Germany Has Left the MGCS Tank, France's Chief of Defence Staff Says — Paris Shifts Service Entry to the Late 2040s and Launches an Intermediate Tank
Paris, 9 October 2026
Key points
- General Fabien Mandon, France's chief of defence staff, told a National Assembly hearing on 8 October that Germany had "decided to leave the project" of the future tank under the Main Ground Combat System: "This is not a complete failure, it is an important German choice"
- The French armed forces ministry, in a statement quoted by French media, said the industrial offer submitted in early 2026 was incompatible with replacing the current tanks by 2037, that Germany had chosen a national study to replace the Leopard 2, and that with MGCS service entry "shifted towards the end of the 2040s" France would launch an intermediate capability
- Boris Pistorius, beside Catherine Vautrin near Bordeaux on 9 October, said the project "is not ended, it is not dead, it has been ended by nobody"; neither minister said whether a common tank remains
- The defence ministry's spokesman in Berlin said the programme now focuses "not on a fixed platform, but platform-independent", crewed or uncrewed, a system-of-systems approach confirmed by the Nörvenich declaration of 17 July
The Franco-German tank is over as a tank; what survives under the MGCS name is a research effort on networked combat, and the two governments now describe it in opposite words.
The Franco-German defence and security council at Nörvenich in July had already set the scope: a research programme to study a cooperative-combat approach and take it to a proof of concept, adaptable to crewed and uncrewed tracked vehicles. Paris says the programme keeps major interest, "refocused" on connectivity, collaborative combat, automation and robotics. The project company of KNDS France, Thales, KNDS Deutschland and Rheinmetall, held in equal shares, was cleared in 2025 to develop a successor to the Leopard 2 and the Leclerc by the early 2040s. The Leclerc's phased withdrawal begins in 2038, and Mandon said the studies must start now to meet it.
Both national successors sit in studies. Germany's next-generation tank is to be bought through PSM, the KNDS Deutschland–Rheinmetall joint venture. France's intermediate tank, of the kind KNDS showed as CAPINT at Eurosatory in June, sits in upstream studies in the 2027 budget, which gives MGCS no additional credit.
The ministers' denial and the general's account describe the same programme: Nörvenich had already taken the common tank out of it. Platform-independent technology for crewed and uncrewed vehicles is what Berlin's spokesman defended on 9 October and what Paris now calls MGCS; neither government has said a shared tank survives. The French ministry says technical reorientation is under way before a new consultation of industry targeted for the end of 2026. Signal No. 164 left open whether Mandon or the ministers hold until a contract settles it; the nearer marker is dated: whether that consultation reaches the four-firm company by December, and whether it asks for a vehicle or a network.
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