Knowledge of the maritime environment is indispensable for safe navigation in peacetime and is a decisive factor when deploying and conducting naval operations during times of war or emergency. Today, marine science research centres around three major questions; the sustainable exploitation of the resource, how the climate system works and changes in the coast and its use. These inherently different aims can often be achieved using similar or identical tools. This is why the partnership between French civilian research bodies and the French navy goes back a long way. The Pourquoi pas? of Captain Charcot was equipped by the French navy. Deployment of the bathyscaph was the work of the Navy for French scientific teams in the 1970s. More recently, this has been replaced by missions lead jointly or with complementary sea-going resources. [NOT CONTROLLED OCR]