OPINION. “When low-cost drones neutralize our sophisticated equipment: Ukrainian lessons for our national defense”

By Philippe Folliot and François Bonneau, senators

Behind this budgetary coldness, there are women and men who choose the profession of arms with all that that entails: the supreme sacrifice, that of their own lives at the end of their commitment. This deserves our absolute respect. Today, the war has profoundly changed its face before our eyes and requires us to make lucid strategic choices for our own operational efficiency and national independence.

A few days ago, in May 2026, we found ourselves together on the Ukrainian front. We went to kyiv, Krivyi Rih, Zaporizhia and Kharkiv. The observation on site is clear: the current conflict no longer has anything to do with that of previous years. We are witnessing a major tactical and technological revolution that is making our traditional military doctrines obsolete.

A single indicator is enough to measure this historic shift, the figure of the rupture: the war of 9 million drones. In 2023, Ukraine produced almost no combat drones. In 2026, 9 million drones will be produced, projected and used on the battlefield by the Ukrainians. An equivalent volume is deployed by the Russians. On the ground, droneization is total and is reshuffling the power cards. It led to the almost complete disappearance of armored vehicles from the front line, which had become targets too vulnerable to attrition: in four years of fighting, Russia lost nearly 4,500 tanks. In comparison, the life expectancy of our approximately 200 Leclerc tanks in the event of war would only be counted in weeks.

Even more spectacular: without having a conventional navy, Ukraine manages to deny access and hold half of the Black Sea thanks to the exclusive use of its marine drones. If we refuse to take into account the reality of these issues regarding naval drones, we risk finding ourselves very deprived in the very near future.

Illustration from the Ma Tribune newsletter

The urgency of a budgetary and capacity overhaul is essential. The update of the Military Programming Law (LPM) 2024-2030, currently debated in Parliament, proposes to add 36 billion euros to the defense effort. This is a real step, a significant increase for ammunition or consistency, but it remains insufficient. As it stands, this text is only an accounting adjustment law aimed at improving the existing situation rather than profoundly restructuring our armed forces. The risk of dropping out is however twofold. Faced with the real threat first: the National Strategic Review revised in July 2025 notes the probability of a high-intensity shock by 2030 at its highest. The hypothesis of Russian aggression against a country of the Atlantic Alliance or the European Union is stronger than ever. In this context, postponing key technological programs, such as stealthy combat drones, quantum disruption or underwater robots, until 2035, constitutes a major temporal misinterpretation. Then facing our partners: by maintaining a timid trajectory which decelerates after 2026, France will have a defense budget of 76 billion euros in 2030, when Germany plans to devote 160 billion euros to it.

It is imperative to spend better. The challenge is no longer just to align billions to satisfy national budgetary curves or NATO display criteria, but to radically reorient the national effort. We must abandon obsolete projects and stop costly arbitrations which no longer correspond to the realities of modern combat. The field experience in Ukraine strongly demonstrates that war now requires ingenuity and validates the immense relevance of particularly effective “tinkering”. Faced with the adversary’s daily countermeasures, our objective can no longer be simply to buy or produce off-the-shelf systems. It is urgent to structure a sovereign and flexible industrial ecosystem, capable of innovating, modifying and delivering hardened systems en masse, at low cost, to respond in real time to evolving threats. We must make our public markets more flexible, simplify regulatory frameworks and reduce administrative burdens to allow our Defense Industrial and Technological Base to have this agility of daily capture, to adapt from day to day and to produce en masse.

Faced with the butcher of Moscow, the inconsistency of Washington and the sphinx of Beijing, democracies are confronted with the return of empires. For Europe and for France, it is an essential and major historic meeting that we have no right to miss. National independence is not decreed through self-satisfied speeches, it is built through courageous, reactive and lucid strategic choices. The time has come to change the paradigm, to shake up our industrial and administrative certainties, and to definitively switch from a showcase army to an army of resilience.