France has decided to increase its military spending by 40% between 2024 and 2030, compared to the previous programming law.
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France will fulfill the objective set for all NATO members: to allocate 2% of its GDP to military spending in 2024. This is what Defense Minister Sébastien said on Thursday February 15. Lecornu, from Brussels where he met with his Alliance counterparts. France, which wants to almost double its military budget by 2030 compared to 2019, initially planned to achieve this objective in 2025.
Investing in drones or hypersonic weapons
These 2% of GDP will be used for the remuneration of soldiers in the army and navy, but also for contracts signed with arms companies, mainly French, such as Thalès, Dassault, Safran and shipyards. naval, for ships, combat aircraft and munitions. There will also be investments in new areas: underwater drones, kamikaze drones or even hypersonic weapons going at more than 6,000 km/h. Weapons extremely difficult to intercept and destroy.
But the majority of future spending will be devoted to nuclear deterrence with the acquisition of new nuclear warheads, new missiles and new Rafale planes and submarines to launch them. Which represents approximately 60% of the expenditure planned by the military programming law passed and promulgated in the summer of 2023.
Expenses on the rise, but…
In total, all expenses included, France must spend a little more than 413 billion euros between 2024 and 2030. This is 40% more than what was included in the previous programming law, for the period 2019-2025 . A very significant increase which partly explains why Sébastien Lecornu affirms that the objective of 2% of GDP will be reached in 2024. France was already very close to it in 2023 since 1.9% of its GDP was allocated to military spending.
This objective is also getting closer thanks to the rather weak growth prospects. Indeed, to calculate this percentage of 2% of GDP, we must compare total military spending to GDP, therefore to the wealth produced. When GDP increases little and when growth is weak, as at the moment, the sum represented by the 2% is lower. We must therefore make a little less effort in military spending to reach this 2%. Conversely, we would have to spend more if growth were more dynamic.
Strong disparities between countries
If France will meet its objective this year, other countries are doing better. Poland is the best student since its defense budget represents almost 4% of its GDP in 2023, or nearly 14 billion euros, in particular because of the Russian threat at its doors. Countries bordering Moscow also exceed 2%, again according to NATO. This is the case of Finland, and the three Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. The United States and Greece are above.
But not all of this envelope is used to buy weapons, planes, submarines and tanks, or to invest in military research. NATO includes pensions paid to veterans and retired military personnel in its calculations. For example, in France, it must cost a little more than 9 billion euros this year.