Defence Procurement in France: Programmes Before the Tender

Defence procurement in France: the document that names next year's contracts

Defence procurement in France is governed at the top by a multi-year programming law, but the document a supplier should read is not the programming law. It is the projet annuel de performances (PAP), the performance annex attached each autumn to the finance bill, and specifically the part covering programme 146, «Équipement des forces».

That annex exists because of an organic law. Article 51 (5°) of the LOLF of 1 August 2001 requires a justification to the first euro for every budget programme. In defence, the administration satisfies that obligation by publishing a standardised fiche for each named armament operation. That is a durable guarantee: withdrawing it would require amending an organic law, not issuing a ministerial circular.

The consequence is remarkable. Once a year, the French State publishes a list of the armament operations whose main contract it intends to notify in the coming twelve months, with the amount attached, and states for each whether the industrial prime is already chosen. It is, in substance, a market intelligence product written by the buyer.

The official life cycle of a French armament operation

The sequence has fixed names, and knowing them tells a supplier where a programme stands.

What a programme 146 fiche actually contains

The template is identical from one operation to the next and from one year to the next, which is what makes the annex usable as a dataset rather than as reading matter. Each fiche gives:

• the operational requirement and technical description;
• the target — initial quantity, current quantity, and the stated reason for any change;
• the industrial and commercial arrangements, naming the prime contractor where one has been chosen;
• the key-date calendar, including the «référence initiale» column, which makes slippage — or acceleration — directly measurable;
• the order-and-delivery schedule year by year;
• the financial section: commitment authority, allocation to the functional tranche, and payments scheduled out to «> N+2».

Three cases recur in the industrial section, and the second is the commercial window. When an operation is in realisation, the prime is named. When an operation is about to be launched, the annex says the industrial arrangements «will be determined at the launch of realisation» — the requirement and the money are published while the contractor is still open. When a cooperation is being structured, the intended industrial architecture is described in detail.

The October list: what the 2026 annex announced

Our monitoring flagged the 2026 annex on 12 October 2025, within hours of the PDF going online. The operations for which the document states that the 2026 allocation «corresponds to the launch of realisation» include, with the committed authority as published:

Read as a supplier rather than as a budget analyst, the HF radio line says something precise: manufacturers of antennas, filters, HF power amplifiers and ruggedised connectors have roughly twelve months before a prime is designated on a €395m programme.

Measured lead time: three real programmes

Rafale F5 and the combat drone (UCAV). The programming law of 1 August 2023 created the F5 standard and its accompanying combat drone. The 2024 annex, dated 29 September 2023, named both and funded them. The DGA announced the first development contracts to Dassault Aviation, Thales and Safran on 8 October 2024. That is 14.2 months from the law and 12.3 months from the budget document. The 2026 annex then allocated €2,980.0m to Rafale F5 for «the launch of the next phase», and on 2 June 2026 the DGA notified MBDA the framework realisation agreement for the ASN4G hypersonic missile — 19.8 months after the budget document that announced that phase.

Contact drones. The 2024 annex created the programme line and allocated €120m for a launch of realisation, stating that the target and the industrial organisation would be set at launch. A DGA call for candidates for a first batch of light tactical intelligence drone systems followed on 17 February 2026: 29 months.

PATMAR futur. On 22 December 2022 the DGA notified two architecture studies of €10.9m each, to Airbus Defence and Space and to Dassault Aviation, with a programme launch «envisaged in 2026». The 2026 annex then allocated €2,956.2m. Two candidate industrial chains were publicly known 46 months before the money was written down, and the State said in writing that the contractor was still open.

An honest counter-example, and it matters. SDCA Remplacement looked like a clean twelve-month case. It is not. A letter of intent between the DGA and Saab was signed at the Paris Air Show on 18 June 2025 — four months before the annex — and the order for two GlobalEye systems followed on 30 December 2025, only about 2.6 months after publication. The rule we draw from it, and publish: when France buys off the shelf abroad, the political or trade-show signal precedes the budget document. The annex leads only on programmes with a national prime.

Where the wall is

The French wall is narrow and it is named. Across 520 pages of the 2026 annex the word «confidentiel» appears nine times, and each time it covers quantities: Mistral and VL MICA munitions, the MMC missile, the MGC cruise missile, the order-and-delivery schedule of SNA Évolutions, the target of strategic ROEM. The AASM, SCALP and MGC targets are classified. Everything else passes: the programme name, the requirement, the amount, the year of the launch of realisation, the payment schedule, and the slippage against the initial reference.

Three other limits deserve stating plainly. Tier-2 suppliers are never named — the annex names the prime, not its supply chain. The technical content of a consultation is only available once the notice is published on the national portal, with short deadlines. And upstream capability files are covered by national defence secrecy.

There is also a structural point about published notices. When we tested the record for «Rafale» with France as buyer from October 2024 onward, TED returned sixteen notices — access platforms, gantries, foundry moulds, test benches, twin-jet leasing. Neither the F5 standard, nor the UCAV, nor the ASN4G ever produced a single notice. Several billion euros of commitment authority, announced a year in advance in an official document, and nothing at all in the tender channel.

How Dfensio covers France

We treat the annex as a dataset, not as a publication. Each October we parse the new vintage within days, extract the operations whose text states a launch of realisation, and publish the list with the amount, the requirement and the stated status of the prime. We then diff the new vintage against the previous ones to produce two derived signals no one else publishes: the programme lineage — initial versus current target, slippage year by year, payment schedule out to N+2 — and the drift alert, computed from the «référence initiale» column, which is how an acceleration such as an aircraft-carrier realisation phase brought forward from 2027 to 2025 becomes visible a year ahead.

Between two vintages we live on the parliamentary layer: the Senate and National Assembly opinions on the defence budget, the public hearings of the DGA and the chiefs of staff, and written questions, which carry a ministerial answer published in the official journal. We also monitor the DGA newsroom, because as the SDCA case shows, the notification signal sometimes arrives there first.

We publish the measured lead time per programme, never a promised one, and we publish the cases where it is short or negative. Briefings with our analysts are confidential: we never name our clients, never publish client logos, and never disclose which capabilities or programmes a client tracks. Everything we deliver comes from public, dated, citable official sources.

Dfensio's analysts are available to answer questions on French defence procurement and programme 146 — request a confidential briefing at dfensio.com/contact.