Signal No. 82 · Bridges, not flagships

On the opening day of Eurosatory — the largest edition in the show’s 59-year history, 2,600 exhibitors from 68 countries — French Armed Forces Minister Catherine Vautrin announced that France has entered exclusive negotiations with a Safran–MBDA grouping to supply the successor to the Army’s Lance-Roquettes Unitaire (LRU). The decision hands the consortium’s Thundart rocket the Frappe Longue Portée Terrestre (FLP-T, ground-based long-range strike) competition over a rival ArianeGroup–Thales bid. Thundart is a 227-millimetre guided rocket, compatible with the existing LRU launchers, with an opening reach of 150 kilometres — roughly double today’s rounds — and an extended variant pitched toward 300. France had weighed the readily available Lockheed Martin HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) as the off-the-shelf alternative; it chose instead a system built to be free of US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), so Paris can field and export it without American licence approval.

The deeper tier moved the same morning. MBDA launched the Land Cruise Missile (LCM), a ground-launched derivative of its naval Missile de Croisière Naval (MdCN) with a range beyond 1,000 kilometres — four canisters per launcher, a quoted reaction time under 15 minutes, canister firings planned for 2028 and an initial system in 2029 — a sovereign contribution to the European Long Range Strike Approach.

KNDS used Eurosatory to launch CAPINT (Capacité Intermédiaire), a stopgap tank for the French Army built from a German-division chassis — a Leopard 2A8-derived hull, 1,500 horsepower, the three-man crew moved into the hull — and a French-division gun, the unmanned Ascalon system with a 22-round autoloader and a 120-millimetre barrel convertible to 140. It exists, KNDS says, to “pave the way” for the long-delayed Main Ground Combat System (MGCS), the joint tank meant to replace the Leopard 2 and the Leclerc. But the flagship it bridges to may not arrive. Rheinmetall chief Armin Papperger said at the weekend that France is considering cutting MGCS funding to “less than half”, that the partner companies have received just €25 million since the programme began in 2017, and that he “can’t say today whether there will even be an MGCS at all”; a German government spokesperson said on Monday the work would now focus on “platform-independent” technologies. Germany is meanwhile building its own interim tank — the Leopard 3, a KNDS–Rheinmetall project the Cartel Office cleared in December — and Italy showed a third national answer at the show: the Leonardo–Rheinmetall IMBT (Italian Main Battle Tank), derived from the KF51 Panther, to replace the Ariete.

The air programme is already gone. On 8 June Germany, France and Spain jointly terminated the New Generation Fighter — the manned core of the roughly €100-billion Future Combat Air System (FCAS) — after the Dassault–Airbus split proved irreconcilable; the combat cloud and drone layers survive under the FCAS name. France’s answer surfaced the same Monday: Vautrin told Les Échos that Paris is in talks with the United Arab Emirates on a “collaboration” to fund the next Rafale upgrade, the F5, due from 2030 — the UAE as a paying partner and customer, with a record sale of some 114 Rafales to India also progressing toward a year-end close. The F5 will not replace what FCAS was meant to be; it lacks the stealth the joint programme promised. Both Paris and Berlin are also courting Sweden’s Saab.

The restriction we reported when France announced it on 1 June became physical on the show floor. No Israeli government officials, no national pavilion, offensive systems — rockets included — barred; only anti-ballistic and anti-air defence equipment permitted, per COGES Events president Charles Beaudouin and the French Armed Forces Ministry. On opening day organisers walled off several Israeli stands with wooden barriers — among them Smart Shooter, Controp, Orbit, Aeronautics, Marom and Source — including firms that had complied; Israel’s defence ministry called it “a shameful decision, reeking of political and commercial calculation”. It is the fourth such move in two years — a Paris commercial court overturned the outright 2024 ban as discriminatory. And the permitted category is precisely the one in demand: Moshe Patel, head of the Israeli Missile Defense Organization, said Europe’s interest in air and missile defence is “huge”, with at least one new contract expected within weeks and “not minor numbers” — Germany already fields Arrow against the Oreshnik, Finland has bought David’s Sling.

On Sunday, Royal Marine commandos and National Crime Agency officers boarded the Smyrtos, a Cameroon-flagged tanker carrying about 700,000 barrels of Ust-Luga crude, in the English Channel — the first UK-led interdiction of Russia’s shadow fleet, run in close coordination with France and supported by a frigate, a minehunter and an RAF P-8. On Monday the EU Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg, chaired by Kaja Kallas, added 34 individuals and 47 entities to its sanctions list — among them shadow-fleet enablers accused of concealing Russian crude’s origin and arranging tanker insurance, 15 judges and prosecutors linked to Alexei Navalny’s 2024 death in custody, and propagandists including a Russian Orthodox bishop. Kallas said sanctions have now cost Russia’s economy between €1 trillion and €1.3 trillion; the wider 21st package is still under negotiation.

The campaign against Crimea’s supply line is producing measurable effect. Average daily traffic on the “Novorossiya” highway — the land corridor that feeds both the peninsula and Russia’s southern front — fell more than 40 percent month on month to 6,500 vehicles in early June, with verified footage of at least 375 Ukrainian strikes on trucks and bridges since May, more than half on the highway itself; the Kerch bridge has largely stopped carrying fuel by rail since 2022, and Crimea has no refining of its own. Petrol is sold by daily QR-code coupon at 20 litres a head — locals call it the “hunger games”, and a Sevastopol war museum’s historic siege panorama was largely burned out in the strikes. Robert Brovdi, head of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, says he will “isolate Crimea” but has not yet secured “total fire control”; the occupation authorities have put the fix at “at least 30 days”. In parallel the G7 opened at Évian-les-Bains: Zelensky said he had offered to meet Putin there and was refused, named more air defence as his priority, and spoke from a Kyiv monastery damaged in an overnight attack that killed at least ten.