French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday unveiled a new national military service plan as France seeks to bolster its armed forces to address growing concerns over Russia’s threat to European nations beyond the war in Ukraine.
Macron was to stress the “need to prepare the nation for growing threats,” the president’s office said ahead of his visit to the Varces military base in the French Alps.
Earlier this year, Macron announced his intention to provide young French with a new option to voluntarily serve in the military.
Photo: AFP
Conscription, which France ended in 1996, is not being considered.
France is seeking to boost its defenses as Russia’s war in Ukraine puts the European continent at “great risk,” Macron said.
“The day that you send a signal of weakness to Russia — which for 10 years has made a strategic choice to become an imperial power again, that’s to say advance wherever we are weak — well, it will continue to advance,” he told radio RTL on Tuesday.
Macron has announced 6.5 billion euros (US$7.6 billion) in extra military spending in the next two years.
He said that France aims to spend 64 billion euros on defense in 2027, the last year of his second term.
That would be double the 32 billion euros in annual spending when he became president in 2017.
France’s military comprises about 200,000 active personnel and more than 40,000 reservists, making it the second-largest in the EU, just behind Poland.
France wants to increase the number of reservists it has to 100,000 by 2030.
France’s new army chief of staff, General Fabien Mandon, last week sent a warning about the nation’s need to get prepared to “lose its children” in the event of a potential conflict with Russia.
Russia annexed 20 percent of Georgia’s territory in 2008, Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Mandon said.
“Unfortunately, Russia today, based on the information I have access to, is preparing for a confrontation with our countries by 2030. It is organizing itself for this, it is preparing for this, and it is convinced that its existential enemy is NATO,” he said.
Macron made clear that the national military service volunteers would not be frontline troops.
“We must, in any case, immediately dispel any confusion that we are going to send our young people to Ukraine,” Macron said on Tuesday.
“That’s not at all what this is about,” he added.
Ten EU countries have compulsory military service: Austria, Cyprus, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden.
Norway, which is not in the EU, has mandatory military service for men and women.
The length of service ranges from as little as two months in Croatia to up to 19 months in Norway.
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