PARIS — France has started exclusive negotiations with French defense firm Safran and missile maker MBDA to supply domestically produced rocket artillery as well as munitions, Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin announced at the Eurosatory defense show near Paris on Monday.
France snubbed a competing offer for a multiple-rocket launcher from a team of Thales and ArianeGroup as well as options from Lockheed Martin with HIMARS and Hanwha Aerospace’s Chunmoo launcher, with Vautrin noting that the country retained a sovereign solution.
French Army staff have been clamoring for a successor to its few remaining and aging M270-based LRU launchers, with deep strike deemed one of the ground service’s biggest capability gaps as the country prepares for high-intensity warfare. The government had said it would decide based on the best combination of delivery times, capability, affordability as well as sovereignty.
“We are currently in exclusive negotiations with a sovereign consortium of Safran and MBDA,” Vautrin said. “I would like to take the opportunity here to thank all the competitors for the high quality of the different proposals.”
Europe currently doesn’t produce modern, independently developed multiple-rocket artillery systems at scale, instead relying on systems from the United States, South Korea and Israel. France has been looking at the two domestic offers as well as off-the-shelf solutions, Vautrin said in April.
Rocket artillery is “essential” for France’s move towards a war-ready division in 2027 and war-ready army corps in 2030, Gen. Philippe de Montenon, the commander of the French land forces and operations, said in a briefing with reporters at Eurosatory on Sunday.
“We need them, of course, as soon as possible,” de Montenon said. “The Army clearly recognizes the need to have an initial capability as early as 2030 to replace the single-use rocket launchers. This is essential.”
Safran and MBDA said in April they expect to be able to deliver the first multiple-launch rocket systems in 2029 should their offer be picked by the French armed forces.
That followed the first test by the companies of their Thundart munition developed for France’s Long-Range Land Strike program at the Île du Levant test range in the Mediterranean earlier that month.
The ground-to-ground rocket has a 150 kilometer range, and the companies are considering developing longer-range munitions.
Safran said Thundart is compatible with the Thales Atlas artillery fire-control system and has a guidance kit derived from the AASM Hammer glide-bomb kit with metric accuracy. Potential capacity extensions include a range of 300 kilometers or a munition that can be aircraft- or ship-launched, according to the company’s presentation at Eurosatory.
The launcher on show at Safran’s stand at the show was mounted on a Scania truck.
Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.