National Strategic Review 2025: Progress and Limitations

The United Kingdom fired the first shot-now France has unveiled its own revised National Strategic Review (RNS 2025), explicitly presented as an update of the 2022 RNS, motivated by a "newly deteriorated environment."

For an update to be meaningful, it must either insert decisive new content or remove flawed elements from its predecessor. Consequently, the two main questions regarding the RNS 2025 are:

What is genuinely new in comparison to the 2022 RNS? And what shortcomings of the previous edition have been corrected?

RNS 2025: What’s New?

From a structural point of view, the 2022 RNS:

1. Detailed a presentation of the strategic environment (10 pages)
2. Identified some strategic challenges, largely through a lengthy theoretical presentation of six "strategic functions"
3. Described ten strategic objectives.

While maintaining the three-part structure, the 2025 edition shuffles the content differently:

1/ The section on the strategic environment and its evolution (now 20 pages) has significantly expanded. It includes not only state actors (Russia, Iran, China), proliferation threats, regional crises, terrorism, organized crime, separatism, and migration, but also outlines climate change, environmentaldegradation, biodiversitycollapse, scarcityof natural resources, and economic energy challenges, all viewed as top-tier threats.

2/ After presenting the 2030 end-state ambition, the section on strategic objectives-now increased from ten to eleven-also grows significantly. Each objective is now structured in two parts: a progress report since the 2022 RNS and an "action plan" for the next five years.

This two-fold structure explains the Review’s significant lengthening (from 53 to 99 pages), despite the addition of just one objective. The resultant apologetic tone of the RNS is very unusual (indeed, it’s unheard of) for a strategic document of this nature.

The new eleventh objective emphasizes academic, scientific, and technological excellence in support of French and European sovereignty. Surprisingly, although it was absent from the 2022 edition, several actions are retroactively attributed in its progress report (quite oddly the 2021 creation of an interdisciplinary center for defense and security is cited as progress since the 2022 RNS). The focus of this objective is clearly on responding to technological dominance challenges in areas like AI, space, quantum science, CBRN threats (nuclear, radiological, biological, and chemical), and also earth sciences.

3/ The third part outlines the ways and means necessary to achieve the updated 2030 ambition. These include legislative measures (e.g., military, justice, and research programming laws, and the transposition of EU directives REC, NIS2, and DORA), as well as administrative and regulatory tools (ministerial roadmaps, expansion of a network of defense officials in the ministries).

While the operational turn is welcome, the level of detail here is surprising-such as the 2026 rollout of an interministerial framework for defense/security stages, the launch of a "daily cybersecurity" portal, the creation of a legal obligation for psychiatric assessment for individuals radicalized and showing psychological disorders, or the development of a national brand for digital risk prevention.

Budgetary Impact

Beyond structural changes, the core novelty of the RNS 2025 lies in its case for increased defense investment. While the exact figure is not in the document itself, it was disclosed during the President’s address on July 13.

In fact, the RNS was preceded by a tightly coordinated media sequence (Chief of the General Staff on July 11, Presidency on July 13). The novelty of the results (or findings) of the RNS were destined to justify the President’s major announcements to the armed forces. Most notably, an acceleration of defense spending goals initially set for 2030, now to be achieved by 2027: €3.5 billion in 2026 and €3 billion in 2027, reaching a defense budget of €64 billion by 2027.

2022 RNS and 2025 RNS: Continuities

Contrary to what one might expect given the scale of the upheavals described in its first section, the 2025 Review largely retains the conceptual framework of its predecessor.

The six strategic functions-knowledge-understanding-anticipation, deterrence, protection-resilience, prevention, intervention, and influence-introduced in 2022 are maintained. However, it should be noted that these were not truly "redefined" in 2022 as claimed, but were essentially a reproduction of the five functions taken in the 2017 RNS from the 2008 White Paper, with "influence" added as a sixth.

Some of these functions remain conceptually vague. The first function (knowledge-understanding-anticipation) entails significant methodological difficulties. The sixth (influence) is logically inconsistent: in the 2022 RNS, it was simultaneously defined as a "strategic function," as a "domain of contestation," and later, as a "comprehensive policy."

Most strategic objectives are also retained, sometimes verbatim, with minor rhetorical adjustments (e.g., Objective 7 evolves from "France as a credible provider of security and a reliable sovereignty partner" to "France as a reliable sovereignty partner and credible security provider"). Objectives 3 and 10 are also more forcefully phrased, emphasizing economic preparedness "for war" and the ability to "achieve military decision."

Conceptual confusion also persists in the relation between functions and objectives. RNS 2025 states that "the 2030 ambition is broken down into eleven strategic objectives," which "contribute to the implementation of the six strategic functions." Logically, one would expect functions to serve the pursuit of objectives-not the reverse-unless strategic functions are mistakenly treated as ends rather than means.

From Hybrid Warfare to "Peacetime Conflictuality"

A particular point worth highlighting is the use-and misuse-of "hybrid warfare" or "hybrid strategy," terms that originally described specific phenomena but are often misapplied.

To its credit, the RNS 2025 offers a formal definition:

"A hybrid strategy refers, for France, to an integrated and deliberately ambiguous combination of military and non-military, direct and indirect, legal and illegal actions, difficult to attribute, carried out by a foreign actor."

In other words, hybrid warfare necessarily includes a military phase or component. Examples include Russia in Georgia (destabilization followed by military invasion) and in Ukraine (Donbas).

However, other sections of the RNS resort to using "hybrid" to describe clandestine operations or non-miltary actions -e.g., "massive increase in hybrid attacks on national soil," "hybrid actions" by our competitors on French soil, and informational threats.

Apart from this unusual lack of conceptual rigor in a strategic document, hybrid warfare calls for three key observations:

• The concept of hybrid warfare does not account for all hostile actions in peacetime-by definition, it cannot apply to those that occur without a military phase (such are subversive acts such as the "red handprints" or Star of David campaigns, or acts of sabotage).
• In such cases, it is more appropriate to use the term peacetime conflictuality to describe infra-military, state-sponsored, politically integrated hostile actions designed to affect national security.
• Consequently, addressing these actions requires more than military strategy-it demands a national security strategy that is integrated, continuous, and operational in peacetime through other instruments (intelligence, cyber, diplomacy, justice, etc.). This is precisely what was intended with Article L1111-1 of the French Defense Code:

"All public policies contribute to national security."

Conclusion: Strategy Still Missing?

The 2025 RNS, while more developed, fails to correct these shortcomings. It outlines threats, recalls objectives, and offers an action plan, but stops short of articulating a coherent strategy. The document remains largely administrative in nature, and the only concrete "solution" offered is an increase in resources-undeniably necessary, but insufficient on its own to resolve France’s strategic equation.

Copyright image : Abdul Saboor/POOL /AFP