France’s defense spending set for big boosts following Macron pledge
Tom Rogan
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Speaking at an air force base in southwestern France, President Emmanuel Macron announced significant defense spending increases on Friday. He offered specific, praiseworthy details on where France’s military will be strengthened.
Macron offered a sense of urgency and, some might say, an implicit rebuke of his tendency for verbose idealism. “We must therefore privilege the speed of action, the rapid rise to power, over the intellectual purity of an abstract model because we will not choose the conflicts that we will have to face,” the French president said, according to a translation.
Macron pledged that France’s next defense plan would see spending of $450 billion over the 2024-2030 period. It will particularly emphasize boosting France’s capabilities with respect to its Pacific overseas territories and boosting its air force, cyber, artificial intelligence, and special forces capabilities. Likely motivated by Russian efforts to threaten undersea communications cables in the Atlantic Ocean, Macron called for a means of protecting “critical underwater infrastructures.” He wants these capabilities, likely centered on unmanned underwater vehicles, to have an operational capacity at depths of up to 20,000 feet.
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Learning from Ukraine’s experience against Russian forces, Macron also pledged that France would “increase our capabilities in all layers of air defense by at least 50%, including, of course, in the fight against drones.” Focus will also be given to “long-range strike, the suppression of enemy air defenses, and, of course, anti-submarine warfare.” Macron further said that French military intelligence spending would go up by 60% (something that the Pentagon will welcome and, considering the French intelligence services’ penchant for industrial espionage, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center will fear).
Nevertheless, the former banker explained that these investments are designed “to ensure, if the circumstances so require, that France would be capable of building and commanding a first-rate coalition, with its partners, to defend the interests of Europe or its allies. This is a responsibility that only Europe … would be able to assume, and we must have the means to do so.”
This is a reference to Macron’s oft-stated ambition of a European Union that operates with “strategic autonomy” from the United States or China. But where Macron has previously centered this ambition in words, he now appears ready to put meat on the bones. While Macron likes appeasing Chinese leader Xi Jinping, this added spending would establish France as a potent military force. Alongside Macron’s restated commitment to France’s interests in the Pacific Ocean, Friday’s speech will offer at least a marginal boost to the deterrence of Chinese aggression.
If delivered, Macron’s investments will allow the U.S. military to redeploy critical assets from Europe to the Pacific, where they are most needed. Yet by clearly putting France on the path to meet and likely exceed NATO’s 2%-of-GDP minimum defense spending target, Macron is also showing that France is willing to be a leading partner of the U.S., rather than an enduring freeloader, in Europe’s defense. There’s a lesson here for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as he delays enacting his own promises to boost defense.
Yes, the devil is in the details as to whether these funds actually end up in the defense accounts. But there’s real cause for hope here. Macron appears to have matched his domestic courage on pension reform to necessarily bold action on security. He deserves American praise.
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