No More Safe Places in Europe? What Is the Logic Behind French Forward Deterrence?

French President Emmanuel Macron made a milestone statement in his recent speech about nuclear deterrence. For the first time in history he offered to deploy the French strategic air forces to European countries.

According to Frank Kuhn, a French journalist who has inquired into this issue, the idea behind dispersed air operations is relatively simple. Combat aircraft operate from designated military air bases. As a result, these bases will be prime targets for missile strikes in the opening phases of a military conflict. However, if it is possible to disperse combat aircraft from a small number of permanent bases to a large number of temporary bases, this will pose serious targeting dilemmas for an adversary. It will enhance the survivability of dispersed aircraft and make it very difficult for an adversary to target the planes on the ground because the number of potential targets is so high and since most of the airfields will be empty most of the time.

In the recent past, the French air leg was probably fairly survivable. At that time, Russia physically lacked the conventional military capabilities to target the operating bases of the French strategic air force, of which there are just three, and the Russian leadership simply did not consider the French deterrent to be directed at Russia.

However, France’s staunch support for Ukraine and harsher rhetoric vis-à-vis Russia could dramatically alter Russian’s position. And if we factor in France’s increased activity in in the High North and the Arctic, then Russian missiles pointed at the French nuclear capability may become quite a plausible prospect.

And now Russia has a new Oreshnik intermediate-range missile which Russia used in a very efficient attack against Dnipro, Ukraine, in November 2024. Ukraine was actually lucky as Oreshnik was used against ground forces spread over a wide area. If used to attack dense targets like air bases, even its conventional submunitions can deal significant damage.

Nuclear-capable Rafale fighters, of which France has only forty, assume a special role in French nuclear doctrine because they are the most likely delivery platform for the final nuclear warning strike.

Emmanuelle Maitre, French military analyst and nuclear deterrence expert, calls the deployment of France’s airborne nuclear forces on allied territory quite logical. In her opinion, access to partner bases in a crisis would yield significant operational benefits that would complicate an adversary’s defense planning. To be sure, dispersion could also heighten exposure to missile strikes in a crisis if the fighter jets were positioned closer to enemy borders.

However, as French air bases can now be attacked with Oreshnik missiles (hypothetically for now), the benefits of dispersion are likely to outweigh the risks.

Although U.S. forward nuclear deployments and those announced by Macron appear similar, they are conceptually different. The original intent of U.S. forward nuclear deployments was to make a nuclear first strike more credible, and the Americans stick to it. And French ‘forward deterrence’ is more about increasing the survivability of its strategic air forces, especially in a crisis. The concept sounded by Paris reflects the uneasy fact that in this new reality there are no safe places left in Europe: Oreshnik will reach them all.

Yet there is a logical dissonance about the planned dispersion of French warplanes. If Paris fears that Russian missiles will reach the French air force bases located deep in the continent, what would keep those same missiles to hit the dispersion bases stationed much closer to the adversary’s territory?