up looking the same, so the US intelligence community went into overdrive looking for the missing Russian bombers.It was suspected they kept 2/3rds flying at any one time, until they couldn't find evidence of enough tankers. It was suspected they had secret bases on Canadian Islands or the Arctic ice sheet, the USS Nautilus’ trip to the North Pole in 1958 was partly to test this theory.The obvious answer was they had stopped building these older bombers because they were about to deploy something new. Something secret and therefore free from all restrictions of engineering.Like this:Myasishchev M-50 HoaxIn 1958 Aviation Week ran a story of a high-supersonic, nuclear-powered Russian bomber that was already in flight test stage. It wasn’t, but it fit the bill, it was shown to be false soon after but the secret Russian bomber was firmly entrenched by then.Aviation press and Aviation generals had assumed a Soviet secret bomber because they still believed piloted flight the best way of getting the job done. They thought this because the Americans were better at piloted fight than the other way - rocketry - a bad bit of confirmation bias.To meet this new threat the USAF doubled down on their piloted dreams. They wrote up an industry tender for a new bomber combining the range of the B-52, greater speed than the B-58 and greater altitude than both.Aerospace companies were encouraged to think of aircraft with a nuclear power source, super cruise, chemical propulsion engines that could work on the edges of space. That plan would be whittled down to the still impressive XB-70 Valkyrie. But in 1958 they were thinking this.A Klingon warbird, with parasite fightersor thisHoly Thunderbirds Captain!or thisGordon’s alive?The super-secret-second-bomber-gap-scare demanded even better fighters before the century series had fully entered service. The manned flight world was going hot, pointy and delta shaped in a hurry to match the speed and altitude requirements of the assumed Russian bombers. They were preparing to build the Mach 3+ North American XF-108 Rapier. Even Canada got in on the act, with its superb CF-105 Arrow.Oh wowOh CanadaI was going to try and work out the cost of all this aerospace, but despite lockdown I don't have that kind of time. We can safely put - bombers, fighters, tankers, trainers, transports, radars, weapons, airbases, training, security, fuel, administration and infrastructure - into the big money column.In this same time frame the USA had bought just one homeland air defence surface-to-air missile into service, the Nike family, available in working, not working, nuclear or immobile form. None of their rockets had gone further than the biggest balloons, and they went pop more often.The future looked good for piloted hot rods reaching into space, they inspired a generation of small boys, science fiction model makers and aerospace stock was upSecond Problem:Faced with the same intractable problems of physics and geography but unencumbered by a generation of bomber barons raised on throttle and stick. Having less cash on hand to duplicate systems and no bases in Canada or Mexico to operate from like the USAF had in Turkey and the UK, the Russians had simply put more effort into big rockets and orbital physics.Beep, Beep!Eisenhower’s second term saw Sputnik 1 going into orbit. This was big. Everyone could do the maths - a nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile wasn’t far behind the tinfoil football. The US had been working on this very idea, but their rockets had been blowing up of late. They thought this tech a long way away from working and had assured their government the Soviets were decades away from orbital success.So the question became - where to put the money now, rockets or pilots?The first clue came soon enough when it became obvious the Soviets weren’t building any more strategic bombers. All the next-generation interceptors were cancelled in 1959. The F-106 was too far along to cancel so the order was cut to just 340. By 1966 they were the only interceptors doing strategic air defence in the states.Ike was faced with a bigger dilemma than the money wasted on fighters and bombers racing to early obsolescence. His rocket programme was floundering, split as it was between the Army, Air Force, Navy and a little known civilian aerospace agency that specialised in wing shapes, numbers and wind tunnels.The Army were only interested in a short ranged Scud type missile PGM-11 Redstone to lob nuclear weapons the other side of the Horizon. Unfortunately they had also nabbed the best Germans at the end of WW2. They weren’t very busy excavating big holes in the desert and weren’t much further along than V-2.The Navy were doubting long-ranged nuclear bombers could get off a carrier deck and into Russia, so they were hell bent on shooting them out of submarines in rockets. They weren’t sure those huge limitations on the dimensions and capabilities of their rockets could be met so were experimenting with the Vanguard.The Air Force were determined the only way to get into space was with a pilot riding the controls - all the way up and all the way down. Their first proposal for a spy satellite had a guy flying a Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar winged spacecraft to orbit where he would keep watch with a big pair of binoculars.Hot sauce, not spam in a canIf you turn aerospace over to robots, rockets and computers and take the pilot out of control you’re not left with much of an argument for an independent air force. Consequently Air Force Atlas ICBMs hadn't had much of a push behind them for a long time.NACA, the wind tunnel experts just wanted to count numbers and explore the science. Concerned that his SAC orientated military industrial complex were now controlling too much of the scientific end of Americas GDP, employment numbers and congressional reach, Eisenhower gave NACA the gig.The job came with a massive increase in budget and a name change to NASA. First thing they did was take the wings off the spacecraft and call it a capsule, then they took the man out of the spy satellite and implored Ike not to use pilots at all. They wanted specimens not spacemans. The systems data nerd had come to the front of national defence. He held no romantic notions of flight.Note: one of the first U-2 overflights in 1956 was out looking for bomber fleets in Kazakhstan. It flew over an industrial complex at a place called Baikonur, took a couple of snaps. No one paid it much attention at the time, they were looking for swept winged jet bombers and there were none there.What there was, was a solitary vertical tube being towed towards a scaffold. It was an early R-7 rocket of the type used to launch Sputnik and nuclear bombs. They only spotted it years after the satellite flew, while scrambling to work out how the Russian’s had jumped ahead.Third Problem:U-2 had previously bought back pictures of S-25 Berkut (SA-1 Guild) SAMs in their herringbone silos around Moscow and other highest value targets They were immobile, few in number and tied to a fixed and large radar infrastructure, not unlike the contemporary US Nike Ajax system.They were dismissed as a major threat to manned bombers for the same reason the US didn’t like Nike Ajax, too small to carry nuclear warheads (then), increasingly inaccurate and ponderous the higher they went, and because they were static their fields of fire could be predicted and avoided, or destroyed by a first wave.But as the years went on U-2s started picking up batteries of S-75 Dvina (SA-2 Guideline) SAMs deployed the length and breadth of Russia. Dvina was cheaper, more mobile, relied on fewer systems and was being produced in huge numbers, they couldn't all be avoided or destroyed.By 1959 Dvina had been taking a heavy toll of Taiwanese surveillance aircraft close to China (and possibly US eavesdroppers over the northern Siberian coast). These things kept going missing at high altitude, but that had been ascribed to fighters or bad weather as the range was considered too great for ground guided SAMs.Then on 1st May 1960 Russian air defence used a trio of Dvina’s to shoot down one of the CIA’s U-2 spy planes over Russia at the unheard of altitude of 70,000ft.It wasn’t the performance of the Dvina that startled the Western intelligence agencies, they had been firing them against USAF U-2s and RAF Canberra’s for a while, it was the scale of their deployment and accuracy. Their fields of fire overlapped and couldn't be predicted, at very high altitude you can’t throw an aircraft around like you can in the thicker air downstairs, so you cant evade them. Entering Sov Block airspace at high altitude and subsonic speed had suddenly become very dangerous, very publicly, very soon after Sputnik.The Exercise:Two months after the U-2 incident the Pentagon told airlines they would be closing the whole of US Air Space for two days. That wouldn't happen again until 9/11.This was to accommodate Skyshield, the largest air exercise ever attempted. Thousands of SAC bomber sorties would fly Russian attack profiles against US cities (Tu-95 speeds and altitudes : 450kts at 45,000ft) while thousands more used American attack profiles, the high altitude B-52’s going in 550kts at 50,000ft and the B-47’s going in at 600mph at low-level.The RAF were invited along and sent two flights of four Vulcans flying RAF profiles (600kn at 56,000ft) one flight launched from Bermuda the other from Scotland.The exercises were to determine an answer to: With only 12 untested single-warhead ICBM’s in service, can we get our vast manned bomber fleet onto the other twelvety hundred targets in Russia?According to the public report 99% of those flying Russian profiles were shot down, primarily by interceptors, American SAMs were not terribly efficient. Most of the SAC profile sorties got through - US Air Defences - and only one of the British aircraft got intercepted. At the time this was put down to superior RAF performance at altitude. US Aircraft managed to inflict some damage to US cities and the Vulcan’s to a few more along Atlantic seaboard.But this wasn’t the end of the exercise.The Result:In Solider's of Reason Alex Abella discusses the rise to