421 Pedro Fatjó Gómez y Guillem Colom Piella The waning power. An analysis of... admission of the weakness of public finances and the pressure to preserve the essential elements of defense to guarantee its sustainability is very significant.48 In strategic approaches, evaluation of risks or defensive priorities, the document is continuous with respect to the White Paper of 2008, except for two outstanding new features. The first one consists of the attempt to resolve the growing breach between the persistence of the risks and threats with the reduction of the resources to address them in the budget of the Ministry of Defense. Thus, the government foresees keeping constant the expenditures for the period 2014-2019, and increasing it slightly beginning in 2020. Therefore, it admits that the pace of equipping and modernizing will be slower than initially planned in 2008, but the modernization of the critical material for the three priority functions must be guaranteed: deterrence, information, and projection of strength. A new multi-functional army model, featuring the concentration of forces, must be adjusted to the new scenario. Last, France will rely on re-launching European defense, and on its presence in the North Atlantic Alliance.49 The second new feature is in the military strategy which has a very relevant change with respect to the previous White Papers, as it abandons the hypothesis of a possible high-intensity confrontation in favor of two scenarios: coercion operations and crisis management operations. The emphasis placed on the “mutualization” of defense, understood as the multi-faceting of high technology materiel within the French armed forces should be highlighted, and as the collaboration within the European framework in operational capabilities such as transport, in-flight refueling, naval aviation resources, satellites, or drones. These changes probably can only be explained with the reduction of defense expenditures, which makes scenarios of greater entity unfeasible, and puts limits on the capability of the country to independently acquire high-technology equipment, at a very high cost. The new model for the armed forces should be capable of assuming three types of operations: the protection of the territory and the population through the deployment of up to 10,000 land forces; the participation in multinational crisis management operations, with a maximum of 7,000 troops, a naval group around a projection ship, and twelve combat aircraft; and an operation of coercion that would need up to 15,000 land troops, forty five combat aircraft, and a naval aviation group. The size of forces needed to carry out these missions would be, in the case of the Army, 66,000 troops comprising seven brigades (two heavy ones of coercion, three 48 GUIBERT, Bathalie. “White Paper of Defense. France prepares the wars of tomorrow with its ambitions reduced.”, Le Monde, 29 April 2013. 49 An interesting analysis in this respect can be found in: LASCONJARIAS, Guillaume. “Rentrée dans le rang? France, NATO and the EU, from the Védrine report to the 2013 French White Paper on national security and defence”, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, vol. 12, nº 4, 2014, pp. 418-431. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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