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On numbers and Russia vs. France. You want a number? How about "0"? That would be the number of Russian soldiers currently participating in Operation Enduring Freedom.
But drop every bullet-point except the last one. The task force from COS, whose missions are SR and DA along the Afghan-Pak border, numbers about 200-300. If you want to just count special operators, then France is currently the second-largest member of the OEF coalition after the US. But that clearly makes no sense as a measure of allies.
And coalition SOF lazed for the Armee de l'air as well as the USAF in Operation Anaconda.
BTW, exactly how many US forces are guarding power stations and the like in Iraq and Afghanistan (and New York for that matter)? Shall we discount them from the list of US forces and if they're killed, tell their families their deaths did "not contribute as much to the GWOT"?
You are also completely wrong about the Legion. It is an integrated part of the French Army, the majority of its soldiers are French (even if officially carried as Belgian, Swiss or Canadian), and its training and doctrine come out of French manuals and French experience. The French armed forces are all-volunteer now. Sending Legionnaires off to foreign lands while French conscripts are undeployable is a thing of the past. For example, the French combined arms battle group in Afghanistan is an integrated unit from elements of the 4ème Régiment de chasseurs, a light armored cavalry unit, the 13ème Bataillon de chasseurs alpins, a mountain infantry unit, and the 2ème Régiment étranger du génie, a Legion engineer unit. Similarly, the French deployments to Haiti and Côte d’Ivoire involved mostly "regular" units, with some Legion support.
And how is it dispositive what politicians think anyway?
Again, you picked Russia over France, not me. As I have pointed out repeatedly on the question of allies, our core allies are the other members of the Anglosphere - the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - with the first two being more reliable than the latter two, with whom we share a common heritage. After that, it is the Western or Westernized capitalist democracies whose interests converge with the US far more than they diverge - countries like Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Israel and Japan (this is not an exhaustive list). Beyond that you begin to enter the realm of countries who are at best notional allies. And the vicissitudes of national politics can change who is this year's reliable ally. Spain was "reliable" last year, not so much this year. New Zealand has been pretty much on the outs with the US since the mid-1980s, but a change of government away from the Labour coalition would bring about a sea change in policy. The same might be said for Germany if the CDU/CSU took over, but anti-American sentiment in Germany is much more deeply rooted than many people realize.
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