The Test of Reality: French National Strategic Review, the Scenario and the Means

21/11/2025

Author

Resident Senior Fellow - Expert in Defense and National Security issues

[1/2] Russian incursions into NATO member countries' airspace, railway sabotage in Poland, cyberattacks: with the scale of external threats, what can achieve our national security strategy ? In the first part of his critical review of France RNS2025, André Leblanc highlights its intrinsic and methodological limitations: is the approach of preparing for the most demanding scenario, even if it is not the most likely, the most effective? And since this maximalist logic is not compatible with budgetary constraints imposed by rising expenditure and costs, how can we better focus our actions?

Strengthened Chinese control over our rare earth supplies, Russian sabotage campaign across Europe, massive cyberattacks: the level of threats currently facing us demonstrates the scale of the task ahead for our national security strategy. Based on a critical review of the 2025 French National Security Strategy, this two-part analysis shows what we are currently missing, and what remains to be done.

On July 14, 2025, the 2025 French National Strategic Review (NSR) was officially published, after being presented the day before during a presidential speech delivered from the Hôtel de Brienne.

The presidential address hailed the NSR as a "clear and precise diagnosis," and a major exercise with unprecedented conclusions. Based on its findings, the President unveiled a major announcement: the acceleration of the budgetary increments of the ongoing Military Programming Law [2024-2030], so as to reach by 2027 the budget target (€64 bn) initially planned for 2030. This increase was meant to showcase a doubling of the defence budget between 2017 and 2027.

Beyond these announcements, reading the NSR quickly revealed its shortcomings, the main three being

There is no strategy.
The NSR does not consider the means necessary to implement its recommendations.
The use made of the "central scenario" is methodologically problematic.

The NSR’s deficiencies are likely due to its drafting method, fast, enumerative, and insufficiently critical. This contrasts sharply with the method used to draw up the British Strategic Defense Review.

Since the publication of the NSR, several events have affected our national security: Russian incursions into Romanian (September 13) and Estonian (September 19) airspace, as well as the activation of Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty (triggering consultations between the Allies when one of them considers that "the territorial integrity, political independence, or security of any of the parties" is threatened) by Poland (September 10) and Estonia. Although Article 4 has been invoked since NATO's creation, notably by Poland and Turkey, this is the first time it has been activated following direct Russian incursions into the airspace of Alliance member states. Finally, China's tightening of controls on rare earth exports has shed light on a major aspect of our national security, illustrating the vulnerability of our economic security regarding our supply chains.

Under these circumstances, it seems useful to examine the validity of the NSR, assessing both its internal coherence (to what extent are its conclusions valid or not?) and its relevance to the real context: how do the main threats that have materialized since its publication illuminate its limitations?

NSR 2025 : Initial Shortcomings

The NSR 2025 comprises three sections: a description of the strategic environment and its evolution, a presentation of 11 strategic objectives, and a list of ways and means to implement these objectives.

The descriptive section has grown significantly compared to the previous NSR of 2022, more than doubling in length (from 9 to 21 pages), now providing a likely exhaustive panorama of everything that could constitute a source of threats. Similarly, in the second part, an additional objective has been added to the previous 10, with each objective beginning (quite surprisingly for an NSR) by presenting the results achieved over the last three years. In the final section, the measures to be taken are described in great detail, spanning 13 pages. Overall, quantitatively, the 2025 review has nearly doubled in size compared to the 2022 version.

Yet qualitatively, the 2025 NSR remains merely a sequential listing of diagnosis, objectives, and measures. Therefore, there is no strategy, since neither these elements taken separately nor their juxtaposition constitute a strategy.

An Objective Is Not a Strategy

It is useful to remember that a strategy is essentially a system of choices, a way of solving a problem. As such, national security strategies (grand strategy in Anglo-Saxon terminology) integrate the objectives set by a State, its strengths and weaknesses, the constraints it faces, and seek ways to achieve these objectives despite the obstacles it faces. These constraints are primarily the limits of its own resources, but also the competing actions of its rivals (adversaries or allies) and the dynamic nature of competition between States. Strategy must therefore account for the relative and evolving nature of its aims: other States’ reactions complicate its execution and create new constraints that must also be integrated.

