Sébastien Lecornu named Rheinmetall, Thales and KNDS, a holding company founded by France’s Nexter and Germany’s Krauss Maffei Wegmann (KMW) in 2015, among the manufacturers that could participate in the implementation of the Main Ground Combat System (MGCS) combat vehicle project . The agreement signed Friday covers Phase 1A of the project, which involves the design of a “demonstrator,” or pre-prototype.
Photo: Rheinmetall
The MGCS program, estimated at around 100 billion euros, was jointly launched by Paris and Berlin in 2017, at the same time as the development of the Scaf, the “fighter jet of the future”, which is very slowly moving forward. Spain later joined the two partners in this latter project.
The MGCS combat vehicle, which can be considered a “generational leap”, is intended to replace the German Leopard 2 and the French Leclerc armored personnel carriers that are currently in service from 2035. The project is managed by Germany, but the financing is shared equally by the two countries.
“In the 2040s, the time will come for two neighboring, friendly countries that are members of the European Union and NATO to have a fully operational armored cavalry framework,” said Sébastien Lecornu.
The French minister spoke of a “technological breakthrough” at a time when “our American friends have not yet begun to think about the post-Abrams era” and when “the Russians are having great difficulty separating themselves from the current generation of tanks.” In his view, France and Germany are “the first nations to address the 2040 era in terms of cavalry and armored vehicles.”
After signing a joint roadmap last September, the two ministers announced at a meeting in Berlin in March that the two countries had reached an agreement on the division of tasks in connection with the large-scale project to be implemented by 2040-2045. (MTI)
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