Wishes to the armies: Emmanuel Macron asks manufacturers to “gain in speed, volume and innovation”

Emmanuel Macron urged defense manufacturers on Friday to “gain speed, volume and innovation” to achieve “war economy mode”, castigating the “form of numbness” which had spread to the sector before the invasion of Ukraine. “We must amplify the transformation that has begun” in order to respond more quickly to Ukraine’s needs in the war against Russia, the Head of State told industrialists, during his greetings to the Armed Forces at the Cherbourg naval base.

“Management by deadlines is vital”

“I ask each boss to be totally focused on production and supply issues. We must never again be satisfied with production deadlines that extend over several years,” he insisted. “What is expected of everyone is basically to gain in speed, in volume, in innovation,” argued Emmanuel Macron who has been pleading for “an industry in war economy mode” since February 2022 and the start of the war in Ukraine.

The Head of State spoke in particular of the “comfortable years” which, sometimes, caused “a form of satisfied numbness which allowed us to maintain a very high level of quality, very high, but expensive, costly, with a small flow , with a little innovation”. But “this world no longer allows it,” he argued. The president notably expressed satisfaction with the improvement in production rates of the Caesar cannon, the Mistral missile, the Rafale plane and Thales radars.

But “others were slow to understand the change in strategic context, the importance of being able to deliver quickly” and “have, over the past year and a half, sometimes missed contracts and I regret that,” he said. The Minister of the Armed Forces Sébastien Lecornu also singled out “bad students” on Thursday, as for the production of Aster surface-to-air defense missiles by MBDA. “Managing by deadlines is vital,” insisted Emmanuel Macron, calling to “no longer count in years, but in months and weeks”.

“Choice and cost control are an imperative”, he also argued, invoking the “citizen’s duty” which falls to everyone because “each euro of the LPM (military programming law, editor’s note) must be useful.”