The French President, Emmanuel Macronannounced this Friday that his country’s defense budget will increase by more than a third for the 2024-2030 period, in an effort to transform the Army with a clear European dimension and prepare it for “multiple” threats.
Macron, who gave a speech at the Mont-de-Marsan air base (southwest), explained that he will ask Parliament for a batch of 400,000 million euros for the next seven years that will cover 413,000 million in needs, compared to the 295,000 million foreseen in the previous military programming law for 2019-2025.
“The threats are multiple and add to each other“, he stressed before listing various scenarios of tension, such as the eastern Mediterranean, the East China Sea and in particular the war in Ukraine, marked by “brutality”, with scenes that were believed to have disappeared since the two world wars.
Macron insisted that if the two military programming laws are taken into account, the end result is that the defense budget will be “doubled”. “After repairing the armies, let’s transform them“, he pointed out before detailing what this evolution will consist of, which first of all involves the strengthening of nuclear deterrence, which “is an element that makes France a different country in Europe” and whose “vital importance” has been seen with the war in Ukraine.
He advanced that the funds for information and intelligence services are going to grow “close to 60%” to, among other things, be able to better resist cyber attacks. He also showed his intention to “double the operational reserve” in order to feed the military ranks as needed and reinforce the special forces. Regarding the material means, he indicated that the Rafale will become the only model in the fighter fleet, which suggests a retirement of the last Mirages.
He also talked about the “accelerated digitization of the battlefield”; of greater capacities in frigates; the development of the “new generation aircraft carrier”; the doubling of investments in drones or the Future Air Combat System (FCAS) that France has launched together with Germany and Spain. The French president insisted that his country’s military alliances “can only be seen within the framework of our Europe” and that France will have to have the capacity to lead a European operation, “within NATO or outside the alliance”, and be capable of deploying its own force of “up to 20,000 men”.
In a message to the military industries, he said that they will have to “drastically reduce production cycles“, adapting them to their partners and the conflicts that arise, while offering them visibility on the business for more than a decade.
Macron stated that he wants the new military programming law that his government is going to present, which he defined as “a national sovereignty project would not be coherent without its European dimension”, can be adopted by Parliament “by summer”.