Under the huge hangar, half a dozen Leclerc tanks lie like gutted beetles. Lined up next to each other, the nearly 60-ton monsters have been cut out, their turret extracted from the chassis, their tracks unrolled on the ground. Thirty operators are busy around the carcasses. “All the elements will be removed and then reassembled, with new, more modern equipmentexplains Thomas N., the workshop manager (the names of the employees are not given for security reasons). Each unit will require six months of work. »
It is here, in the KNDS factory in Roanne (Loire), that the spearhead of the Army is preparing to face the coming decades. Launched in 2015, the Leclerc tank renovation program is entering its active phase. The first two modernized armored vehicles, called XLR, were delivered in June and sixteen others should follow by the end of the year. Objective set by the Directorate General of Armaments for the Franco-German company, resulting from the merger in 2015 between Nexter and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann: to provide a rejuvenation treatment to all the tanks of the French army , i.e. 200 units, by 2029.
Considered one of the most advanced heavy armored vehicles in the world when it entered service in 1993, the Leclerc is no longer very young and had to be modernized to remain competitive on the battlefield: abandoned after the end of the cold war, the battle tank became essential again with the war in Ukraine. “It is the only machine that combines firepower, mobility and protection”, recalls Marc Chassillan, former armaments engineer and specialist in land equipment. No more question for a modern army to do without such devices, as the Netherlands did in the early 2010s.
Scorpion network on board
The Leclerc production line having been closed by Nexter in 2007, for lack of new orders (only France and the United Arab Emirates bought them, 406 copies for the first, 388 for the second), the State made the choice to modernize existing units, pending the hypothetical development of a new model, not expected before the mid-2030s, at best. Some 321 million euros have so far been budgeted to cover the XLR program, according to Cédric Perrin, vice-president (Les Républicains) of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs, Defense and Armed Forces Committee.
Besides a complete overhaul of their components, which will be done by cannibalizing parts from a stockpile of decommissioned tanks and “cocooned” by the French army, the Leclercs will receive new equipment. Each tank will integrate the new information system of the army, called Scorpion. A sort of private Internet network, this must eventually connect all the French armored vehicles present on the battlefield, in order to facilitate collaborative combat. It will also connect the armored vehicles to the infantrymen and, tomorrow, to the drones which will be deployed in the theater of operations.
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