France in talks with UAE as defence plans with Germany fall apart

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France said it was talking to the UAE on a defence partnership for its Rafale combat plane following the failure of a next-generation fighter jet project with Germany.  

French defence minister Catherine Vautrin said on Monday that Paris was talking to the UAE on a “collaboration” regarding the next upgrade to its flagship Rafale jet, made by Dassault Aviation and due from 2030. 

The planned Rafale upgrade will not replace the now-defunct Franco-German Future Combat Air System (FCAS) since it will lack features such as stealth that the project was supposed to have.

Berlin pulled the plug on FCAS due to irreconcilable disagreements between Dassault and Airbus’s German-based aviation division.

A Franco-German advanced tank project, which Vautrin said was badly delayed, is also unlikely to happen — another sign of faltering defence co-operation between the EU’s biggest powers just as Berlin leads a broader rearmament push in response to the threat from Russia and waning US commitment to the continent’s defence.

A successful partnership with the UAE on an upgraded Rafale would strengthen France’s case for alternative collaborations as it works out how to finance and develop a new fighter jet for the 2040s and beyond without Germany. The UAE already owns and operates Rafale fighters.

“My counterpart was in Paris 15 days ago,” Vautrin said of the talks in an interview with Les Echos newspaper, adding the UAE would be a “big client” of the so-called Rafale F5. 

She did not detail the nature of the partnership. But the UAE could bring more funds for the development of the plane and commitments to acquire them, in exchange for work for local contractors. Updated military spending plans by Paris through 2030, which are being finalised now, include money for the new Rafale.

Vautrin said she had also visited MBZ, or UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, several times as well as UAE defence company Edge.

France and UAE discussed such a partnership last year, but talks hit a wall because Dassault was not keen to share sensitive technology with another contractor, people familiar with the matter said. Such concerns were also at the heart of the failure of the German deal on FCAS, the €100bn fighter-jet programme.

Dassault declined to comment.

The Iran war and attacks on Gulf states have since deepened defence relations between France and the region, however, with Paris sending Rafales to help with air defences.

France ideally needs partnerships to finance a new plane, given it has huge budgetary constraints and needs to trim its public deficit. Vautrin said discussions around a record sale of some 114 Rafale jets to India — often cited as another potential partner — were progressing well and could be finalised by year-end.

France as well as Germany were also courting Sweden’s Saab, people familiar with the matter have said.

In the same interview, Vautrin criticised another flagship Franco-German project, led by KNDS and Rheinmetall, to develop the Main Ground Combat System, a future tank programme. France faces a more urgent need to replace its ageing fleet of KNDS-made Leclerc tanks, which are no longer in production. Vautrin said Paris now had little choice but to pursue an interim solution.

“The tank of the future is 10 years behind schedule. We can’t wait any longer,” Vautrin said in the interview.

Armin Papperger, chief executive of German tank maker Rheinmetall and one of the partners in the MGCS programme, said at the weekend that France was planning to slash the budget for the project.

“If you have less money available, you don’t go any faster, and we’re already very slow,” he told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

Papperger said that the proposed timeline for the Franco-German tank, with the first units expected to enter service in the 2040s, was “an incredibly long timeframe.” He added: “I can’t say today whether there will even be an MGCS at all.”

Separately on Monday, Vautrin told a news conference that France had picked a French consortium made up of Safran and MBDA to develop a rocket launcher with a range of 150km to replace its existing systems. It passed over another bid from Thales and Ariane Group.

France had also looked at the equivalent Himars system made by Lockheed Martin as it weighed up whether to go for more readily available solutions, people close to those talks had said.

Additional reporting by Leila Abboud in Paris and Laura Pitel in Berlin