prominence of the RAND Corporation in the early 60s. They were Computer whizz kids using programming to replace battlefield experience in systems analysis and procurement, right down to the last decimal point.Military Industry had been getting more complex, numerous, expensive and swiftly redundant of late, and some people were keen to rationalise the game.Post-exercise analysis of Skyshield was one of RANDs first big jobs. Their other job was rationalising spy satellite requirements to replace U-2, they had just won the argument to take the man out of the spy satellite.RAND teams deployed imaginary S-75 Dvina batteries at multiple locations across the USA and calculated the toll on flight path and radar data from the exercise. They weren’t hunting Bear flights, they were looking at the BUFF, B-47 and Vulcan flights.Soviet aviation couldn't get smaller, faster bombers into the continental USA, so when Skyshield exercised those more more nimble and aggressive types of profile with B-47s and Vulcans you can tell it wasn’t to test US Air Defences.The results were kept secret until the late 90s.The exercise was run again for the next two years as air chiefs tried to find a way around the data - which said all of the B-52’s and a majority of the low level sorties would have perished over Russia.This massive upset for SAC can be validated by the immediate switch to low-level attack by all USAF and RAF nuclear bomber fleets. Even the Vulcan’s dramatic success against New York couldn't evade the data saying the high altitude ride was over.The Vulcans had succeeded because of their concentrated use of Electronic Counter Measures. An area the USAF had neglected but would quickly pick up. Unfortunately ECM is a very easy threat to overcome once you’re focused on it. It also helps if you already know the operating wavelengths and control systems of your opponent like the RAF did in America, but not Russia.The other reason for their success was their design. It’s not fair to compare the Vulcan to the B-52. By simple dint of geography the Vulcan had far less time to get launched, get high and get into an attack profile. They were more nimble and had practised avoiding or confounding air defences.V-bombers, along with B-47s and B-58s based in Turkey, UK and Spain would be the first through the Soviet defences and were geared for a tough fight. The B-52s from central USA would arrive as a second wave, hours later while the Russian radar sites were being repaired.Note: We should remember JFK was playing chicken over Cuba as these results were being discussed in the Pentagon. His experts must have been telling him the mighty SAC was likely to be wasted while failing to bring Russia to cinders. They also told him Russia probably couldn’t even singe the USA with their bombers. Europe was gonna be an irradiated desert, but the two big players were really only threatened by a dozen untested ICBMs.They were both playing with a busted flush and a single ace.It’s possible that during the Cuban missile crisis - before the USAF or RAF had fully trained up on low-level penetration - RAF Victors and Vulcans were the pre-eminent flying nuclear deterrent in NATO. Interestingly Downing Street got a very decent deal on Polaris within two months of the Crisis.Every bomber that couldn't handle the switch to low-level was immediately scrapped or found alternate duties. Before the end of the decade Valiant, Victor, B-47 even the super hot B-58 were gone from the frontline. Their service lives halved at extreme cost.Vulcan and B-52 managed tolerably well at low-level but a painful nexus of reduced range, metal fatigue and a still increasing Soviet SAM barrier would eventually push then out of that business.As ICBMs came on line B-52s used up their airframe lives arc-lighting the empty jungle, until they became a totem platform for launching sea mines and cruise missiles. The Vulcans would hang around, searching the empty Atlantic for periscopes with a WW2 radar until their last hurrah over the Falklands.The bomber barons tried to inject life back in the cockpit with even faster bomber plans. RAND analysts showed that developing a Mach 5 SAM to counter this threat would be cheaper, easier and more effective than a fleet of Valkyries. XB-70 was immediately cancelled, leaving the S-200 (SA-5 Gammon) with nothing to shoot at except the occasional SR-71.Conclusion:Russian rocketeers had threatened the concept of a pilot in control. It should have been predicted, but US intelligence services let themselves down badly by failing to see ‘over the hill’. They were too engrossed in Pentagon politics.That failure hurt a lot of careers and revenue streams, its sting can be detected in Air Force public relations and internal politics today.The RAND corporation came out the deal in pretty good shape. Its alumni would populate national security positions for the next fifty years. They would give us the F-111, the B-1A and the Vietnam war. The skunk works that produced the U-2 was purposely kept from intense scrutiny of data. They would produce the SR-71, F-117A and eventually put the man back in the frontline cockpit with Stealth.*this huge investment in aerospace infrastructure wouldn't go to waste, as the manned bombers were cancelled, most of the contractors and companies found nice big contracts in the Apollo programme. It cushioned the fall and silenced the politics.

