France Launches Early Rafale F5 Work in Wake of Joint Fighter’s Collapse

France has awarded the first Rafale F5 contracts for a deep overhaul of its frontline and nuclear-strike fighter, after its joint fighter project with Germany and Spain collapsed in June.

France’s defense procurement agency says it has awarded the first contracts for the Rafale F5 upgrade, starting work on a new radar, engine and electronic warfare suite for the country’s frontline fighter.

The Direction générale de l’armement, or DGA, said in a Sept. 10 statement that it gave preliminary equipment contracts during the summer to Dassault Aviation, MBDA, Safran and Thales. The agency plans to launch full development by the end of 2026 and aims to qualify the new standard around 2033.

The announcement follows the June collapse of the fighter jet at the center of the Future Combat Air System, or FCAS, a joint program of France, Germany and Spain. The Rafale F5 program itself is separate from any future next-generation fighter.

The stakes go beyond avionics. The DGA describes the F5 as a substantial midlife overhaul of the Rafale, built around collaborative combat, operations in hostile airspace and renewal of France’s airborne nuclear deterrent through integration of the future ASN4G missile.

The French Defense Ministry has separately described the ASN4G entering service in 2035, a different milestone from the F5 qualification target.

Once qualified, the F5 is slated to enter service first with the French Air and Space Force and then with the French Navy.

An upgrade, not a new airplane

The F5 is an evolution of an aircraft already in service, not a clean-sheet design. Thales’ new RBE2-XG radar, for example, is designed to fit the same physical space as the Rafale’s current RBE2 radar, according to the DGA.

Dassault says on its Rafale development page that it intends the F5 to remain relevant beyond 2060, a manufacturer forecast rather than a set retirement date.

The Rafale has been upgraded in steps before. Dassault says the F4.1 standard was qualified in March 2023 and is in service with both the Air and Space Force and the Navy, while additional F4 functions continue to be fielded.

What the first Rafale F5 contracts cover

The DGA identified five work packages in its statement:

• A very low-drift inertial navigation unit using hemispherical resonator gyro technology, from Dassault Aviation.
• The Inter-Vehicle Data Link, or IVDL, from Thales.
• The RBE2-XG radar, from Thales.
• The SPECTRA F5 self-protection suite, from Thales and MBDA France.
• Preliminary design work on the M88 T-REX engine, from Safran Aircraft Engines.

The agency said the data link’s planned high-bandwidth waveform is meant to be discreet and resistant to jamming. It said the radar should improve detection range and identification of targets with very small radar signatures, backed by added computing power, and that SPECTRA’s core electronic warfare architecture will become fully digital.

Those are official design goals. No independent performance trials of the F5 equipment have been made public, and the DGA did not give a radar detection range.

More thrust from the M88 T-REX

The engine award covers preliminary design only, not full development or installation in the fleet.

The DGA said the current M88-2 produces a maximum of 7.5 metric tons of thrust, or about 16,500 pounds, and that the planned T-REX version would produce 9 metric tons, or about 19,800 pounds, a 20% increase. Safran, when it unveiled the T-REX in June 2025, described that figure as thrust with afterburner and listed improvements to the low-pressure compressor, high-pressure turbine and nozzle.

“We’re proud to be launching this engine project, which will push the boundaries of the M88’s performance to meet the evolving needs of our armed forces customers in an increasingly unstable geopolitical context,” Christophe Bruneau, executive vice president for military engines at Safran Aircraft Engines, said at the time.

Safran then described the project as risk-reduction work ahead of formal development.

Drone wingman and AI testing

Dassault says the F5 will fly alongside an uncrewed combat aircraft that will draw on its nEUROn stealth demonstrator. The company says the drone will use stealth technologies, carry its payload internally and operate autonomously while remaining subject to a human decision-maker. The ministry awarded the drone development contract in October 2024.

Separately, Reuters reported Sept. 22 that Dassault had flight-tested two artificial intelligence algorithms on a Rafale, one developed in-house and one with Thales. The company did not disclose what the algorithms do or present them as certified F5 equipment.

What it costs

The DGA did not publish the value of the summer contracts.

The Defense Ministry’s update to France’s military programming law adds 3.4 billion euros for combat aviation. The ministry says that money enables the F5 launch along with new missiles, including a long-range air-to-air weapon and the STRATUS Rapid Strike cruise missile. The figure covers that broader effort and is not the F5’s standalone price.

The DGA credits the overall Rafale program with more than 7,000 direct and indirect jobs in France and more than 400 companies.

The FCAS fighter split

Reuters reported that the core fighter part of FCAS was scrapped in June after industrial disagreements between Dassault and its main partner, Airbus. The three countries intended to keep working on some wider elements, including data links and a combat cloud network.

Dassault Chief Executive Officer Éric Trappier told a French Senate committee that irreconcilable differences with Airbus led to the fighter’s demise, Reuters reported July 1. Airbus has blamed Dassault, Reuters reported.

Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury had argued in May, at the company’s defense summit, that work on the wider FCAS systems was proceeding despite the fighter dispute.

Trappier signaled that Dassault’s options for a future fighter remain open.

“We can do it alone, that’s possible, or we can find partners. Do these partners exclusively have to be European? That’s an open question,” Reuters quoted him as saying.

The UAE question

Whether France will pay for the F5 entirely on its own is not settled in public reporting.

In April, AeroTime reported, citing French newspaper La Tribune, that co-financing talks with the United Arab Emirates had collapsed and that France would fund the upgrade alone. But the Financial Times reported June 15 that Defense Minister Catherine Vautrin said France was in talks with the UAE on an F5 collaboration.

The outcome of those talks has not been established, and no UAE official response on F5 financing had been made public as of Sept. 29.