On October 14, 2026, French Air and Space Force Chief of Staff Gen. Jérôme Bellanger told the National Assembly’s defence committee that France will develop the successor to the Rafale as a national programme, as reported by Defense News the next day. The aircraft, called the Avion de Combat du Futur (ACF), follows the collapse of the joint Future Combat Air System (FCAS) with Germany and Spain, which France and Germany agreed to scrap in June after years of disputes between Dassault Aviation and Airbus over specifications and industrial control. Bellanger set a target of flying conventional missions in 2040. France remains open to cooperation, he said, but only in frameworks that will not be structural to the birth of the aircraft.
The 2040 date is driven by nuclear deterrence, not by the fighter itself. Bellanger said the Rafale’s successor must be able to carry the ASN4G hypersonic nuclear cruise missile in 2050, and working back from there means it has to fly conventional missions by 2040. Going national, he argued, is the way to meet that deadline. Before then, France needs a Rafale F5 standard by 2035 that incorporates the first components of the future aircraft, including the engine, the sensors and the Stratus RS missile designed to neutralise enemy air defences. In other words, the schedule is set by the deterrent, and the Rafale F5 is the bridge.
Bellanger insisted that the FCAS years were not wasted. Work had been divided into pillars that also included a new engine, with Dassault and Airbus working on the next-generation fighter at the heart of the system, and he said progress in the aircraft, drones, stealth, connectivity and combat cloud can now be carried forward on a national basis. Dassault CEO Éric Trappier has said that, with engine partner Safran and electronics group Thales, his company has the know-how to build a next-generation fighter for well below the €50 billion ($56 billion) budget attributed to FCAS. That is the company’s own estimate, and the article does not say how France will fund the programme, so the figure should be read as a claim rather than a plan.
The cooperation that remains is telling. Bellanger said France must absolutely continue working with Germany and other countries on the combat cloud, because interoperability between European crewed platforms will be vital, so that wars are fought together rather than side by side. He described a very good working relationship with his German counterpart and said both commanders want common operational requirements for the cloud. He also said the British-Italian-Japanese Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) is working towards almost a strategic bomber, and that cooperation there is “not all roses”. Germany, for its part, has started receiving F-35s ordered in 2022, but it has no clear successor for its Eurofighters, which leaves the two former partners in different positions.
The most interesting part of the briefing is not the fighter at all. Bellanger said France will receive its first long-range one-way munitions in the summer of 2027, with MBDA’s Deluge drone forming the basis of its first squadron of bombing and reconnaissance drones, and the force is experimenting with interceptor drones, an area we noted in our piece on the Royal Navy’s new launchers. It also plans a very-high-altitude squadron using stratospheric balloons for communications relays and intelligence sensors. The concept he described for strikes into enemy territory starts with a first wave of many disposable drones to weaken air defences, including through jamming, saturation and deception, followed by reusable but expendable drones to open a breach for crewed and uncrewed deep strikes. That makes the 2040 fighter one part of a larger system rather than the centrepiece, a theme that also runs through France’s Hypairion project.
Ultimately, France is betting that it can keep a sovereign fighter industry alive without a partner, and the evidence for that bet is still thin. Three things will show whether it works: whether the ACF programme is formally launched and funded, whether the Rafale F5 reaches its 2035 target with the first future-aircraft components, and whether any partner, within the “different frameworks” Bellanger mentioned, joins later. As we noted in our post on France’s M51.3 missile test, French planning is built around the deterrent, and the same logic is now shaping the next fighter.
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