France’s preparations for a major European conflict depend on keeping civilian services functioning while deploying armed forces abroad and responding to disruption at home. Parliamentary testimony exposes the practical tension: the personnel, infrastructure, and suppliers needed for military mobilisation also sustain the economy on which that mobilisation depends.
A National Assembly defence committee report brings together hearings conducted in May and June, alongside separate parliamentary group contributions. Its evidence shows how military preparedness reaches into hospitals, energy networks, telecommunications, and businesses whose continuity cannot be secured by defence spending alone.
Xavier Brunetière, director for state protection and security at the Secretariat-General for Defence and National Security, described planning around the central scenario of France’s 2025 National Strategic Review: a major, high-intensity war in Europe involving France and its allies, outside metropolitan French territory, accompanied by extensive hybrid attacks at home.
The 2030 horizon is a preparedness target, rather than a prediction of when conflict will occur. Nevertheless, the scenario requires authorities to plan for military deployment and domestic disruption together. Essential services would face additional demands precisely when their ability to operate could be impaired.
One of the clearest tensions concerns personnel. Brunetière told MPs that the Orion 2026 exercise had highlighted the need to reconcile reserve mobilisation with the continuation of essential national and economic activities.
Expanding the reserves therefore creates obligations beyond recruitment and training. Calling up personnel can strengthen the armed forces while reducing capacity in their civilian workplaces. Where those workers perform essential functions or possess scarce skills, mobilisation requires decisions about which responsibilities take priority and how their absence will be covered.
The testimony identifies this competing demand without establishing that it has been resolved. It also illustrates why military and civilian preparedness cannot be assessed independently.
The same interdependence applies to infrastructure. General Nicolas Leverrier, responsible for protecting defence installations, assets, and activities, described vulnerabilities extending through subcontractors, service providers, connected industrial equipment, and organisational procedures.
A well-protected military installation may still depend on an exposed supplier or a disrupted network. Its resilience consequently rests partly on organisations operating with different resources, security practices, and commercial pressures. Protecting the installation does not, by itself, ensure that it can continue functioning.
Cybersecurity adds the problem of simultaneous failures. ANSSI director Vincent Strubel described a scenario combining sophisticated state operations against critical infrastructure with criminal attacks on hospitals, local authorities, and other essential services. Further activity could amplify disruption and saturate response capabilities.
His warning was more specific than a general claim that attacks are increasing. ANSSI handled approximately 1,360 incidents annually in both 2024 and 2025, a level he characterised as a high plateau. The concern is what happens when attacks become concentrated and coordinated across sectors.
The state could not manage that situation alone, Strubel said. Regional, sectoral, ministerial, and private response capabilities would be needed, allowing ANSSI to prioritise the most serious incidents.
An organisation’s ability to recover from an isolated attack therefore offers only a partial measure of preparedness. Recovery becomes harder when suppliers, communications networks, and public authorities are also affected.
Regulation can improve baseline protection, but cannot remove these dependencies. Strubel estimated that NIS2 would bring approximately 20,000 entities under supervision in France, while leaving much of the economy outside that perimeter. He identified banks and insurers as potential channels for spreading security practices more widely, without imposing excessive obligations on very small businesses.
The political difficulty lies in financing and sustaining this wider effort. Additional military expenditure does not automatically provide local authorities with cybersecurity staff, businesses with replacement personnel, or essential services with recovery capacity.
The report reflects disagreement over whether resources match responsibilities. Its chairman emphasises adaptation and strengthened coordination. The Socialist contribution questions agency staffing and funding, advocating predictable multiannual allocations. These are distinct political assessments, rather than a shared committee finding that France is unprepared.
They also sit within a constrained fiscal environment. The government’s draft 2027 budget targets a deficit of 5 per cent of GDP, against a revised forecast of 5.4 per cent for 2026. Resilience investment must therefore compete with demands to restrain spending and maintain existing public services.
With the presidential election beginning in April 2027, roughly six months away, long-term preparedness also meets a shorter political timetable. Decisions over taxation, spending, and the distribution of security obligations must secure support during an election campaign, while implementation will extend into the next presidential term. The challenge is to establish commitments durable enough to survive that transition.
This is not an exclusively French predicament. Other large European economies must also reconcile security requirements with extensive public-service obligations and fiscal constraints. Italy, for example, faces a different deficit trajectory but substantially higher public debt, projected by the European Commission’s spring forecast to reach 139.2 per cent of GDP in 2027. The constraints differ in degree and composition; the underlying competition for resources is shared.
France’s hearings make those competing demands unusually explicit. They describe coordination mechanisms and identify vulnerabilities, but provide limited public evidence of how the system would withstand sustained disruption across several sectors. The test of preparedness is whether military mobilisation, civilian continuity, and fiscal decisions can be made consistent with one another, and maintained beyond a single electoral cycle.
