PARIS — France plans to spend an additional €8.5 billion (U.S.$9.8 billion) to buy munitions through to 2030, with the return of high-intensity warfare in the Middle East and Ukraine showing a need for more mass, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu told parliament on Wednesday.
The country plans to set up a platform called France Munitions that will serve as an ammunition wholesaler for the French armed forces as well as allies and export clients. The goal is to place bulk orders with manufacturers to speed up an overhaul of industrial production capacity and raise ammo output in France, with funding coming from both the government and private investors, Lecornu said.
European countries have observed munition spending in Ukraine and the Middle East with concern, with the volumes of drones and missiles used in the space of weeks well beyond what they have in stock, and outpacing production capabilities of Europe’s defense manufacturers, for now. The updated spending plan allocates four times more funding to ammunition than a previous law, Lecornu said.
“The urgency is clearly munitions,” Lecornu said. The prime minister said the focus will be on ground-based air defense, early warning drones and particularly counter-drone measures, including interceptor drones and loitering munitions, “which at last must be produced in large quantities at controlled costs.”
The spending on munitions is part of an overall defense budget increase of €36 billion for the 2026-2030 period announced by President Emmanuel Macron in January. The ammunition budget comes on top of €16 billion planned for munitions in the military spending program approved in 2023, according to Lecornu, who was previously France’s armed forces minister.
The security situation requires parliament to speed up the review of the updated military programming law, Lecornu said. The government will present the update on April 8, and table its plans in the National Assembly in the week of May 4 and the week of June 1 in the senate.
France needs to take a deeper look at its models, with drones that cost a few thousand euros capable of triggering the use of an interceptor missile that costs several millions, according to Lecornu, in reference to the conflict in the Middle East.
“Our entire concept of weaponry needs to be rethought,” Lecornu said. “That is one of the lessons of this war, as well as from Ukraine.”
Several innovative French companies are now capable of producing interceptor drones, and Lecornu said he will inaugurate a new production plant near Paris that can churn out thousands of drones per month, together with Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin.
The need is for “quantity and quality, cost and efficiency, innovation and speed, saturation munitions but also precision munitions and therefore decisive strikes,” Lecornu said. “This is a military challenge, it is also an industrial challenge, and therefore a challenge of sovereignty.”
France will also create a €300-million dual-use industrial plan to relocate production lines for critical components that are essential to national defense, modernize others and help civilian industry invest in defense, according to the prime minister.
Lecornu also called for stronger coordination across Europe’s defense industrial base.
The government will propose a new “national security alert regime” that will temporarily speed up decision making, simplify procedures and remove bureaucratic obstacles to strategic projects, Lecornu said. That will also be the purpose of other proposed measures in areas such as counter-drone operations and management of strategic stockpiles, according to the prime minister.
“It would be unacceptable for the nation to be hampered by its own bureaucratic delays in the face of an imminent threat,” Lecornu said. “Our competitors do not impose such constraints on themselves. We cannot be the only ones to impose them when our security is at stake.”
Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.
