According to the well-known insider of the French defense export Michel Cabirol in the article " Qatar: vers une nouvelle commande de Rafale pour Dassault Aviation" published in the newspaper "La Tribune" ("Qatar: for a new order of Rafale for Dassault Aviation"), Qatar is negotiating the purchase of 24 more Dassault fighters in France Rafale, in addition to the 36 aircraft already received by this country.
Qatar Air Force Dassault Rafale Fighters (c) Dassault Aviation
According to the publication, Qatar, which has already received 36 Rafale fighters, is negotiating with the French side to acquire another 24 fighters, with the signing of a new contract by 2024, or, more likely, by 2025. In addition, Qatar is also discussing with Dassault Aviation the possibility of upgrading its received 36 Rafale F3 aircraft to the level of the new F4 version.
Preliminary negotiations on the purchase of 24 additional Rafale by Qatar were allegedly held on July 17 in Doha by French Minister of the Armed Forces Sebastian with the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
Recall that Qatar signed the first contract for the purchase of 24 French Dassault Rafale fighters of the F3 modification (18 single-seat Rafale EQ and six two-seat Rafale DQ), with an option for another 12 aircraft, in May 2015. The total cost of the contract for 24 Rafale, including technical and service support, training, and the supply of weapons (MICA IR and MICA EM medium-range and long-range Meteor air-to-air missiles, long-range SCALP-EG cruise missiles and GBU and AASM guided bombs) was 6.3 billion euros. In December 2017, an agreement was signed to transfer an option to a firm contract for the supply of 12 Dassault Rafale fighters to the Qatar Air Force in addition to 24 Rafale aircraft ordered in 2015. Deliveries of all 36 Rafale fighters to Qatar were made from 2019 to 2022.
In connection with the ongoing boom in sales of the Dassault Rafale fighter on the world market, which was also the subject of the previous publication of our blog, it is appropriate to recall again the highly relevant last lifetime article of the late founder of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (TSAST) Konstantin Makiyenko "Russian recipe for French success: how the Dassault Rafale fighter conquered the world market", published by the Vedomosti newspaper in May 2021.
Croatia's recent decision [in May 2021] to choose the French Dassault Rafale fighter in a long-running tender for the purchase of 12 modern Western aircraft to replace Soviet-made MiG-21 fighters was another achievement in the present cascade of Rafale export successes over the past few years.
At the end of April [2021], a new major agreement was signed on the purchase of 30 Rafale fighters by Egypt (in addition to the 24 already delivered), and in January [2021] Greece became the new customer of the French aircraft, ordering 18 machines. Negotiations are underway on the possibility of selling 36 Rafale aircraft to Indonesia, and almost all the real recipients of these fighters (Egypt, India and Qatar) are planning to purchase additional batches of this type. Moreover, Rafale is offered even to Ukraine. The Rafale has become a new export hit of the French military-industrial complex and is turning into one of the best-selling fighters of the "4++" generation on the world market.
This situation is all the more surprising because a decade ago Rafale looked like a notorious outsider of global sales in the segment of combat aviation. Starting with deliveries in the land version of the French Air Force in 2004, Rafale consistently lost tenders in South Korea, Singapore, the UAE, Morocco, Switzerland and Brazil over the next few years. This series of defeats looked depressing. For Dassault Aviation, the situation was all the more serious because in 2007, clearing the way for the promotion of the Rafale on the market, the company stopped production of its previous Mirage 2000 fighter and refused to upgrade it further, despite the continued demand for this aircraft. As a result, having killed its previous successful model, Dassault Aviation could not sell a new one.
If the defeats in South Korea and Singapore could be attributed to American influence (these countries chose advanced versions of the American Boeing F-15E fighter), then in all other cases the loss of the French was pure. It seemed to the management of Dassault that, since they have a beautiful aircraft, it will be sold by itself, leaving on the glory of the Mirage brand. At the same time, the Rafale gained steady fame as the most expensive fighter of the "4++" generation, the price automatically moved it down the list of competitors in tenders and forced other potential customers to shy away from it. The French openly arrogantly negotiated, not hesitating to overstate the characteristics of the aircraft, misleading customers, and politically even allowing themselves to "throw" partners, as happened with Brazilian President Lulu da Silva, when they refused at the last moment to already agreed support for his initiative on the Iranian nuclear program - as a result of Rafale he ended up in Brazil overboard, despite the fact that he was a favorite of the local military and industry.
