I don’t think this is really about responding to Trump. I think this means the elites in Paris have finally figured out that they’re going to fighting a civil war really soon and they aren’t prepared.
Unlike Germany, whose elites seem ready to lead the nation to suicide, the French elites have always been about saving their own hides come what may. They have a self-preservation instinct that Germans, Swedes and Belgians seem to have evolved out of.
Actually - this about the Frogs-Dutch-Germans-and little guys further distancing themselves from a rogue bankrupt country whose leadership is deranged paranoid
“A chunk of the funds will be spent on replacing ageing armoured personnel carriers, adding more refuelling aircraft and ships and upgrading France’s nuclear arsenal.
The bill also sets aside more money for the troops, in the form of better training, improved accommodation for military families and new equipment, including new bullet-proof vests and night-vision goggles.”
I think that if France believed it would be fighting a civil war they’d concentrate on manpower and training, not refueling and nuclear weapons. This is just a generalized increase in everything.
I worked for the defense arm of Schlumberger, at the time the world’s largest corporation. French military hardware was a joke. It was built, mostly as a reason for socialist welfare payments. It created make-jobs. We would receive equipment for inclusion in contracts my American based firm had with Canada and find that nothing worked. We’d open the equipment and find that the units did not have critical elements like power supplies. Even though they came with obviously false data saying they’d passed tests. We’d be told, “ah, well, everybody was on holiday. We will send you the power supplies when they are done.”
Perhaps we were only treated this way because we were a wholly owned subsidiary. The shoemaker’s children, as it were.
I am reminded of General Schwarzkopf’s comment about the French not helping in the Gulf War, “Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your bagpipes.”