France24, Dec. 23, 2016 – France’s military chief on Wednesday took the unusual step of urging the country’s next president to raise defense spending in a rare public appeal.
Chief of Defense General Pierre de Villiers called on France to boost its defense budget to two percent of GDP before the end of the next presidential term, in 2022. It is an effort that can be “neither considered lightly nor delayed”, he warns. “Time is of the essence.”
De Villiers’s call comes four months before the first round of France’s 2017 presidential election and spurred a spate of reactions across the political spectrum.
France has raised defense spending twice in the wake of the January 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis and currently spends 1.78 percent of its GDP on defense. The budget rose by 600 million euros to reach 32 billion euros in 2016 and will increase by 700 million more for 2017. Alongside fellow European Union member states, France has committed to reaching the two-percent target in 2024, a goal reaffirmed at July’s NATO summit in Warsaw.
But for De Villiers, 2024 won’t cut it.
“One must understand that the slightest discrepancy incoherency between threats, missions and means is akin to the grain of sand that seizes up the system and leads to defeat,” wrote the chief of defense, typically a discreet figure, in the French business daily Les Echos. “That’s the danger we will expose ourselves to if nothing is done. Everyone has understood: We do not win a war without a war effort.”
Although the op-ed was published Wednesday, the newspaper specifies it was written before Monday’s apparent Islamist terrorist attack on a Berlin Christmas market.