Some officers know how to manage their effects. Major-General Henri Marescaux was one of them. At the end of the 1990s, the man was number 2 in the army. He is busy in his office, located in the heights of the tower of the General Directorate of Armaments (DGA), in Balard, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. In the midst of negotiations on the budgets of the military programming law, he is worried. “It was then a question of going below the 406 Leclerc tanks produced, whereas we had already reduced the target several times since the beginning of the 1990s”, says Marc Duval-Destin, former director of the Leclerc tank program of the DGA, from 1996 to 2001, present that day.
For several days now, a discussion has been under way between the officer and the official. When the first urges him to defend the project – and to challenge a reduction in the number of tanks produced, already reduced from 1,500 to a few hundred in previous years – the second questions himself. “I remember saying to him: ‘General, is it really up to me to defend this 406 target? I have no reference, I don’t know if it’s not a sterile civil servant fight.'” Marescaux stares at him for a moment, before turning to his office window. It is night, and an illuminated Paris stretches out at the feet of the two men. The soldier then declares: “To hold an area like this against an enemy, we would already need several hundred tanks. With 400, we are at a minimum.”
“Industry was meeting the needs of the army”
All the arguments were then good to defend the production objectives of the Leclerc tanks. What would General Marescaux – who died in 2021 – say about the current situation? In recent weeks, responding to the urgings of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Western countries have pledged 321 heavy tanks to Ukraine. Including zero Leclerc. However, Ukraine has asked for these armored vehicles, small jewels of French technology. If the Elysée ensures that “nothing is excluded”, the French military and political leaders especially dodge the subject. Tanks require a lot of training, support, maintenance, they say. Too complicated… And above all, not enough.
Since the discussion reported in the offices of the DGA, the number of tanks has once again decreased, from 406 to around 250 in operation. Some tanks are in Romania, serving in NATO training exercises. Others need to be modernized. Above all, the production line where they were assembled, in Roanne, in the Loire, closed in 2008. The formidable Leclerc tank, requested by Ukrainian leaders and praised by French staff and politicians, is a vehicle in endangered. Victim both of the drop in military credits following the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the industrial crisis, its development alone tells a piece of French history.
The concept of the Leclerc tank was born during the Cold War, at the end of the 1970s. At the time, the staff wanted to replace the armored vehicle then used by the armed forces, the AMX-30. The idea of a tank designed in collaboration with Germany is considered, then evacuated. The Industrial Group of Land Armaments (Giat Industries), born eight years earlier from the merger of the armaments industries of the Ministry of Defense, imagines a purely French successor. “We have always taken two different approaches. When the Germans based their military industry model on small groups, their orders tended to meet the immediate needs of the market, analyzes Marc Berville, who held various responsibilities within the DGA, including that of Secretary General of the General Council for Armaments. We were in a more vertical approach. The industry met the needs of the army.”
job provider
In this case, an armored vehicle packed with state-of-the-art electronics, and a smaller, faster vehicle than the Leopard 2s produced by the thousands across the Rhine. “It’s a tank that took a long time to break through, but which was an anticipation of what the army’s commitment would become in the next twenty or thirty years,” says Marc Berville. Giat Industries develops the project for ten years, and the target of 1,500 units is set. Initially, the period of uncertainty opened by the fall of the Berlin Wall did not reduce the number of tanks. “In this period, the analysis of the West was that the Soviet Union could continue to be exhausted, but that one did not know when its fall would occur, continues Marc Berville. The tank could have found its place if the Soviet world had not fallen.”
The project becomes one of the showcases of the French arms industry. Its Hexagonal knit construction. In the 1990s, the Giat was deployed on 14 sites in France, bringing together for some more than 1,000 people. Assembled in Roanne with the help of 1,830 employees, the Leclerc armored vehicle combines turrets built in Tarbes (1,500 employees), gun tubes forged in Bourges (1,200 people), and ammunition produced in La Chapelle-Saint-Ursin (400 workers), in Centre-Val-de-Loire, or in Cusset, in the Allier (630 people). “It was an important provider of jobs. I remember that at the time, it was a bit as if each deputy wanted his small part of Leclerc on the territory”, recalls Alain Richard, senator from Val- d’Oise and former Minister of Defense in the Jospin government, from 1997 to 2002. The Leclerc tank is not only a military story: it is also a job story.