A strategic priority is, for a State, what profit is for a company, and is not to be confused with the means to achieve it.

The most frequent mistake in terms of State strategy (as also in economic strategy) is to confuse the formulation of an objective with the formulation of a strategy; this is akin to confusing solving a problem with reading its statement. Yet, a strategic priority is, for a State, what profit is for a company, and is not to be confused with the means to achieve it.

Methodologically, between stating the objective and listing measures, several steps must be rigorously conducted: identifying and analysing constraints, defining a logic of action (or strategic posture) that addresses those constraints, testing its validity, etc.

Thus, crafting a national security strategy is a particularly difficult exercise requiring methodological rigour, intellectual courage and creativity. Nevertheless (and probably for these reasons) it remains an indispensable tool for navigating interstate competition.

It may of course be argued that the NSR is not meant to formulate a strategy in the full sense (that it’s not a national security strategy) but merely to provide a "review," a panorama of issues or to state an ambition. But in that case, what makes it strategic? It would have been more accurate to call it a national defence review, or even a national defence and security review (although it omits essential components of security).

Moreover, the NSR lays out an "action plan"-this is the third and administrative section-so there is indeed a programmatic intent and a list of measures, making the absence of strategy not only surprising but conceptually problematic. By virtue of what exactly are these measures proposed?

Effort and Sustainability of Effort

The development of a strategy must run through two layers of constraints: the first, most obvious one is that choices must be made. The second is that, since resources are limited, choices must be made between options that are themselves limited. The constraint of choice is therefore compounded by the constraint of the means chosen, primarily financial constraints (as reflected in the budget).

The NSR 2025 sidesteps both constraints. On the one hand, as noted, it does not make choices but sets objectives (an objective often consisting of achieving the best capacity in different areas: cyber for objective 4, deterrence for objective 1, etc.). On the other hand, the RNS 2025 does not at any point consider the limits of its resources, particularly budgetary resources. Significantly, the RNS contains only one costing: "In the field of defense, public and private investors will be mobilized, with the aim of investing up to €5 billion additional in the BITD [defense industrial and technological base]." (p. 95). It should be noted that this costing is once again simply the mention of a target to be achieved.

Beyond this, the strategic objectives and measures include no costing at all; the NSR therefore does not address the resources required for implementation, which fundamentally limits its scope.

Under these circumstances, the implicit (and by default) solution isto increase budgets, and this will be explicitly stated in the Brienne speech with the major announcement of doubling the annual budget increments for the next two years in order to reach €64 bn by 2027.

Si la démarche de la RNS repose sur une augmentation de moyens, elle doit alors exposer comment cette augmentation est possible, et surtout comment construire sa soutenabilité dans le temps.

However, the NSR fails to explain how such increases are possible or how their sustainability will be ensured over time. Without this, its endeavor is an unfunded wish-wishful thinking assuming the financial requirements will follow automatically.

Objective 3 exemplifies this proclamatory approach: after noting the need to prepare "by 2030" for a "major extraterritorial war," it assumes that by then "budgetary sustainability and financial sovereignty are reinforced, notably through reduced public debt." Yet in the 2026 budget bill, which increases defence spending, the debt rises by €8 bn and debt servicing costs increase from €52.4 bn to €59.3 bn. Given the major constraints on resources, any strategic thinking must take into account the reality of the situation.

In practice, the Brienne announcements have been scrupulously implemented: the 2026 draft budget provides for a €6.7 bn increase instead of the €3.2 bn originally planned. The 2028 increment (€3.5 bn) has effectively been added to that of 2026 (€3.2 bn). It is as if the original military programming trajectory were accelerated to reach in two years what was planned over four.

