Farewell to the Franco-German tank: Paris and Berlin shelve yet another joint project

The original ambition behind the Main Ground Combat System (MGCS) – the Franco-German project for a future main battle tank launched in 2018 by Paris and Berlin with the aim of replacing their respective Leclerc and Leopard 2 tanks with a new-generation armoured vehicle by 2040 – has been definitively shelved. The final nail in the coffin was driven in on Thursday by the French Chief of the General Staff, Fabien Mandon, who announced during a hearing before the National Assembly’s Defence Committee that “the Germans have decided to abandon the project”.

Berlin has rejected this interpretation, arguing that cooperation will continue, albeit with significantly scaled-back objectives, and yesterday the French and German defence ministers, Catherine Vautrin and Boris Pistorius, stated during a meeting in Le Haillan, in south-eastern France, that the MGCS remains “a current project”. Yet despite these superficial reassurances, the substance remains the same: the joint tank, a symbol of ambitious European industrial integration, no longer has a clearly defined future, and Paris and Berlin are, for the time being, reverting to national solutions. France has launched a project for a transitional tank known as CapInt, designed by KNDs France to replace the fleet of ageing Leclerc tanks from 2037–2038 onwards.

At the same time, Germany has launched a national study into the development of the Leopard 3 as a medium-term interim solution to replace the Bundeswehr’s Leopard 2 tanks. The collapse of the MGCS project in its initial form (it may survive only as a platform for technological research, connectivity and collaborative combat systems) comes four months after the failure of another Franco-German programme: the Future Air Combat System (SCAF) for the development of a sixth-generation multi-role fighter.

The failure of the MGCS is another major blow to Europe’s ambition to build credible strategic autonomy in the field of defence.