Grandstand. François Cornut-Gentille, MP (LR) for Haute-Marne, in a gallery at the World which attracts attention because it is signed by one of the special rapporteurs on the defense budget, dreams of being a “disruptor” of the French army model. Devoting it to public loathing, he made a serious error of assessment, as evidenced by his arguments, which paid little heed to the facts, and his proposals without any real content.
Let’s go back to his reasoning which would like to denounce a triple impasse, budgetary, capacity and partnership.
Budget impasse first. Let us denounce from the outset this accounting vision which, on the one hand, deplores a financial trajectory of military programming which would be untenable and, on the other, instructs the trial of a government which would not do enough. What to believe?
I prefer, for my part, acts with selective memory and complicated conjectures: the current majority has decided on a historic increase in power of our armed forces, the 2022 budget being almost 30% higher than that of 2017 For the first time, this trajectory has been respected, year after year, to the nearest euro. And the candidate Emmanuel Macron is committed to scrupulous respect for the future trajectory, as set by the military programming law (LPM) until 2025 to reach an annual budget of 50 billion euros.
Let us twist our necks in passing with the bad argument according to which the LPM would be endangered by a decree in advance guaranteeing the financial effort in favor of our companies weakened by the war in Ukraine on credits placed in reserves, including 346 million euros from the Ministry of the Armed Forces. This technical treasury operation is carried out within the constraints that Parliament has imposed on the executive with the organic law relating to finance laws and will be subject to legislative ratification during the next finance law. The government has planned to restore the credits of the armies during this meeting. What should have been done? M. Cornut-Gentille said nothing about it: he gave himself time to reflect. The government does not wait; it acts by responding to emergencies while calmly preparing for the future.
Exceptional operating capital
Capacity impasse then. The platform that we are contesting denounces a complete army model that would be “obsolete”. That the army model that we are aiming for is not quite complete is obvious: we are repairing and modernizing a model that is suffering from twenty-five years of underinvestment and the “axe” restructuring that Mr. Cornut- Nice supported.
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