However, even before this acceleration, the sustainability of the "simple" implementation of the 2024-2030 Military Planning Law was already raising many questions. A report by the Senate Finance Committee pointed out that, as early as 2024, the appropriations executed had not been sufficient to finance all of the additional costs incurred, with a remaining financing requirement of around €1.2 billion at the end of 2024. Similarly, 90% of the payment appropriations planned for 2025 (excluding personnel expenses) were already earmarked for clearing the stock of outstanding payments, which continued to be fed by the commitment of new commitment authorizations. In other words, the budgetary trajectory was already under pressure even before it was "accelerated."

Here too, it could be argued that the NSR did not have to consider the feasibility of its recommendations, but simply their relevance. However, relevance and feasibility are intrinsically linked, and a strategic equation can only be solved using realistic terms. Moreover, as before, it should be emphasized that the mathematical increase in budgets alone does not exhaust the question of investment strategy.

It could be argued that the NSR did not have to consider the feasibility of its recommendations, but simply their relevance.

The strategic issue at stake is therefore not so much how much will be allocated to the defense budget, but how this figure can be sustained, i.e., how to organize for sustaining this effort over time, which is the condition for the viability of our forces. It is this issue that must be integrated in its entirety through a national security strategy.

Problems With Using a Central Scenario That Is Not the Most Likely

In presenting the NSR, heavy emphasis was placed on the "central scenario" as a major innovation.

This scenario appears in several sections. First (§7) as a "particularly high risk of a major high-intensity war" in Europe involving France, in which French territory would also be targeted by massive hybrid actions. It is later described as a "hypothesis" (§112): participation in a high-intensity war near Europe with "a risk of concomitant destabilising hybrid actions against our internal security" (noting that "the threat of a major conventional war on metropolitan French territory" is not considered credible). A temporal precision appears in §154 ("a hypothesis of major high-intensity engagement near Europe by 2027-2030, concomitant with a massive increase in hybrid attacks on French territory"). In the "means" section, it is stated (§488) that the defence and national security reference framework will be adopted "to address the various types of threats within the scenario identified as dimensioning for national territory" (with a footnote explicitly defining the scenario). Finally, the "central scenario" reappears (§542) as a basis for setting operational requirements under the internal security programming law (LOPSI).

Thus, even though it is only formally defined in a footnote, the central scenario plays an essential methodological role, namely that of calibrating the planning work for the overall national defense and security system. It should be noted, however, that the NSR does not say that this scenario is the most probable (it does not "assign a probability coefficient" to it) but chooses to favor it because it has maximum dimensioning value, according to the following logical argument: if we prepare for this scenario, we will be prepared for a maximum number of unforeseen events, since it is the most demanding. This is essentially just another application of the same maximalist logic, which avoids having to make choices. We prepare for everything, to the maximum extent possible, in order to be well prepared.

But the approach taken (preparing for a scenario not because it is more likely to occur, but because it is the best way to prepare so that it does not have to occur) clearly poses a logical problem as long as the intrinsic value of the scenario has not been established.

The first problem posed by this central scenario is therefore logical. One might expect that preparatory work would focus primarily on the most likely threat scenario. Or that, in the absence of probability, the default decision would be to prepare as thoroughly as possible. But the approach taken (preparing for a scenario not because it is more likely to occur, but because it is the best way to prepare so that it does not have to occur) clearly poses a logical problem as long as the intrinsic value of the scenario has not been established.

A second methodological problem stems from the neglect of the issue of resources already observed in budgetary logic. If the objective is set by the most demanding scenario because it is the most demanding, at what point is the adequacy of this objective in relation to the available resources, which are by definition limited, taken into account? The risk of an a priori approach, without constraints, reappears here.

In reality, the French NSR premise that if we are prepared to deal with this central scenario, we will be well placed to deal with anything we have not anticipated, deserves to be questioned, a priori as we have seen, but also, and above all, in light of the events that have occurred over the past several months, a posteriori.