Yes of course he is and any CEO would be to take his company to new heights and new platforms. He reveled his grand vision about For The Next 10 Years Of Facebook.Mark Zuckerberg said that next year Facebook would be making a series of aggressive talent and ad-tech investments that would set it up for a successful future.But that could mean Facebook's expenses increase up to 70%.Zuckerberg also outlined his three-, five-, and 10-year plan for the company.In summary, he wants to have multiple Facebook products — WhatsApp, Messenger, Search, Video, NewsFeed, Oculus, and Instagram — each connect 1 billion users. Once those have reached mass scale, then he'll start to aggressively monetize them.He also wants to improve the advertising experience for brands, particularly on mobile. Facebook will be investing in ways to better target and measure campaigns through data. It wants to help brands measure online to offline sales conversions. Currently, advertisers spend only about 11% of their budgets on mobile, according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, because the right tools aren't in place.Finally, Facebook wants to build the next major computing platform, which Zuckerberg believes could be augmented reality and Oculus. He also wants to bring the internet to more people through Internet.org."We're going to prepare for the future by investing aggressively," Zuckerberg said."The strength of the business today is putting us in a strong position to invest in the future," Wehner added.Here's the transcript of Zuckerberg's plan, Seeking Alpha:On previous calls, you’ve heard me talk about our big company goals of connecting everyone, understanding the world and building the next generation of platforms. These goals are important for us and part of our foundation of our strategy for the next decade, but achieving these will involve many different efforts and steps along the way, some that will be achieved rapidly and others that are going to take longer.So with that in mind, I’d like to run through our progress this quarter on the different efforts that we expect to deliver a lot of impact over the next three, five and 10 years.Let's begin with our three-year goals. Over the next three years, our main goals are around continuing to grow and serve our existing communities and businesses and help them reach their full potential.When you look at the size and engagement of our community, our progress remains very strong. 864 million use Facebook every day and across our core products, we continue to see huge engagement. For example around 700 million people now use Facebook Groups every month. Achieving this scale shows that we're delivering experiences for the way that people want to share and connect.Another example is our progress on public content. Last quarter I talked about how we're working to connect people around important public moments and personalities on Facebook. This quarter we've continued to build on our results and there are now more than 1 billion interactions every week between public figures and their fans on Facebook.The investments we have made in video have also played a big part here. This quarter we announced a new milestone for video on Facebook achieving 1 billion video views, a day of made of videos. During the summers the ice bucket challenge drew more than 10 billion video views by 440 million people which is a good sign of how far our video product has come.Instagram has also made a lot of progress this quarter. In August, the Instagram team launched Hyperlapse, a standalone app for time lapse of videos on iOS. The team has also invested heavily in improving the speed and performance of Instagram on Android. This has helped drive Instagram's strong international growth which in some countries has achieved more than 100% year-over-year growth. Globally, people using Instagram now spend around 21 minutes a day on average using the app. This is a strong figure compared to the industry and a good sign that Instagram's strategy is on the right path. Our other big focus over the next three years is to continue to serving businesses well and creating a lot of value for marketers.As our results show, our approach here is working. To continue delivering value for businesses, we work to improve the quality of ads and news feed by reducing low quality content and improving our targeting to show more timely and relevant content. We’ve also made some big advances in our ad tech, most importantly the launch of our new Atlas platform. Atlas offers marketers a lot of new capabilities to help reach people across devices, platforms and publishers as well as improving measurement in online campaign. We're very excited for the future of Atlas and Cheryl is going to talk more about this in a moment.Next, let's talk about our strategy over