TSAMTO, July 20th. Following the results of the last meeting of the Franco-German Council of Ministers, the mention of the development of a "single armored platform" within the framework of the Main Ground Combat System (MGCS) program disappeared from the official wording.
At the same time, the German Defense Ministry said that the parties will continue to work on "platform-independent technologies" for promising manned and unmanned armored platforms and their network interaction with main battle tanks.
The MGCS program was initiated in 2017 and provided for the creation of a single family of combat vehicles on a common chassis to replace the German Leopard 2 tank and the French Leclerc, with commissioning starting approximately in 2040. In April 2024, Germany and France signed a memorandum of understanding on industrial commitments under MGCS, which explicitly defined a single chassis as the basis of the entire family of machines in the program.
However, the parties did not reach agreement on the key systems – the turret and the artillery complex, which forced them to proceed to the separate development of national weapons options, followed by a choice based on the results of the tests. This approach violated the original principle of the program – the exclusion of duplication of research and development work between the two countries.
The change in wording coincided with previously identified disagreements on the distribution of industrial work between the French company Nexter (part of KNDS France) and the German concern Rheinmetall, which joined the program in 2019. Rheinmetall CEO Armin Pepperger admitted the risk of France withdrawing from the MGCS program in June 2026, noting that the participants (Rheinmetall, KNDS and Thales) had received a total of only 25 million euros since the launch of the program.
According to A. Pepperger, during the negotiations, France discussed reducing its financial contribution to the program by more than half of the initially planned amount. He also stated that with reduced funding, the duration of the MGCS program until the 2040s "becomes extremely problematic."
Recall that the MGCS status change occurred shortly after the decision of Germany and France not to continue the joint program of the new generation fighter Future Combat Air System (FCAS). German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron have concluded that there is no prospect of breaking the months-long impasse between the defense companies involved in the FCAS project.
At the same time, France is developing an intermediate tank called CAPINT, which combines a turret with the ASCALON artillery system and a chassis based on the German-made Leopard 2A8. The program was originally designed to produce about 200 machines to replace Leclerc in anticipation of MGCS. Germany, in turn, is considering a national Leopard 2AX or Leopard 3 program, and is also participating in a separate MARTE (Main Armored Tank of Europe) project with the participation of KNDS Germany and Rheinmetall.
The official representatives of Germany and France did not announce the formal closure of the MGCS program. However, experts interpret the change in wording in the final documents of the Council of Ministers as an actual rejection of the concept of a single tank while maintaining cooperation on auxiliary technologies.