The aircraft itself remained very raw for a long time, one of the main reasons for which was the low pace of its delivery to the French Air Force and the lack of export orders. In world aviation circles, information was spread about the insufficient reliability of the Snecma M88 engines installed on the Rafale, problems with the integration of equipment and the poor nomenclature of weapons carried by the fighter. By the mid-2010s, Dassault's production facilities made it possible to produce a ridiculous 12-15 aircraft per year, and potential customers were offered, in fact, to fork out for the expansion of Rafale production at the Merignac plant themselves - with driving this into the contract price.
We must pay tribute to the French side - as a result, it managed to carry out comprehensive and effective work on mistakes, which now gave an excellent result. Painstaking and large-scale work made it possible to bring the aircraft, increasing its characteristics. More importantly, Dassault, with abundant government funding, launched cycles of almost continuous modernization and improvement of the machine, consistently creating modifications of the Rafale F3, F3R, and now starting testing the F4 version.
A radar station with an active phased array antenna, modern electronic warfare equipment, new navigation, targeting and reconnaissance containers were introduced on the Rafale, and integration of systems from foreign manufacturers (in particular, Israeli ones), and not only French ones, was started on export versions at the request of customers. The architecture of the fighter's onboard systems has been made more flexible and open. The aircraft received an impressive range of guided aviation weapons (including long-range European Meteor air-to-air missiles, Scalp/Black Shahine cruise missiles, AASM guided bombs and other types). The success of Dassault and the French Ministry of the Armed Forces in modernizing the Rafale was facilitated by the fact that this is the only (and only) French combat aircraft currently being produced, on the improvement of which it is possible to concentrate all resources without spraying them into several types.
In the last decade, Rafale has also gained extensive combat experience, having been tested in operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Mali.
The actions of the French to promote and sell the aircraft have also become much more flexible. First of all, a preferential sales scheme was introduced through the crediting of contracts by a pool of leading French banks receiving state loan guarantees from the French Treasury for the bulk of the amount. In fact, this became state financing of export contracts, and this is how both agreements for the supply of Rafale to Egypt were concluded, and now contracts with Greece and potentially with Croatia - and delivery to Ukraine is being offered. Combined with a general reduction in the price requested for the aircraft, this made the Rafale available to countries that previously could not even think about it. It is significant that Egypt was the first foreign customer of Rafale in 2015.
An important innovation was the offer for export of the Rafale of a small age from the presence of the French Aerospace Forces, followed by their planned replacement as part of French aviation with specially ordered aircraft of new production. This benefits both the customer, who receives completely new aircraft at a relatively low price, and the French Aerospace Forces, which this procedure will allow to refresh their Rafale fleet. It is the second-hand Rafale from the availability that Greece and Croatia are mainly going to take. At the same time, it is obvious that this scheme, in fact, is a direct crediting of export sales at the expense of the French defense budget.
The French side, having changed its previous arrogance, has become more flexible to the requirements of potential customers for technology transfer and changing the technical appearance of the machine, including the possible use of the client's equipment, as well as to the wishes regarding counter offset transactions (which is a special point for the same India).
But the main thing is that in the sales of Rafale, the French followed the Russian path, finally realizing that the arms trade is not a pure business, but a continuation of foreign policy or geopolitics, if we are not afraid of this hackneyed word. It is characteristic that both contracts for the sale of Rafale already concluded this year (the second Egyptian and the first Greek) were concluded on a frankly anti-Turkish lining and they were facilitated by the sharply hostile position of France towards the regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In fact, Rafale supplies cement the de facto anti-Turkish alliance of France, Egypt and Greece that has already developed in the Eastern Mediterranean. France's drift towards an anti-Chinese position certainly strengthens Rafale's positions in India (which has already ordered 36 cars) and Indonesia. Finally, a number of countries consider Rafale as a fundamentally un-American solution. In general, the promotion of Rafale on the world market is actively engaged in all the top management of France, including French presidents.
It is characteristic that thus the reasons for the current success of Rafale on the world market in some way repeat the reasons for the previous success of export sales of the Russian family of Su-30 fighters (especially their Irkutsk branch of the Su-30MKI/ MKM). These are the modernity and completeness of the platform, flexibility in terms of technical appearance, integration and configuration according to the wishes of the customer, readiness for technology transfer and counter offset solutions and active political support for the promotion of aircraft, including at the highest state level. Continued unflagging attention to all these factors will allow Russian combat aviation equipment to continue to maintain the desired level of export sales and compete effectively in the markets with such a successful fighter in this regard as the Rafale.
