France is a military power because it has all the necessary categories to be one and in sufficient quantity and quality to also be a great power.
France has conventional, nuclear, technological, industrial and diplomatic capabilities that support its seat among the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. But, above all, it has a national strategic culture whereby political leaders and public opinion widely support the use of force in defense of national interests. Meeting all the power requirements, France is not only able to identify its strategic objectives in the defense and national security strategies that are regularly updated, the last one in 2017, but also to enable the necessary resources to achieve them through military programming laws. , the last of 2018 for the period comprised between 2019 and 2025.
Being a great military power and because it wishes to remain so, France is faced with the need to adapt its capabilities to a strategic context that is changing and that forces it to review its level of ambition, the model of armed forces, the resources dedicated to defense and the type of allies to turn to if you do not want it to decline in its status as a military power.
France is the only nuclear power and the first military power in the European Union. It has strategic nuclear, naval and air forces, and the means to act in the new combat domains in space and cyberspace. France is also a space power, the third in the world, with technological, industrial and civil infrastructure capabilities that support military operations. For them, it has its own command structure, a Space Strategy (Stratégie Spatiale de Défense, 2019) and funds from the 2019-2025 Military Programming Law. It has large conventional capabilities of global projection that allow it to carry out its own operations and on behalf of the United Nations, NATO and the EU, which is why it occupies the fifth position in the ranking of the Elcano Global Presence Index 2020.
France is the sixth global cyber power, after the US, China, the UK, Russia and the Netherlands, according to the National Cyber Power Index 2020 of the Harvard Belfer Center. France has been able to use military needs to preserve not only its operational superiority, but also to develop its own cybersecurity industry and technology. Since the inclusion of cyberspace as a new operational domain in the 2008 National Defense and Security Strategy, its importance has been reaffirmed in the latest white paper (Revue stratégique de cyberdéfense 2018) and a military strategy has been developed that includes both defensive and offensive actions ( Stratégie cyber des Armèes 2019) accompanied by the necessary personnel and budget resources, some 1,600 million euros and 4,000 cyber soldiers until 2025.
Like any power, France has a strategic instinct and carefully monitors trends that could jeopardize its status as such. The President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, already warned in his speech on deterrence and defense on February 7, 2020 at the École Militaire about the strategic, political and technological fluidity of the international environment. The revision in 2021 of the National Defense and Security Strategy (Actualisation Stratégique) confirms the deterioration of the strategic context announced in 2017. Threats such as terrorism, proliferation or Russia and Russia contribute to the deconstruction of order and international security organizations. China, which adds to its intimidating behavior an alarming military growth and a greater capacity for political and military influence. The strategic and military competition with both countries is so evident that France no longer rules out the risk of a direct confrontation. Added to the previous threats are new sources of insecurity such as disinformation and hybrid warfare, to which are added non-state actors that are difficult to dissuade and revisionist powers such as Turkey and Iran.
In an environment of competition between great powers, it is logical for France to worry about the budgetary and technological erosion of its capabilities. The adaptation of the armed forces model (Ambition 2030) to the new strategic context required an economic effort of 198,000 million euros for the 2019-2025 period, which should be covered by the current Military Programming Law. This increased the average annual expenditure from around 32,200 million to around 39,600 million, which made it possible to offset the accumulated budget reductions, increase the spending of the armed forces by 23% and satisfy the French commitment to NATO to spend 2% of its GDP to defense spending. However, and despite the planned stabilization mechanisms, there have been increases in spending of 600 million euros in operations and 2,100 in programs, which will force some of the planned programs to be dispensed with or cut. According to the estimates of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense of the Senate, in charge of evaluating the updating of the Military Programming Law in 2021, this should increase the 198,000 million initially planned to 295,000 in 2025 to achieve the planned objectives, but It will not be easy to add extraordinary funds in a financial situation weakened by covid in which the GDP has been reduced by approximately 10% and the debt reaches 120% of the GDP.
The drop in exports is another risk for the French industrial base, as it has always relied on exports to offset limited domestic demand. France ranks third among world arms exporters, after the United States and Russia with 8.2% of the international market between 2016 and 2020 according to the SIPRI database. However, its share is losing ground to less scrupulous new exporters, such as China or Turkey, or more aggressive ones such as the United States, which systematically competes with France in the European, Arab and Asian markets for the same clients, as evidenced by Australia's cancellation of the French submarine program in favor of an Anglo-American consortium (AUKUS).
