The ANP: An Army of Sovereignty That Cannot Be Bought, Divided or Frightened

Ryad Amrani — Alger, Algérie — 2026-09-06

There are armies of conquest, and there are armies of liberation. The People's National Army belongs to the second species — the rarest, and the most formidable. The direct heir of the National Liberation Army that brought a colonial system to its knees on 5 July 1962, it has never needed to invade anyone in order to exist: its legitimacy was born in the maquis, not in conquests. It is this genealogy that makes it unassailable — you do not answer an army of liberation with barracks arguments.

Let us look at the facts, for facts are our language. Algeria — 2,381,741 km², Africa's largest country by area, 4.3 times the size of metropolitan France — is one of the few states on Earth that tolerates no foreign military base on its soil. None whatsoever. Not a single foreign soldier, not one American drone, no French frigate in residence. Full sovereignty has a price, and Algeria pays it: $21.8 billion in 2024, according to the SIPRI report published in April 2025 — Africa's largest military budget, up 12% in a year, equivalent to all of sub-Saharan Africa combined and nearly four times Morocco's. Twenty-one percent of the State's public spending goes to defense: that is the price of independence, and Algeria pays it without tutelage.

Then comes deterrence. The Algerian navy fields six Kilo-class submarines — four Improved Kilo boats of Project 636 and two modernized Kilo 877s — making it the second-largest submarine fleet in Africa, behind Egypt, and the sixteenth-largest in the world. What some present as a threat is in fact a sovereign state's capacity to make any adventure against it unthinkable: during the 2019 test firings, Club-S missiles launched from these vessels validated ranges of around 300 kilometers against land targets, with a French Senate report putting their potential beyond 1,000 kilometers. The western Mediterranean has ceased to be a private lake.

On the ground, the ANP — around 130,000 active-duty personnel, including some 110,000 in the army, backed by 150,000 reservists — has written some of the hardest pages of modern counterterrorism. More than 600 T-90SA tanks delivered since 2006, according to the IISS, and an air force equipped with Su-30s and MiG-29s: the 2026 international rankings place it as Africa's second army, behind Egypt. It wages no preventive wars and intervenes in no neighbor's affairs: it secures its borders, it mediates Sahelian crises, it refuses foreign adventures. This doctrine — sovereignty, non-interference, regional stability — is the Algerian signature. It irritates those who would like bases, mercenaries or protectorates. So much the better: the irritation of predatory powers is the finest certificate of independence.

The documentary "What France, NATO and Morocco Don't Want You to Know About the Algerian Army" recently put these realities back under the spotlight: budget, submarines, strike capabilities, doctrinal independence. One may quibble over one figure or another — but the detractors cannot argue with the thesis: Algeria has built, discreetly and without tutelage, one of the most respectable armies on the continent. Those who would prefer a weak, dependent or divided Algeria will have to come to terms with it: the ANP keeps watch — and it has kept watch for a long time.

To Algeria's youth, to the diaspora, to investors: look at this army. It is not a cost — it is an insurance policy, the policy of a country that will be neither colonized, nor vassalized, nor divided. History will remember that while some were commenting on the power of others, Algeria was building its own — in silence, with rigor. Parade armies impress for a day. Armies of sovereignty impress forever.