France Picks the Safran–MBDA Thundart Over HIMARS for Sovereign Deep Strike

Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin made the announcement on the opening day of Eurosatory, the largest edition in the show’s 59-year history. Thundart wins the Frappe Longue Portée Terrestre programme, the replacement for the Army’s Lance-Roquettes Unitaire. It is a 227mm guided rocket, backwards-compatible with the existing LRU launchers, with guidance derived from Safran’s AASM Hammer; its first phase fields a 150 km reach — roughly twice today’s rounds — and the second phase, to 2035, targets 500 km. Safran and MBDA are to form a 50/50 joint venture to build it.

The alternative on the table was the Lockheed Martin HIMARS, available now and combat-proven in Ukraine. Paris chose against it deliberately. A French-built, ITAR-free rocket can be fielded and exported without American licence approval — the sovereignty premium that has come to govern European deep-fires procurement, paid in development time against an off-the-shelf system that would have delivered sooner.

The proprietary read. This is the deep-strike decision Großwald flagged as pending by Eurosatory, now made — and made on the sovereignty axis rather than the speed axis. The logic is consistent with the ASN4G and the wider French pattern: where a capability is strategic, Paris will accept a slower domestic programme over a faster American buy to keep field-and-export rights in its own hands. The exportability is not incidental — a 227mm round compatible with launchers half of Europe already operates is built to be sold. The test is the 2030 availability date against HIMARS deliveries that could have begun years earlier. Tracked in Signal No. 82.