The military ambition of recent decades is beginning to take its toll on the model of the armed forces. Its force structure is planned to sustain limited operations for a long time and operations of greater intensity for a short period, but not to sustain a large operation for a long time or to sustain operations as demanding as those in the Sahel indefinitely. France has participated with solvency and assiduity in crisis management operations, but the effort in human and material resources that its rapid deployment forces have made has reduced the operational and logistical capacity of the rest of the forces and missions. The need to dissuade Russia forces France to reduce and reorient its military effort, which explains the withdrawal of French troops from the counterinsurgency operation Barkhane in the Sahel that they have led until 2021. The reduction of operations helps, but does not solve, the problems of recruitment and permanence of personnel faced by the armed forces both due to the working conditions of less qualified personnel and the difficulty of competing in salary with the civilian sector to find qualified personnel as digitization accelerates of the armed forces.
France needs help to remain a global military power. The United States, despite occasional friction, remains France's leading military partner, followed by some European allies, such as Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy, with whom it maintains special defense relations, or others with whom France acts in coalition or through multilateral organizations in NATO and the EU.
France will remain the only European strategic leader after the departure of the United Kingdom. There are other military powers, such as Germany or Spain, that do not share its strategic culture, and other military powers that share it, such as Italy or the Netherlands, but that do not have a sufficient variety and quantity of military capabilities to co-lead the EU. France is the strategic conscience of Europe and has tried to awaken the EU from the dream of naivete, appeasement, equidistance and soft power in which it has lived for the last decades as a civil power. France has been behind the great moments of boosting European defense but it has not been a disinterested mentor because it wants the EU's foreign, security and defense policies to be aligned with the objectives of its defense and national security strategies.
France has always advocated a common European strategic culture, but has not been able to get the EU member states to subordinate their particular security interests to the creation of a joint defense. Some of its strategic proposals, such as making the Permanent Structured Cooperation a hard and restricted core of European defense, have not found the expected response. The diversity of cultures, interests and commitments partly explains the failure of its initiatives, but it is also explained by a leadership style that expects unconditional follow-up from its allied partners. Its European partners can hardly trust France to put its nuclear power at the service of European defense when its doctrine reserves its use to a sovereign decision, or to contribute combat troops to operations in Africa when France reserves command and control of these operations. .
To overcome it, France has combined long-term initiatives with more pragmatic ones. Among the former, the appeal to European strategic autonomy stands out, a vague and constantly evolving concept –a story– to provide the EU with the conscience and capabilities of military power. Coined in the EU Global Strategy of 2016 after Brexit, the concept has found invaluable support in the geopolitical approach of the European Commission and has gone beyond the initial area of defense to settle in all other areas of competition. Among the second, the European Intervention Initiative to bring together the powers – European or from the EU – that want and can participate in more committed military operations. Since not all EU member states contribute to military operations and missions, in the end the most practical thing is to coordinate with the most willing and capable countries, whether they are from the EU or not.
The combination of strategy and tactics can also be seen in the defense industrial sector, where France and the European Commission share a geopolitical approach and industrial logic. Both see the need for the EU to regain the highest degree of technological and industrial sovereignty possible in the current context of geopolitical competition and for the current industrial fragmentation to be reduced. Coinciding with the initial vision, France aspires to capitalize on the Europeanization of the European defense industry and convert its industrial hegemony into a monopoly, or duopoly with Germany, taking advantage of the funds and programs of the Commission (European Defense Fund or the Development Program European Defense Industry) and instrumentalizing intergovernmental cooperation initiatives such as Permanent Structured Cooperation or the Capacity Development Plan, among others. France aspires for the European champions to be French and to control a value chain that ends national preferences within a single market.
Finally, and taking advantage of the presidency of the European Council in 2022, France will have to lead the European contribution to the review of NATO's Strategic Concept and the preparation of the EU's Strategic Compass. Both documents must be compatible because they must guide the adaptation of force structures to the new strategic context. The military requirements of the powers are changing. They now need nuclear and conventional capabilities to deter new threats, but they no longer need the projection capabilities they needed for crisis management and cooperative security operations. They also need their armed forces to operate in new cyber, space, hybrid, or influence domains and progress in digitization before disruptive technologies revolutionize the way they fight. Powers like France will need to keep their modernization and innovation programs out of budget constraints if they want to preserve their operational superiority. They will need to better select their current priorities and capabilities because more functions cannot be done with the same money and the French Armed Forces are now being asked to contribute more to the resilience of French society and its territories. The high representative, Josep Borrell, when presenting the initial draft of the EU's future military strategy, stated that "Europe is in danger" because it was not a military power, but that does not mean that a great military power like France can continue being so and that it is sheltered from new risks.
Félix Arteaga is principal investigator at the Elcano Royal Institute and professor at the General Gutiérrez Mellado University Institute of the National Distance Education University (UNED).