the next five years. Over the next five years, our goals are around taking our next generation of services, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Search and helping them connect billions of people and become important businesses in their own right.One big priority for us here is messaging. And continuing to build and grow Messenger and now WhatsApp as well as great services. This quarter we made an important change to our mobile messaging efforts by transitioning people to Messenger on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. We believe that this change allows us to offer a better and faster messaging experience on mobile, and our data shows that people who use Messenger, usually respond to messages about 20% faster.This month we also completed our acquisition of WhatsApp. I'm excited to be working with this team and John to join our Board. WhatsApp continues to be on a path to connect more than 1 billion people around the world and we're going to be working into accelerate their efforts here. Another key part of our strategy is helping developers to build more great social experiences on our platform.Over the next few years, our goal is to make Facebook a cross-platform platform that allows developers to build, grow and monetize their apps across every major mobile platform. We’ve continued to make good progress here. This quarter, we opened our audience networks to all developers and publishers, allowing over 1.5 million advertisers on Facebook to extend their campaigns across mobile and for developers to begin monetizing their apps.We're also excited by the continued adoption of App Links, our deep-linking technology for mobile apps. App Links is now used by hundreds of apps across iOS, Android and Windows phone and in just the past six months, the developers have created links to more than 3 billion individual destinations in these apps.Now let's talk about how we're approaching our goals over the next 10 years.For the next 10 years our focus is on driving the fundamental changes in the world that we need to achieve our mission, connecting the whole world, understanding a world with big leaps in AIs and developing the next generation of platforms, especially in computing.This is a very big period, a very busy period for our efforts with Internet.org. In July we worked with Airtel to launch the Internet.org app in Zambia. This provides free data access to a set of basic internet services for health, education, employment and communication. The results from this are very encouraging. We've already heard a lot amazing stories about how people are using the internet to add value to their lives. We hope to bring Most Popular Websites & Email|Good Home Page|Top 500 Sites|The Internet.org app to many more countries soon.Over the last few months, I've also travelled to several countries and met with policy makers, key distributors and people and communities that are coming online for the first time. Increasingly industry and governments are seeing expanding internet access as one of their core priorities. This is positive development for our work with Internet.org in our long-term goal of connecting everyone in the world.Finally, let's talk for a minute about our progress of Oculus. As I've said before, with Oculus, we're making a long-term bet on the future of computing. Every 10 to 15 years, a new major computing platform arrives and we think that virtual and augmented reality are important parts of this upcoming next platform. This quarter, Oculus continued to make progress towards this vision.In September, the first Oculus developer conference took place, where we announced a new prototype VR headset on the path of a consumer version of the Rift. We continue to see a lot of excitement in the developer community and we've now shipped more than 100,000 of Rift developer kit to over a 130 countries. It's still early for Oculus but we are encouraged to see the variety of apps and games being developed for this platform.Internet.org and Oculus are just two of the huge opportunities ahead. Our efforts here will take longer to achieve their full impact, but we're going to continue preparing for the future by investing aggressively. So that’s how we’re approaching our strategy over the next three, five and 10 years, while focusing on our big goals of connecting everyone, understanding the world and building the next generation of platforms.This has been a quarter with strong results. I want to thank the entire Facebook community, our employees, our partners and our stockholders for their continued support. Because of your contribution, Facebook continues to grow in strength and to create greater value in the world for people, partners and businesses. We have a long journey ahead, we’re on the right path and I'm excited about the progress that we’re making.

