PARIS — KNDS is proposing a main battle tank with a turret and gun developed in France and mounted on the hull of Germany’s Leopard 2 as an intermediate solution to replace the French Army’s aging Leclerc tanks, which are expected to reach the end of their service life before the arrival of a next-generation tank.
The tank proposal unveiled at the Eurosatory defense show on Monday featured an unmanned turret with a 120mm auto-loader smoothbore gun developed by KNDS France, with the possibility of upgrading the cannon to 140mm. KNDS said it aims to deliver the first units of the tank, dubbed Capint, short for intermediate capability, in the 2030s.
With the French-German project to develop the Main Ground Combat System delayed and not expected to arrive until the mid-2040s, France will need a replacement for its Leclerc tank somewhere in the next decade. The country intends for the interim capability to be a building block of MGCS, Gen. Olivier Coquet, head of the French Army’s technical section, said on Sunday.
“We are already working to create what will be the combat of tomorrow,” KNDS CEO Jean-Paul Alary said in a press conference at the defense show outside Paris on Monday. “Maybe the combat of tomorrow, the ambition of MGCS, will come a little bit earlier than the project itself.”
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The goal is to present France’s Directorate General for Armament with a demonstrator tank as early as 2030 and deliver the first production units in 2035, followed by deployment to the forces in 2037, said Julien Brunet, product line manager for main battle tanks and reconnaissance vehicles at KNDS France, in a separate briefing.
The proposed tank already represents the beginnings of a fourth-generation combat system, according to Brunet, who described such a platform as one with fully integrated AI, a combination of passive, reactive and active protection, counter-drone warfare and the ability to engage beyond line of sight.
The plan is for the intermediate tank to already include concepts initially planned for MGCS, including one or two robotic wingmen, KNDS France CEO Nicolas Groult said in the press conference.
Groult said KNDS already tested firing on-the-move in Portugal in January. “So it’s not a concept, it’s not a drawing, it’s something that we are confident that can happen.”
Whether France and Germany will continue with the MGCS project is a political decision, but abandoning it would be “very bad news” for Europe, Alary said in response to questions about the future of the project. The two countries earlier this month abandoned a plan to jointly develop a sixth-generation fighter jet as part of the Future Combat Air System program.
The proposed French intermediate tank will carry a crew of three in an “extremely well protected citadel” at the front of the vehicle, with a combination of passive composite protection as well as reactive and active protection, Brunet said.
Active protection measures will be distributed, with some mounted on the turret and others on the chassis, according to Brunet. He said KNDS will use defensive effectors that are “potentially a bit different” from those of the Trophy active-protection system, with the company having in-house solutions to deal with hard-to-stop threats, though he said details are classified.
Robot wingmen will need to be big enough to keep up with the main platform, though small enough to keep costs under control, Brunet said. The number of robots accompanying the main battle tank will gradually be increased, and their level of passive protection will depend on the value of each robot, according to the executive.
KNDS’s French and German arms are in talks to determine which parts will be provided by each business, and protection of the chassis as well as the interfaces will probably be French, according to Brunet. If the Leopard 2 chassis is retained for the French intermediate tank, the aim is to build locally, also because manufacturing in Germany is already ramping up to meet existing demand, he said.
“If we need to produce the chassis quickly, the best option is still to produce them in France,” Brunet said. “We have the know-how, there’s no problem.”
KNDS said the Ascalon gun had already fired around 300 rounds, and the company said the firing by a main-battle tank demonstrator with a remote-control turret in January was a world-first. Brunet said the Ascalon 120mm cannon is “much more powerful” than standard NATO 120mm guns.
KNDS also showed off a possible successor to the Leopard 2 A8 with an unmanned turret and a 120mm cannon from Rheinmetall.
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.