Macron’s ‘bonsai army’ needs more money to grow

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On the eve of the Bastille Day military parade, French president Emmanuel Macron celebrated his government’s big new seven-year defence budget as a “proactive” one that would maintain France as an influential power.

The fruits of spending were on display when new pieces of kit debuted at the July 14 military parade — a group of Guépard helicopters (part of a €10bn order from Airbus) flew overhead, and new Serval armoured vehicles rumbled down the Champs-Élysées. 

Yet behind the pomp and big numbers lie some uncomfortable truths: France’s armed forces are essentially running to stand still and have not recovered from decades of cuts after the cold war, made in the name of the “peace dividend”. 

The 2024-2030 budget passed by lawmakers this month is worth €413bn, a hefty 40 per cent increase (in nominal terms) on the €295bn allocated in the 2019-2025 budget. 

But inflation will amputate about €30bn, or approximately 30 per cent of the spending uplift, according to Julien Malizard of defence institute IHEDN. Much of the rest will be eaten up by maintenance costs on equipment, as well as ballooning prices on increasingly high-tech kit — for example, a Rafale fighter costs about €80mn, more than double the old Mirage model it replaced.

The upshot is that France will not end up with a step-change in capabilities from the new money. It will continue to have what critics call “a bonsai army” — a reference to the Japanese art of cultivating miniature trees. France would have the basic range of capabilities of the more powerful US army, but just on a tiny scale.

Macron does deserve credit for beginning to address the problem, even before the Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year. In an apparent dig at Germany’s Zeitenwende, Macron said France did not need “a wake-up call to be conscious of the need to reinvest” in its military. Under his direction, annual defence spending is set to reach €68bn in 2030, double the level of 2018.

Even with this effort, France will only just make the Nato target of spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence, according to Malizard, after falling short of it for almost a decade.

Christian Cambon, the long-serving head of the French senate’s foreign affairs and defence committee, admitted there was an unfortunate “optical effect” where France was spending big without seeing much growth in actual programmes. That “creates the impression that you’re not getting much for your money”, he said.

Former colonel Michel Goya was harsher in comments to RMC radio in May: “Our armies are short of everything! The €413bn in the new budget will only mitigate the disaster.”

Goya is among the critics who argue that the new defence budget shows that France has not learned the lessons from the war in Ukraine (a high-intensity land war) and has pushed off tough strategic decisions about what kind of army it truly needs and what it can afford.

Should it stick with its model of having an expeditionary force that can deploy abroad for short-term missions, or beef up to become more capable of fighting a land war like in Ukraine? 

The government has to an extent avoided the question and chosen relative continuity. A big chunk of the new defence budget (13 per cent by one senate estimate) will go to updating France’s nuclear weapons and the aircraft and submarines to carry them — long the cornerstone of national defence.

France will also put enough money into the army to ensure it can maintain the same number of brigades by 2030, and sharply increase the number of reservists. But there will be no big increase in the size of the naval and air fleets; some long-awaited equipment acquisitions have been delayed.

The air force will, for example, buy 48 fewer Rafale fighter jets and 15 fewer transport aircraft than previously planned, and the army almost 500 fewer armoured vehicles. 

Drawing lessons from the battlefield in Ukraine, France will plough more money into munitions, drones and air defences, but it has stopped short of adding enough “mass” to be able to fight an extended ground war.

Cambon pointed to the main trade-off: France has to balance military ambition with heavy public debts and need to fund other needs such as hospitals, schools and pensions. “We are not an attacker country, but we must be capable of defending ourselves, in co-operation with Nato and our European allies,” he said.