The French Minister of the Armed Forces and his German counterpart announced the signing on Friday in Paris of an agreement on the joint tank of the future project (MGCS), long held back by divergent interests. “After several months of intense negotiations, we can now present a result (…) The working groups (between the two countries) have developed a document that we will sign together on Friday in Paris,” declared the German Minister of Defense. Defense Boris Pistorius in an interview published Thursday in the daily FAZ.
“It’s coming to fruition, finally!”, he added, specifying that “at the beginning of next year, the detailed contract should be ready”. French Minister Sébastien Lecornu insisted, in this joint interview given to the German newspaper, on the fact that Paris and Berlin were designing “the new generation of tanks for 2040” with this project.
Equal funding between the two neighbors
The two countries are getting ahead of the Americans who “still have not started to think about the future of the Abrams tank” and the Russians who “experienced some failures with the successor to their tank”, he said. -he added, emphasizing that the MGCS would integrate “next generation firepower, electronic warfare and artificial intelligence, as well as laser and directed beam weapons”.
A month ago, the two countries managed to unblock the issue by agreeing on the distribution of industrial tasks. Financed equally by the two countries and carried out under German direction, this program, originally led by KNDS, an entity created for the occasion between the French Nexter and the German KMW which manufactures the Leopard 2, saw the he emergence in 2019 of the German manufacturer Rheinmetall. And this has long destabilized the structure and the distributions envisaged between industrialists.
The MGCS program (English acronym for Main Land Combat System) was launched in 2017, at the same time as the Future Combat Aircraft (Scaf), another defense cooperation project between Germany and France. It aims to replace the French Leclerc tanks and the German Leopard 2 from 2035 and to innovate. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 caused a shock in Europe about the increased needs for investment and cooperation programs in the defense sector.