2023-07-03 03:07:56
If the ritual is respected, Emmanuel Macron will address the high military hierarchy, Thursday, July 13, in Paris, in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Brienne, headquarters of the Ministry of the Armed Forces. The next day, he will go down the Champs-Elysées in his command car for the traditional National Day parade.
This year, the President of the Republic will have a little more ammunition than the previous ones, at least on defense issues. It will be able to include in its balance sheet the vote of a military programming law (LPM) 2024-2030 showing a 40% increase in credits (413 billion euros) compared to the previous one, in the service of a “war economy”.
In these times of budgetary drift, the military did not expect a “crazy dough”. The effort is real, but the display is advantageous: inflation will cut into this envelope of 30 billion euros, uncertainty hovers over the 13 billion in extrabudgetary revenue, the major programs launched and the modernization of nuclear deterrence will absorb most of the equipment credits.
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Deliveries of armored vehicles (Jaguar, Griffon, etc.), Rafale aircraft and frigates will therefore be more spread out in order to favor the maintenance in operational condition of equipment and stocks of ammunition, surface-to-air missiles and drones, or to reinforce the intelligence, cyber and space. At least the armed forces have a multi-annual program giving them visibility that is absent in most countries.
Course au leadership
During the three decades that followed the fall of the USSR, the Western world received the “dividends of peace” by illusions about the end of history (and of war). Everything that was no longer devoted to the armies could be devoted to health, education or infrastructure.
Everything is now pushing for a sustained increase in military budgets, from the Russian-Ukrainian conflict to the tensions around Taiwan, against a backdrop of a frantic race for world leadership between the United States and China. There are no longer any countries which do not rearm. The continuous increase in expenditure since 2014 accelerated in 2022 (+ 3.7% in real terms), to exceed 2,000 billion euros.
In France, the absence of public debate, confined to Parliament and its elected members of the defense committees, is matched by the absence of debate on the economic effects of such a rearmament.
Too expensive, defense? There are two ways of measuring the community’s effort: its weight in the budget and its share in the wealth created. The first approach is misleading: this seemingly colossal sum of 2,000 billion euros represents only a little more than 2% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).
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