> Building nuclear propulsion for our next aircraft carrier is crucial for France to maintain the unique skills of its nuclear industry.

> If our engineers did not design on-board nuclear boilers for decades, we would weaken this know-how and our sovereignty.

Ok it's a side-effect benefit, but there has to be different ways to keep working on nuclear energy in more useful ways (useful for people, for the environment, by useful I mean at least not destructive, why not creating a cargo ship rather, or hybrid wind and nuclear powered cargo ships, ...)

Why bother spending money on doors? They are expensive and you have to kill trees to make them.

Europe hasn't been building weapons for a while. The recent clash with Erdogan and heavy dependence on US military is making them realize it was a mistake.

You need your own military, and you better have more than the guy next door. (especially when he is crazy).

> Europe hasn't been building weapons for a while.

This, I think, is the crux of the issue. When you look at European armed forces, you only see American weapons: M9, M249, M27 IAR, the list goes on.

Is this sarcastic? the M27 IAR is made by German manufacturer H&K. The M249 is made by a subsidiary of a Belgian company. The M9 is an Italian design.

It is indeed: many Europeans countries have large, successful defense industries that produce things from spy satellites to handguns, tanks, machine guns, optics and every thing in between. Some of those are inferior to what the Americans make, some of those are on par, some of those are superior as can be seen from the US armed forces choosing European designs. "Europe hasn't been building weapons for a while" is an absurd statement, but perhaps expected from the other side of the Atlantic.

In case you forget, your country still has enemies, it's called Russia, and if you are not careful, Turkey and North Africa too. France has already way underspent it's NATO target of 2% GDP for many years, this is just replacing a rusty half-century old ship by 2038, in essence, merely maintaining France meager navel power.

How on Earth is Russia an enemy of France? Sounds insane to me.

If you are French then you probably don't know that your economy is kept afloat through the military occupation of former French colonies in the African continent where rare materials and wealth is extracted from their lands in essentially arbitrage-pay the poor African colonies pennies and resell it on the international market at disgusting multiples.

So the fact that you cannot see the link between offensive military projection capabilities and your economy suggests that this topic is not very well discussed sort of like how you can't read about the United Fruits company in American history textbooks or the genocide of native americans in the millions through biological warfare and weaponized poverty pushing their descendants further into poverty and irrelevance-even Canada does it openly.

Enjoy Erdogan landing in Marseille if we don’t.

Seriously, those comments are beyond stupid, the world is not made of friendly people (nor Bisounours) and without an army aggression from an external power is guaranteed. Even with one assymetric forces mean war can happen, like it did recently in Karabash for instance.

Today I learned that Care Bears are called Bisounours in French

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bisounours

For the non-French, it's a portmanteau of "bisou" and "ours", literally "Kissbear"

Macron got humiliated by Erdogan, so he wants a bigger toy now. Also, envy, as the British will have two more modern carriers. That's why....

In more sophisticated words: France's naval forces are kinda weak and don't have power projection capabilities. You can't pretend to be a world power, if you don't have the force to back it up with.

Literally how Turkish people think. They think this is all about pride or showing who's the boss. French people don't give a damn. The naval carrier isn't to project power against Europe or Turkey, the French Navy and Airforce alone is more than capable perhaps one of the most powerful in EU that shared with UK.

The power projection is aimed towards maintaing their former African colonies where they still rely on to fund/subsidize a lot of social benefits and programs in France.

You also have Turkish people and pretty much everyone around the world able to join the French Foreign Legion which makes it very easy for the French republic to minimize political fallouts losing its citizens in Africa while able to deploy large armies consisting of non-French individuals fighting for French interests and sovereignty in the region.

WW2 was over long time ago. France is at the absolute vanguard of EU's offensive capabilities. After USN, perhaps only French Navy can compare as its own French owned vertical industries all come together to build up its standing army.

do you have citation that former french colonies subsidise the french social net?

> France's naval forces are kinda weak and don't have power projection capabilities

What do you think the Charles de Gaulle, Mistrals and FREMMs are for?

Currently the French Navy is the largest in Europe.