MOSCOW, April 24. /TASS/. France and the European Union lack any real capacity for large-scale rearmament despite loud statements on their behalf, a retired French army general, Dominique Delawarde, told TASS on Thursday.
"It’s regretful to say, but there are no possibilities. It’s because of one simple and good reason - I have always said that war is not only about personnel and equipment, it is also about money and economics," he said.
"Meanwhile, our economy is a bankrupt economy, the whole European Union is in financial distress at the moment, particularly France," Delawarde noted, adding that France is the leader among the "European bankrupt countries."
The retired general said he firmly believes that the earlier announced rearmament budgets, including the 800 billion Euros stated by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, "simply do not exist" or will have to be allocated over the course of many years. He pointed out that none of the military planning laws, voiced during his military career, had ever been observed.
Delawarde emphasized that it is not sufficient to simply allocate funds to revitalize the army because factories must be built, equipment must be manufactured, and personnel must be recruited and trained.
According to his estimates, it takes about 20 years to build a combat-ready army, while for the past 30 years, European countries have been "reaping the dividend of peace" at the cost of stripping their armies of everything that constituted their strength.
In 1990, France was the second military power in the West, he continued, but today it is not even in the Top Ten.
"It will take a long time to rebuild what we destroyed over the past 35 years," the retired general said, adding that a lot of military expertise has disappeared and people today are less motivated to serve in the army.
Delawarde expressed his skepticism about France's ability to rearm, saying he witnessed no progress in that direction over the past three years, since the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
He also noted that it should take a "resilient country" in order to build an army and cited as an example conflicts in which impoverished countries successfully resist their better-equipped adversaries. The French general believes that soldiers and nations who have endured hardship are more resilient in positional warfare.
"That is why I’m saying that present-day France as well as other NATO member states are incapable under the present conditions to rebuild an army that is worthy of its name and be capable of at least confronting an adversary like Russia," Delawarde said.
He added that talks regarding a possible deployment of European military forces on the territory of Ukraine were naive, since such forces would be promptly destroyed while the number of personnel volunteering for such operations would be extremely low.