Recovery plan: the missed opportunity of the French authorities for its defense industry and its armies

On September 3, 2020, the French government presented its Recovery Plan to address the economic consequences of the COVID19 crisis, which hit businesses and jobs hard in the country. If the majority of industrial and economic sectors are effectively equipped to try to preserve what can be, and transform what must be, no announcement has been made concerning the national defense industry , yet the the most efficient state investment in terms of job creation and budgetary return for the state. Questioned on the subject, the French authorities considered that the investment plan resulting from the current Military Programming Law already constituted major support for this sector granted by the State.

If, from a political point of view, this speech actually makes sense, the National Defense Industry being one of the main beneficiaries of the plan to increase Defense spending enacted by the Military Programming Law 2019-2025, with an overall envelope which will have increased by almost €20 billion over the entire period, it remains true that this is a real missed opportunity for the government to redirect certain credits towards industrial programs and structuring for the whole country, as can be the major Defense programs. This is how the massive French investments to set up national deterrence in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly around the Le Redoutable class of nuclear ballistic missile submarines, conditioned the technologies which made it possible to give birth to the program. European space, which gave France a key role in civil aeronautics, and even made it possible to power the first TGV.

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