Good news : Macron is human (may be)For the past 35 years France has been in static mode. One step to the left, one step to the right, staying on the same spot. Then one person decided to get it moving forward “en marche !” It appeared as easy as lifting the earth on one’ shoulders, Atlas styleWho is Mr. Macron and how did he get where he is now ? More important : what is his agenda ?The magazine “The Economist” has just published a three page article about the man, just as many other media did (or will do). When I quote from this article, I identify it by (E).Macron was born to a provincial middle-class family, both his parents being busy medical doctors, he was raised by his teacher grand-mother. He gained an intensive love both for reading and for thinking. At 15 he had a role in a school drama play : his talent for acting will come useful later as his career unfolds. At the time he met a teacher, 24 years his senior, whom he will marry ten years later. While the on-line blogs pretend that this marriage is humbug, to hide a gay nature, the French electorate couldn’t care less.At 16 he wins the “Concours Générale” in French language and literature, which means that he ranked first among all the brilliant students of his generation. He also won a prize in a piano contest. After failing a first admittance test he insisted to be examined again by the same teacher who rejected him previously. Not for him to avoid obstacles ! He then spent two years studying literature and failed twice the entrance to the highest literature school “The Ecole Normale Supérieure”. As a matter of fact he did not cram for the exams but was busy writing two novels he never finished, realising that he would not be the next young writer prodigy.(That was lucky for all future Nobel prize winners )At the age of 24 he met and developed a mutual fascination with an aging philosophy professor, Paul Ricoeur, for whom he served as editorial assistant. Much of Macron’s thinking originated from that meeting : instead of France’s confrontational politics, his approach is one of dialogue and synthesis of contrary points of view. In his speeches most sentences are balanced : “Employers need… but at the same time employees are right to demand…” etc. He got a degree in philosophy, attended a school of political science, and played tennis, soccer …and kick boxing.From his youngest years he “had an uncommon flair for making people feel he is keenly interested in them. Macron, says a former colleague, is “a networking machine”. Wherever he goes, he collects friends.He enters and graduates (of course at the top of his class) the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. Three of the past five French Presidents, almost all of the cabinets of French ministers come from this elite school.His ranking allows him to be named at the Finance Ministry as “Inspecteur des Finances” (like Giscard, Juppé before him) where he spends four years to become familiar with the way the government is being run.He then decides to enter private business and goes for a job interview with the manager of Banque Rotschild. As the man told on TV about this meeting : “Don’t look for another job, you are hired not as a trainee but as a managing partner. I have never made in my life such a proposition to anybody else, but I have never met previously someone like Emmanuel Macron”. In a two year banking career he earned a multi-million bonus for organising some of the largest deals of the bank …and then resigned.The path of Macron towards the presidency is characterised by his high degree of ability but also by an incredible list of lucky (for him) events. Somebody up there, in the heavens, has been eliminating all obstacles that could have impeded his progress…on top of the right choices he made on every turn.He joined Hollande’s team preparing an electoral program for the future president, at the time when the shoo-in socialist candidate for the 2012 election was called Dominique Strauss Kahn. DSK’s sexual excesses were known by the French press, however it took the New York Sofitel incident to put an end to his political career.As an advisor in the Elysée Palace Macron advocated quite a few policies that Hollande would only follow partially and so he resigned and planned to return to the business world. Then the incumbent Minister of the Economy got involved in a scandal about his hidden foreign accounts…and Manuel Valls called for Macron to replace monsieur Cahuzac.As a minister Macron managed to carry out some small reforms…but overhauling the Labour laws met too strong resistance…so he resigned and started his own party. At the time he had just a few hundred followers and the potential presidential candidates included two French presidents and three ex-prime ministers. None survived the preliminary polls of the Right and the Left. Sarkozy was felled by the hatred he accumulated at the time of his stay in power, Juppé made a mess ot his campaign by focusing exclusively on his opposition to Sarkozy and it’s Fillon who came up on the top. Suddenly the media got the revelation of the vast public sums Fillon pocketed through the alleged work of his wife (smaller amounts would not have upset the French) and his program of strict austerity for the country seemed too hypocritical to swallow. On the left Hollande proved too unpopular to stand for a re-election and