France, Dec. 14 -- Faced with an increasingly threatening Russia, the continuing risk of terrorism and a United States administration that wants to pull back military support from Europe, France is looking to expand its military capacity, and recruiting more soldiers has become a necessity.
"Scale matters, and scale means equipment and munitions, but it also means people," said Olivier Kempf, an army colonel and military analyst.
France has one of the best-equipped armies in the EU and the second-largest number of troops, after Poland, with 200,000 active duty personnel and around 45,000 reservists.
But Kempf said the three branches of the military have struggled to meet their full recruitment targets in recent years. Legacy of conscript...