France has no choice! A new White Paper on Defense is essential in 2025

A few days ago, the MP for the 1st constituency of Var, Yannick Chenevard, called for the drafting of a new White Paper on Defense, or LBDSN, in its opinion concerning the 2025 French Navy credits.

According to the parliamentarian, the format of the French Navy, currently targeted within the framework of the Military Programming Law 2024-2030, no longer corresponds to the operational needs observed today, forcing the latter to disengage from certain crucial missions, in order to carry out others, even more important.

More specifically, Mr Chenevard insists on the format of 15 first-rank frigates, targeted by the French Navy, considered very insufficient to respond to the operational reality to which it must respond today, and underlines the need to have a second aircraft carrier, to respond to the different possible scenarios.

The fact is, as mentioned in various articles on this site, the entire French armed forces are currently under-capacitated, simply to respond to the operational activity of the moment, as is the case with the Air and Space Army's fighter fleet, which is short 95 aircraft.

It therefore seems essential, at present, for France to equip itself with a new framework document providing a precise and up-to-date vision of the threats and their developments, in order to deduce the doctrines and formats of the French armies, in order to respond to them.

White Paper on Defense 2013, Strategic Review 2018 and 2022: where do the doctrines and formats of the French armies come from today?

Today, the evolution of the format and doctrines of the French armies is framed by the Military Programming Law 2024-2030. This provides, in particular, a significant budgetary effort to reach a budget of €63 billion in 2030, almost double that of 2016.

Beyond the macro budgetary aspects, the LPM also details the breakdown of these credits, to achieve the objectives of formats and military capabilities established by the Strategic Review 2022, drafted previously. However, in many aspects, and particularly in terms of formats, the RS 2022 is only an evolution of the Strategic Review 2018, which was drafted to frame the trajectory of the previous LPM 2018-2025.

Thus, the vast majority of the capacity formats of the 3 armies, such as the 225 combat aircraft for the AAE and the naval air force, the 200 combat tanks of the Army, or the 15 first-rank frigates of the French Navy, and even the HR format of the armies set at 1 active military personnel, already existed in the RS 207.000, despite an international context that has changed significantly from 2018 to 2018.

However, here again, the RS 2018 almost entirely took up the format of the armies defined in a previous document, the White Paper on Defense and National Security, or LBDSN 2013, written shortly after François Hollande came to power.

Indeed, for President Macron, the emergency in 2017-2018 was to give the armed forces the necessary means to stabilize the budgetary balances of the armed forces, seriously undermined by two decades of chronic underinvestment, having forced the three French armed forces to cannibalize themselves, to meet operational needs which, themselves, have been increasing.

Certainly, the reality of threats and tensions had changed significantly since 2014, with in particular the French intervention in Mali, the capture of Crimea by Russia and the war in Donbass, or even the massive rearmament of China, accompanied by a very aggressive policy by Beijing in the South China Sea and regarding Taiwan.

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