[en] A new general relativistic fluid formulation has been obtained for intense relativistic electron beams (IREB) with arbitrarily high relativistic mass factor γ. This theory is valid for confined IREB equilibria such as those found inside high energy accelerators as well as in the pinched and ion-focused regimes of beam propagation in plasma channels. The new relativistic fluid formulation is based on the covariant relativistic fluid formulation of Newcomb with the parameter lambda identical to 1, in order to allow for realistic confined equilibria. The resulting equilibrium constraints require that the beam has a slow rotational velocity around its direction of propagation and that the off-diagonal thermal stress element, associated with these two directions of motion, be nonzero. The effective betatron oscillation frequency of the fluid elements of the beam is modified by the radial gradient and anisotropies in the thermal stress elements of the beam fluid. The wave equation, for sausage, hose and filamentation excitations on the relativistic fluid beam, is found to be formally identical to that obtained from the Vlasov equation approach, hence phase-mixing damping is a generic and self-consistent correlate of the new relativistic fluid formulation