“We must have a war in advance,” said Emmanuel Macron, Friday January 20, in Mont-de-Marsan, during his vows to the armies. The amount allocated, 413 billion euros over seven years, has been unprecedented since the 1960s.
by Elise Vincent
It is by a massive figure stated in a deep voice, that the head of state, Emmanuel Macron, chose to respond, Friday, January 20, from the Mont-de-Marsan air base (Landes) , in war times that threaten Europe since the start of the Ukrainian conflict. While in the spring, the president had decided to hasten the preparation of a new military programming law (LPM), the amount which will ultimately be allocated there will reach 413 billion euros over seven years, he revealed On the occasion of his wishes to the armies. An unprecedented sum, made up as much betting as of drastic choices.
“We must have a war in advance (…) draw the consequences of what our time carries in germ”, developed in the preamble the head of state, on a tribune framed by a burst and An imposing Sol-Air Mamba defense system, two equipment deployed on the eastern flank of Europe against Russia. “One of the traps would be to run out by seeking only technological refinement, the other would be not to invest,” added Macron in the introduction to a soldier of soldiers, adding that some of his decisions ” Began “an irreversible” change “.
With a global envelope of 413 billion euros, the future LPM which must cover the period 2024-2030, turns out to be the largest budget ever devoted to armies since the 1960s, when General de Gaulle had decided to provide France with nuclear weapons. A symbol widely underlined this Friday by the Head of State. A sum which also corresponds to more than 100 billion additional credits compared to the previous LPM, which was scheduled for the period 2019-2025 and whose budget was around 300 billion.
anxious that such a budget can be misunderstood in part of the opinion at a time when the deficiencies of public funding, from school to hospitals, fuel social tensions, the speech of Macron A targeted in hollow to justify the issues. “In this project, there is no luxury, neither comfortable, nor comfort. There is only the necessary,” assured the head of state. “At a time when each euro of the French taxpayer must be spared, we had to find the best compromise between a defense that meets our ambitions and the essential principle of sobriety,” he completed.
A “new army model”
A military programming law is not, by nature, an exercise of great transparency, a good part of the detail of the envisaged budgets being classified as Secret-Defense. The words chosen, partly for strategic reports, therefore count as much as the reality of planned means. To listen to the Head of State, it is first of all the strengthening of deterrence “under specific and evolving conditions” which will concentrate a substantial part of the means of the future LPM. So far, the amount allocated to deterrence each year was estimated at 5.6 billion per year.
You have 61.54% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.