France’s 2035 National Security Strategy Warns of Escalating Threats in Space and Undersea Domains

MILAN — French President Emmanuel Macron stated on Tuesday that France and other European nations have faced a surge in Russian hybrid threats in recent weeks.

“In recent weeks, the threat—particularly the Russian hybrid threat—facing Europeans and France has intensified,” Macron told reporters following a high-level meeting at the Élysée Palace. The summit brought together presidential candidates, alongside senior military, intelligence, and energy officials. (With the French presidential elections scheduled for September 28, Macron is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term after completing his two mandates.)

According to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report, the emergency session was convened to address the rapid deterioration of global relations, specifically focusing on the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and their direct implications for French national security and energy stability.

Just days prior, France’s national strategic planning body issued a stark warning: Europe must urgently expand its military capabilities, reserves, and societal resilience to prepare for escalating hybrid warfare and prolonged, high-stakes conflicts.

The Haut-Commissariat à la Stratégie et au Plan (HCSP) released a comprehensive 40-page document outlining Paris’s long-term national security objectives for 2035. The report explicitly projects an increase in strategic confrontations in both undersea and outer space domains.

“Critical digital infrastructure, the seabed, and outer space will increasingly become arenas of strategic confrontation between state actors, as well as between private entities and governments,” the document states. “A growing share of global power—and corresponding vulnerabilities—will be concentrated in these largely invisible domains.”

The HCSP report highlights key areas of potential friction, noting that Russia-attributed hybrid operations across Europe climbed from fewer than ten incidents in 2022 to nearly fifty by 2024. Based on this trajectory, the authors warn that hybrid actions will continue to multiply across cyber, economic, and informational sectors.

Hybrid warfare, defined as the use of unconventional tactics below the threshold of open military conflict, is designed to obscure attribution and make it difficult to identify the perpetrators.

Looking ahead to 2035, the report’s authors presented critical recommendations for Paris and the broader European Union to navigate a “durably degraded” security landscape. First, they urged France to accelerate the transformation of its military posture. This shift aims to move away from small-scale counter-terrorism deployments and prioritize large-scale, high-intensity combat readiness through a war-economy framework.

“The budgetary effort required of the nation must align with a clear European objective for 2035: the ability—acting collectively among Europeans if necessary—to deter or prevent any attack designed to test Europe’s unity and credibility,” the report emphasizes.

A second key recommendation calls for ending the continent’s technological dependency on non-European suppliers, particularly the United States and China, in favor of domestic and allied European systems. France has already taken steps in this direction, notably establishing a Digital Sovereignty Observatory in January to map government and corporate reliance on foreign technology.

By 2035, the strategy emphasizes that the goal is not “full European military integration,” but rather the cultivation of flexible, rapid collaborations with like-minded global partners.

Finally, the plan prioritizes preserving national unity amidst heightened hybrid threats. A core capability, the report notes, will be the ability to detect and counter sophisticated information operations aimed at destabilizing French society, though it does not specify the exact mechanisms for achieving this.

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