Manuel Valls too right-wing for the Socialists he planned to represent. Macron wisely stayed out of the preliminary rounds, as his message was that the opposition of Right and Left no longer corresponded to the “l’esprit des temps”. As goes the saying : “Nothing is stronger than an idea of which the time has come”. Macron correctly judged what the electorate was thirsting for.In the last round of this long electoral season Macron faced Marine Le Pen. Under all circumstances he was slated to win as Marine’s candidacy was hobbled by her party’s past and also by a program that advocated both staying and leaving the euro zone. In the final TV duel amongst the two opponents Marine managed to make the worst performance of her long political career : instead of a close win the final score in favour of Macron was 66 %.What qualities did Emmanuel Macron display to get to the top? To launch his own movement, with no previous political experience, he needed an enormous amount of nerve, what the Economist called “fearsome self-belief”. (The Yiddish word chutzpah seems the best description). His public speaking performance is by no means exceptional. (He is no Hitler, Mussolini or even Mélenchon).What worked for him was his message. In a melancholy country, in prey of self-doubt he irradiated hope and optimism. After the disappointment of the last five Presidents the time was ripe for something new. It seemed obsolete that the country was condemned to an eternal opposition between Left and Right. He proposed a program carefully calibrated to be half-way between Right and Left/ Anyway the electoral season has lasted much too long, the various detailed programs of all the candidates much too boring…it was a matter of selecting the man who seemed the right leader, and Emmanuel Macron fitted the bill. On the subject of the European Union and of globalisation he did not hesitate to promote unpopular ideas : one might not like some facts, but it’s no use to wish them away. France needs to join reality rather than dream about changing it overnightParliamentary elections will take place in June and some people bet that the ambitious reforms foreseen will never get through the Chambers. Strictly speaking a small minority of the electors had voted for Macron, if one takes into account the absentees, the people whose first choice was some other candidate … Conceivably his party –cobbled together in haste- could get less than an absolute majority. Does it matter ?Normally a newly elected president gets from the electorate a majority in the Parliament…but this may not be the case in 2017. There are a lot of entrenched politicians, mayors of their town and who pretty well decide who gets elected for their constituency. There are a lot of frustrated right wing voters, who look back at the Hollande presidency with all the good will of a bull towards a red piece of cloth.Macron’s bet is that the possible right and left oppositions would never agree on an alternative program so he will be free to govern. Also many politicians, especially on his right, will be loath to spend five (or ten ?) years opposing a program not too far from the one their party had proposed, and will be tempted to get some ministerial portfolio. So the coming parliamentary elections should not mean the end of his “ en marche”. (get moving).How about the Unions ? Many labour leaders are opposed to many of Macron’s ideas : re-writing the Labor Law involves allowing firms to freely negotiate with their employees or the unions that the employees chose concerning working hours, wages other conditions. That would make the powerful centralised Union leaders quite redundant ! Foreseeing a maximum amount an employer can be condemned to, if the dismissal of an employee is judged unlawful by the Courts. Retirement rules of public employees are often a lot more favourable than the ones the rest of the country has to accept …However there is a general feeling that if France’s economy is to move forward, many of the traditional brakes will have to be removed. How will the negotiations with the Unions go ? Much depends upon the public mood next Fall. While the Unions have a history of putting the country to standstill, when they dislike some reform proposal, they would be loath to do so against overwhelming public opinion. Macron’s “Thatcher moment” is approaching (E)What is Macron’s style like ? He displayed it when the day of inauguration at the Louvre Museum he walked for over a minute, alone, at the sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which happens to be the Hymn of the European Union. Only De Gaulle (and maybe Mitterrand) managed to match his solemnity ! His ministers also claim that he has become totally “presidential”. Paul Ricoeur, his mentor in philosophy, has taught him that the French needed to find in their leader a sense of “verticality”. Will this be sufficient ? Will some outside event help him, as it did so often in the past ?If a huge storm should engulf whatever demonstration is organised against his policies, then indeed one might ask the question : is Macron fully human ?