France aims to keep firepower while cutting military France, which launched an armed intervention in Mali earlier this year, has declared its determination to sustain its punch as a leading military power, despite making fresh cuts to its defence forces. Juggling severe budgetary pressures with its longstanding strategic ambitions, President François Hollande's socialist government on Monday laid out plans to retain the country's nuclear deterrent as well as preserve its ability to project significant force beyond its borders, both on its own and with its allies. A white paper, or policy document, on defence, delayed for several months by wrangles over the potential budget consequences, said the armed forces would be reduced by 34,000 between 2014 and 2019, from a total of 218,000 today and on top of a 40,000 reduction over the past five years. It said defence spending would be held at €179bn over the same period, implying a freeze in annual expenditure around the current level of €31bn. France, the biggest European military power along with the UK, currently spends the equivalent of 1.56 per cent of gross domestic product on defence, down from close to 3 per cent at the end of the cold war. This is set to fall below 1.5 per cent under the white paper plans. What is the big challenge? Mr Hollande asked in a speech marking the paper's publication. It is to maintain the position and the efficiency of our armed forces at the same time as dealing with the essential control of our public spending. The white paper proposed no radical changes in France's strategic posture, reaffirming the country's reintegration into Nato's command structure decided by the previous right-of-centre government. It reiterated the commitment to France's air and seaborne nuclear weapons and stressed the need for enhanced defence against cyber attacks. Noting the shift of US priorities to the Asia/Pacific region, it said France required the capability to intervene independently across the European periphery, the Mediterranean basin, the Sahel and equatorial Africa, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Unlike a similar exercise conducted by Britain in 2010, which grounded maritime patrol aircraft and at least temporarily scrapped its aircraft carrier, the white paper proposed no withdrawal of any basic defence line. As well as troop numbers, the number of combat aircraft and ships will fall. The total number of deployable troops will fall to 66,000 from 80,000 and capacity for taking part in a prolonged operation with Nato allies will be halved to 15,000 troops from 30,000. But France will seek to fill gaps shown up by its operation to defeat Islamist militants in Mali by buying surveillance drones and transport and refuelling aircraft. François Heisbourg, special adviser at the Foundation for Strategic Studies in Paris, said: "We have not done anything as radical as the Brits in 2010. That is fine as long as the budget is made available. That is the big question. Although the white paper set out the broad budget outlines, firm figures will not be set until later this year as the finance ministry, military and France's big defence industry wrestle over spending levels and funding sources. "This is not going to be fun for the defence industry," Mr Heisbourg predicted. [Budget restrictions] will have a serious impact, although you can't say yet where it is going to hurt. The heads of defence companies, which include Dassault Aviation, Safran and Thales, recently wrote to Mr Hollande to warn of the effects of curbs on defence spending on rising unemployment. The white paper said France, which backed a failed plan by EADS, the aerospace group, to take over BAE Systems, the big British defence contractor, late last year, must retain a top-rank defence industry. It said the state, a large shareholder in the industry, was "ready to exploit systematically all ways of co-operation . . . to support a viable European defence industry base."