AD2S Podcast - High Intensity: Continuity, Adaptation, and Technical Common Sense

March 24th, 2026 -  Dassault Aviation’s Perspective on Combat MRO

The remarks by Pierre Daubin, Commercial Director of Dassault Aviation’s General Directorate of Military Support (DGSM), are a direct continuation of the discussions from the AD2S roundtable dedicated to combat MRO in the context of high-intensity operations.

Noting that Dassault Aviation “is not starting from scratch” in this field, Pierre Daubin offers, in the podcast broadcast on the AD2S LinkedIn channel, a pragmatic industrial perspective on this issue, based not on abstract assumptions but on experience gained in supporting active fleets, both in France and abroad.

Verticalized Contracts As The Foundation Of Resilience

The first observation is that a high-intensity engagement translates above all into a massive increase in activity. This ramp-up affects all industrial and support functions: securing supplies, production rates, stockpiling, protection against cyber risks, robustness of information systems, as well as the evolution of operational risk management practices.

The good news is that Dassault Aviation and its partners have already been engaged for several years in proven support programs structured around vertical MCO contracts covering the main fleets in service, whether it be the RAVEL contract for the Rafale, BALZAC for the Mirage 2000, OCEAN for the ATL2, or ALPHA CARE for the Alphajet. These programs have proven their effectiveness during recent crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the indirect consequences of the war in Ukraine.

Pierre Daubin highlights several key factors behind this resilience:

• The first is management by a single industrial point of contact, ensuring optimal coordination among all private stakeholders involved in support. This organizational structure enables a streamlined use of available resources, based on a long-term fixed-price approach, which secures both operational readiness and industrial investment capacity.
• The second factor relates to high contractual commitments regarding availability, which hold manufacturers accountable and encourage them to invest upstream in factories, among suppliers, and within design offices. This is a crucial proactive measure for absorbing peaks in activity.
• Finally, strengthening the link between the armed forces and industry at all levels enables smoother information sharing, the creation of short decision-making loops, and more sophisticated use of technical and logistical data, particularly through digital tools, big data, and artificial intelligence.

The results speak for themselves: in the case of the Rafale, for example, these developments have made it possible to achieve and maintain a high level of activity, i.e. around 300 flight hours per year per aircraft, while increasing the number of available aircraft, despite a reduction in the fleet due to exports, particularly to Greece and Croatia.

Maintaining and adapting capabilities to support situational awareness

For Pierre Daubin, these achievements are significant assets, but they are not sufficient on their own to cope with a high-intensity conflict. He thus highlights other factors for success, such as the dual civil–military nature of the French aerospace industry, which could, if necessary, allow for the reallocation of certain capabilities from the civilian sector.

Added to this are ongoing efforts to ramp up production to fulfill French and export orders, as well as the associated strengthening of repair and spare parts production capabilities, achieved through demanding work to address supply chain vulnerabilities.

The development of the Rafale’s F4, and later F5, upgrades, along with contracts for technical support and analysis, also help maintain the expertise of the design offices. In Pierre Daubin’s view, this expertise could eventually suffer from the slow pace of development and the end of production for certain aircraft, such as the Mirage 2000, even as these fleets will continue to be deployed in the event of a major conflict.

It is precisely to address these limitations that Dassault Aviation has been conducting in-depth work with the armed forces and the Minister of the armed forces’ MRO direction (DMAé for « Direction de la maintenance aéronautique ») for nearly three years. The necessary additional resources - material, industrial, and human - have been identified, but their allocation will need to be prioritized in light of budgetary trade-offs, an unavoidable reality of high-intensity support.

“Initial studies have been launched as part of the Ravel contract, with the aim of an operational risk management (ORM) approach- referred to in French as “Gestion du risque opérationnel“ (GRO) - into Rafale maintenance. This will involve determining the potential consequences of partial repairs or temporary deviations from the recommended maintenance plan, establishing a guide for repairs to incidental or combat damage, and working on a list of minimum equipment,” explains Pierre Daubin.

In this regard, Dassault Aviation’s participation in major exercises such as Orionis, Emeraude, and Saphir plays a central role, as these stress tests not only allow for the evaluation of systems but also familiarize design offices with the risk management inherent in crisis situations.

Such a shift represents a major cultural revolution in itself, since after decades of tightening regulatory requirements and consolidating military airworthiness - sometimes at the cost of reduced autonomy and a loss of accountability among those on the ground -, high-intensity operations demand a conscious return to informed decision-making. This evolution must go hand in hand with administrative simplification efforts, as certain measures can already be implemented in peacetime, without waiting for a major crisis.

With this in mind, numerous innovations are already being studied or tested: additive manufacturing and remote assistance in overseas operations, the use of big data and AI (for predictive maintenance, logistics planning, and aircraft deployment optimization), the use of digital twins to simulate the impact of various operational scenarios on support systems, and the use of inspection drones to quickly assess the condition of aircraft upon their return from missions.

In conclusion, Pierre Daubin emphasizes a conviction now shared by the forces: technical common sense and situational awareness must once again become the norm.

By Murielle Delaporte

Photo © Dassault-Aviation (https://www.dassault-aviation.com/fr/defense/rafale/)

Listen to the Podcast via the AD2S LinkedIn chanel.