Launched in 2015, the Main Ground Combat System, or MGCS, program was intended to allow France and Germany to pool their skills, resources and needs to replace the Leclerc tanks and Leopard 2, by 2035, in a particularly sluggish market.
Since then, this market has been disrupted by the rapid increase in international tensions and threats, including in Europe, causing a massive demand to replace the battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles inherited from the end of the Cold War.
If the German industry quickly adapted to this new European and global commercial situation, by offering two intermediate generation tank models, the Leopard 2A8 and the KF51 Panther, and two modern VCIs, the Puma and the Lynx, this is not the case for France, which continues to bet exclusively on the MGCS, to preserve the skills of its defense industry in this area, after the commercial failures of the Leclerc and the VBCI.
While German tanks and IFVs, but also South Korean and American ones, are lining up successes to modernize European and Western armored forces, the question now arises of the merits of the French strategy in this area, deliberately ignoring the emerging intermediate generation, to bet only on MGCS, while everything indicates that the latter will arrive on a largely saturated market, as was the case with Leclerc in the 90s.
In this section:
After Germany, Norway, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, Croatia will order 50 Leopard A8
Indeed, despite this radical transformation of the global market, the timetable and ambitions of the MGCS programme have not changed. On the contrary, the difficulties encountered in harmonize the needs of the armies and the expectations of the industries of the two countries, have already pushed back the probable entry into service of the MGCS, beyond 2040.
This postponement is obviously a problem for France, deprived of an intermediate generation, the Army must now prepare a new evolution of the Leclerc, to allow it to reach this deadline, even though the MLU modernization currently underway was already supposed to fulfill this mission until 2035.
On the German side, however, this is more than welcome, as KNDS Deutschland, formerly Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, presented the Leopard 2A8, to meet immediate needs, and that Rheinmetall has just signed a major contract with Italy, to produce, from 2027, the KF51 Panther, presented as an alternative to MGCS.
So, since the presentation of the Leopard 2A8, in May 2023, KNDS Deutschland lined up orders in Europe, beyond the first 18 models ordered by the Bundeswehr, to replace the Leopard 2A6 sent to Ukraine.
Ainsi, le Leopard 2A8 was selected by Norway (54), Czech Republic (77), Germany (+105) and Netherlands (46), and announced as such by Lithuania (54). Croatia, for its part, confirmed this week an order for 50 Leopard 2A8, to replace the M-84 which will be sent to Ukraine. At the same time, the KF51 Panther Rheinmetall has ordered 132 units from Italy.
For its part, Poland has ordered 250 American M1A2 SEPv3s, as well as a thousand South Korean K2s, while Romania has also turned to the Abrams, for 54 examples. Finally, Hungary had previously arbitrated in favor of the Leopard 2A7HU, very close to the Leopard 2A8, while the British Army has begun upgrading 148 of its Challenger 2s to the new Challenger 3 standard.
Facing Leopard 2A8/X, KF51 and K2, will there remain an addressable export market for MGCS in 2040?
In other words, today, the European market for battle tanks has already turned to mid-generation models by more than 70%. Only Sweden, Finland, Greece, Spain and Portugal remain in Europe, which have not yet taken the plunge. However, it is likely that some of them, particularly Spain and Greece, will soon modernize all or part of their fleets.
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The Scorpion bubble is a resounding success. The tanks used en masse in Ukraine did not pierce anything at all. The artillery conquered, the infantry occupied and the gliding bombs allowed the breakthroughs. I like tanks, but the only armor that works is the mound of earth. The fire that kills and conquers is not in grazing fire, or too little. It comes from the sky to go around the mound of earth. I do not understand why we persist in pretending not to see it. By integrating more firepower into the Scorpion bubble, we will respond to the same use case as that of heavy tanks. What is missing is not a pile of scrap metal on the ground. It is more mobilizable fire. Ask the English what happens when you have failed your Scorpion program…
Tanks take everything in the sky, not from the front. In compartmentalized spaces, it is once again the fire that conquers, not the armor. There is too much boxed work.
Hello,
I am convinced that the pro-German romanticism displayed by our Chief of the Armed Forces will definitively make us lose our competence in the field of MBTs.
Germany sees here a great opportunity to return to its desire for European hegemony that it aspired to in the past. It has clearly not digested that France has regained leadership in certain areas such as aeronautics and space.
It seems very clear that it will not abandon the SCAF program to better appropriate our skills but will push back the MGCS program as much as possible beyond 2040-45 to gain control of the armored vehicle market, and we will certainly be forced to buy Leos from them...
The Leclerc Evolution is a solution to overcome this unhappy prospect.
But will it just be an evolution of the 200 existing models in the fleet or is it possible to launch significant production?
What is the basis of the fund?
Would the engine and transmission be of national manufacture?
Could India, which is interested in acquiring at least 1500 tanks lighter than a Leopard or Abrahams, produce it under license? And possibly sell it to us at a production cost lower than what it would cost us to produce it on domestic soil?
Some questions that I have been asking myself for a long time...
The army leadership does not consider the cavalry as strategic, the government has been in recent years under the obsession of the president wishing to strengthen the Franco-German axis through large cooperation programs. The first point is the observation of a greater ease in exporting national programs than international programs