Defense Choices for the Next French President

France is a permanent nuclear-armed member of the United Nations Security Council, with a special sense of responsibility for global security. The next president of France will wield tremendous power over French defense policy, including the ability, if necessary, to deploy force without immediate recourse to parliament. France has been the most militarily active European member of NATO in recent years, including a large domestic deployment because of an ongoing state of emergency.

The next French president will also inherit the second-largest defense budget among the European NATO states (over EUR 40 billion for 2017), which is planned to rise further, although future large increases may be constrained by the French government’s large budget deficit. The new French president may also produce a new white paper outlining the main geostrategic parameters for French defense policy for the following five years. All these developments come at a time when the security of France and Europe is threatened externally by Russia and internally by terrorism, among other challenges.

This analysis is not an assessment of the electoral programs produced by the French presidential candidates (the first round of elections will be held on 23 April 2017). Instead it considers the geostrategic and political landscape that will confront the next French president, alongside potential operational, budgetary, capability, and international partnership choices.

Geostrategic and Political Context

The main parameters of French defense policy were last set out in the White Paper on Defense and National Security of 2013, which outlined a considerable level of strategic and operational ambition relative to most other European governments, despite its announcement of cuts to national defense spending (from around 1.9 per cent to 1.76 per cent of GDP) and personnel (24,000).

After protecting national territory, guaranteeing European and North Atlantic security was considered the second strategic priority, but a threat from Russia was not discussed in the 2013 document. That has changed since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and Paris has since responded to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine by sending an armored task force to Poland, increasing maritime patrols in the Baltic Sea, and cancelling the planned sale of Mistral amphibious assault ships to Russia.

Beyond Europe, French geostrategic priorities were narrowed in the 2013 white paper, prioritizing Africa (mainly North Africa and the Sahel) and the Middle East over the broader “arc of instability” – stretching across Africa, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean and Central Asia – highlighted in the 2008 version. The Indian Ocean was underlined as the next geostrategic priority, and the potential for strategic trouble in East and South-East Asia was also emphasized.

In other words, France has intended to remain a “European power with global reach”, continuing to strengthen military ties with a number of partners in the Gulf and the wider Indo-Pacific, even if it should prioritize security challenges in Europe and to Europe’s south. And France continues to maintain a global outlook on security. For example, despite the multitude of challenges to European security, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian proposed in July 2016 that EU governments should send naval vessels to ensure open waterways in the disputed South China Sea.

Following the January and November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris inspired by the Iraq/Syria-based ISIS, the geostrategic focus on the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel has been reinforced, alongside the need to deter Russia in Eastern Europe. The 2013 prioritization of territorial defense, European security, and the regions to the south of Europe, currently seems unlikely to change much – if anything, events since then have buttressed those priorities. But the hardening of the security environment for France and Europe has put added strain on the country’s defense resources (on which more in the next section).

Taking precedence over external priorities, since the November 2015 terrorist attacks, the French government has imposed a domestic state of emergency – whereby the executive and security services are granted special powers, such as searches without judicial oversight – which has been extended until 15 July 2017, a period that includes the upcoming presidential elections. This is the longest uninterrupted state of emergency in France since the Algerian war in the 1950s and 1960s.

And the war analogy does not stop there. French President Hollande and some of his ministers have described their struggle with Islamist terrorists (especially ISIS) as a “war”, language that most Europeans had previously associated more with neo-conservatives from former US president George W. Bush’s administration. Subsequent terrorist attacks, such as in Nice in July 2016, have stiffened the government’s war footing.

Some French security analysts (and a few politicians) have been very critical of this approach. As François Heisbourg from the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS) has said: “Bombing Raqqa and liberating Mosul are one thing; waging war on French citizens in St. Denis [...] is quite another”. A key decision for the next French president will be to decide on whether to prolong the current state of emergency – and to continue using such bellicose language – in part because of its impact on French defense policy.

Partly, but not only, because of the current threat from terrorism, there is widespread political support for increasing defense spending (currently, it equates to 1.8 per cent of GDP according to NATO figures) along with security funding (such as for police and intelligence forces). Three of the main presidential candidates, (François Fillon, Benoît Hamon and Emmanuel Macron) have committed to increasing the defense budget to at least 2 per cent of GDP, while another (Marine Le Pen) would like to raise it to an impressive 3 per cent (by contrast, the NATO-Europe average is just under 1.5 per cent). Few if any serious French politicians run on a political program to reduce defense spending and/or scrap France’s nuclear weapons program.

Operations, Budgets, and Capabilities

The domestic war footing against terrorists and the intensified bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq have put added strain on French defense resources. For example, some 13,000 soldiers are currently deployed domestically to protect sensitive targets. Moreover, France is the EU member that has engaged in the most international military operations in recent years. In addition to intervening in Libya and Côte d’Ivoire in 2011, Mali in 2013, and the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2013 – 4, France has kept 4,000 soldiers stationed across the Sahel (stationed in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Nigeria).

Paris also sent its aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, to the Persian Gulf to carry out strikes against ISIS in Syria and Iraq at the end of 2015. In a first for a non-US ship, the French carrier took command of US Naval Forces Central Command Task Force 50, which plans and conducts strike operations in the US Fifth Fleet area of operations. Furthermore, France is not neglecting its global outlook: Later this year, France will send a Mistral-class amphibious assault ship to the western Pacific for military drills with the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, the UK’s Royal Navy, and the US Navy.

To some degree, these greatly increased domestic and international commitments have reduced France’s ability to defend NATO territory in Eastern Europe. However, it has previously sent fighter jets to the Baltic and ships to the Black Sea; although it is not one of the lead framework countries for NATO’s recently-deployed Baltic battalions, it is contributing 300 soldiers to the UK-led battalion in Estonia. Furthermore, France will take command of NATO’s Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) in 2020.

There is some debate in French military circles as to whether France can realistically keep up this tempo and combination of operational commitments, especially if they continue to grow. Some capabilities have experienced higher-than-planned attrition rates, for example. In July 2016, the government announced that it would create an 84,000-strong national guard for homeland security duties, drawn from the police, gendarmerie, and army reserve (which will also grow from 28,700 to 40,000 by 2018), to relieve the armed forces from their current domestic duties – a plan which the next president may wish to continue. In line with growing operational commitments, France also announced during 2015 (after the January Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris) that the French defense budget would rise by EUR 3.9 billion between 2016 and 2019, resulting in a 4 per cent increase in real terms, and keeping French spending at around 1.8 per cent of GDP up to 2019.