France must raise defence spending given current security threats to two per cent of GDP by 2020 as "you can't win a war without a war effort", the country's chief of the defence staff warned on Wednesday, reports The Telegraph.
Speaking two days after an unknown assailant drove a truck through a Christmas market in Berlin killing 12 people, General Pierre de Villiers said that attacks on France and other European countries in recent years showed that "peace no longer happens by itself".
In a rare departure from a top French official's "duty of confidentiality", Gen Villiers called for an upgrade to nuclear arsenals and other equipment, and a gradual rise in defence spending over the next five years to reach two percent of gross domestic product, compared to 1.77 percent currently.
France had promised such an increase to Nato by 2025, but in an appeal published on Wednesday in business daily Les Echos, he urged a faster effort.
"We must remain capable of durably assuring the protection of France and the French against the full spectrum of threats," he wrote.
"It must be understood that the slightest slip in coherence between threats, missions and means would be the grain of sand that grinds the system to a halt and lead to defeat."
"You can't win a war without a war effort," he said in an op-ed piece entitled: "The price of peace is the war effort."
Defence spending in France has been on a "downward trend for 35 years", a movement that the current defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, had shown "willing" to end, said Gen Villiers.
However, "for armies from now on, this effort must translate into a gradual rise" to two per cent over the next five years.
The North Atlantic Alliance sees this figure as a requirement. However, only five Nato member states — Estonia, Greece, Poland, the UK and the US — spend more than two per cent of their GDP on defence. Donald Trump, the new US president-elect, has said those who do not meet the target should not enjoy the alliance’s protections.
France's current planned defence spending for 2017 is 32.7 billion euros (£27.6bn), which represents 1.77 per cent of GDP. However, that figure surpasses 40 billion euros when military pensions are included, as they are in British calculations.