Military appropriations plummet
The project was quickly overtaken by the geopolitical context. With the Berlin Wall fallen, the Soviet Union falling apart, the prospect of war on the European continent receding. From year to year, military credits melt like snow in the sun. From 2.97% of GDP under Giscard, they collapsed to around 1.61% at the end of Chirac’s first term in 2002. “When I took up my post at Defense, the message I received from all sides is “panic on board”, recalls Alain Richard. Our defense industries are struggling: the size of the French market is too small. Everywhere else, contracts for the armaments industry are falling year after year.”
Military credits are plummeting, and the Giat, which has made the Leclerc tank its spearhead, is suffering. The production is delayed: the entry into service of the armored vehicle, planned for 1991, finally takes place in 1998, during the Kosovo war. Above all, its manufacture is expensive. Very expensive, even. In a report published in October 2001, the Court of Auditors weighs the price of the tank, which, originally, was to amount to 15 million francs (2.29 million euros): it actually exceeds 104 million (i.e. 15 million euros). In eleven years of management, Giat Industries has accumulated 3.66 billion euros in losses. More than half of them, assure the sages of Rue Cambon, are linked to bad management decisions. “The Giat has always been seriously ill, confirms Hervé Morin, Minister of Defense of the Fillon governments, from 2007 to 2010. He suffered the difficulties involved in being a state enterprise with its heaviness, while by having its budgets cut.”
Difficult exports
The company is doing even less as the Leclerc sells little internationally. In a market already saturated by the AMX-30s, then by the German Leopard 2s, the French tank had many disappointments. “The Leopard program was started ten years before that of Leclerc, points out Marc Chassillan, who spent nearly twenty-five years at Giat (which became Nexter Systems in 2011), and author of a military history book on tanks Leclerc. When the first major production of German tanks ended in 1992, we were barely starting ours.” Despite this delay, Giat Industrie sold more than 400 in the United Arab Emirates in the early 1990s. “We tried to place sufficient orders for our forces, while looking as best we could for export contracts to ensure the industrial tank”, describes Alain Richard. But these efforts are failing in Greece, Turkey and even Saudi Arabia. “France struggled to sell it, observes Yves Gueyffier, industrialization director of Leclerc tanks at Giat until 1990. Unlike other products such as the Rafale, which ended up exporting well, the tank is quite circumscribed to a conflict and to a period. The tank really protects the Eastern border.”
The production finally stops in 2008. Of the approximately 800 tanks leaving the factory, the French army will have received 406. A little less than half of the units serve as a reservoir of parts. Only 226 are actually in service in the army. Years of dearth of military budget passed by there. The consequences of the “peace dividends” – to use the expression of Laurent Fabius – from which Western democracies have benefited. In detail, Leclerc tanks were actually only used in two theaters of operations (in Kosovo from 1999 to 2002) and in Lebanon (from 2006 to 2010), as well as in the context of deterrence and NATO training (Lithuania, Poland, Estonia, Romania).
The tank, the use of which is not very indicated on sandy terrain, was not even deployed either in Afghanistan or in the Sahel. And will have known only a real fight with the Emirates, since 2015, in Yemen. “It happened with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Leclerc tank what happened with nuclear power after the Fukushima accident in Japan, analyzes Marc Bertille. France has kept its power plants, but n did not launch a new nuclear program. In the same way, we kept our tanks without producing others.”
The intentions of the executive have not changed on this point. Despite the spectacular increase in the defense budget announced in January, Emmanuel Macron has, according to the chained duck, “pulverized the request” of the staff on the purchase of additional tanks and guns in December, during a defense council. The restarting of an assembly line of armored vehicles on our territory therefore seems difficult for the moment – if not impossible – to implement. “We are talking about the disappearance of a sector, notes Marc Duval-Destin. Take the big shielding mechanics, for example: France no longer knows how to do it, and taking everything back would be very expensive. For all of this to work, it would be necessary to guarantee a production capacity, which implies a project of several billions, which would take at least three to four years. A project almost unimaginable today. According to information from the palmipede, the army will have to “be satisfied with 200 renovated Leclercs” until 2040. And cross your fingers while waiting for the realization of another Franco-German program, launched in 2017 and planned for horizon 2040, the MGCS (Main Ground Combat System). Hoping it’s not a new mirage.