October 18, 2002	Friday	Sha'aban 11, 1423

PARIS: After years of watching its military decline to second-tier status, France has embarked on a costly modernization plan, with a shift in strategy toward creating capability to project military force anywhere in the world.

The new center-right government of President Jacques Chirac has outlined a plan for $87 billion in military capital spending between 2003 and 2008. The armed forces would get a second aircraft carrier, better satellite intelligence, a dozen unmanned drones, 57 Rafale combat aircraft, 34 NH-90 transport helicopters and 50 Airbus A400M transport planes, as well as new submarines and frigates.

“There is a clear change in the French defence policy,” said Philippe Moreau Defarges of the French Institute for International Relations. “In the time of de Gaulle, it was focused on nuclear deterrence,” he said, referring to Charles de Gaulle’s 1959 to 1969 presidency. “Now it’s focused on external power projection.”

For the year 2003, the military budget would total about $39.5 billion, a 6.1 per cent increase over the previous year. Overall, the six-year programme would push French defence spending from 1.71 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product to more than 2 per cent.

“It’s a strong increase,” said Defence Minister Michelle Alliot-Marie in an interview. She said she wants to tell the United States that after years of giving short shrift to its armed forces, France is now serious about heeding American calls for its European partners to share more of the burden.

Alliot-Marie said France was encouraging its European partners to do the same. Military spending is not particularly popular in Europe, and politicians typically face pressure to use funds for social programmes.

But the French are hoping that the Sept 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, and the constant warnings that similar attacks, perhaps with biological or chemical weapons, could happen in Europe, might spur other countries to reconsider their defence postures.

“One cannot say that the essential element in the construction of Europe is a common foreign and defence policy, and then not fund it,” Alliot-Marie said.

France’s spending increase was made possible by presidential and legislative elections in May and June, in which Chirac was returned to office by a lopsided margin and given a friendly center-right government.

Spending more on the military was one of Chirac’s priorities when he first won the presidency in 1995, but for five years, beginning in 1997, he was forced to share power with a Socialist- led government that used money that had been earmarked for defence for education and other social programmes.

“The Socialists did not have the same vision of defence as we do,” said Alliot-Marie. Referring to their time in government, when the French economy was one of the fastest- growing in Europe.

The decision was prompted by a feeling among Chirac and his allies that France’s place in the world has been hampered by its declining ability to project military power.

In his Bastille Day address in July, Chirac lamented that France’s military capability and readiness had slipped behind that of Britain, Western Europe’s other big military power. Britain now spends about 2.28 per cent of its gross domestic product on defence.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.