Why This ‘Cheap’ French Armoured Truck Became the Vehicle 3 NATO Nations All Chose D

2019, the Nexter assembly plant at Roanne, central France. A vehicle rolls off the production line on six black wheels. It’s hull a flat slab of welded aluminum painted in three-tone camouflage. It weighs just under 25 tons. It stands nearly 3 m tall. A squat remote weapon station sits on its roof like an afterthought.

A single machine gun where a turret should be. No cannon, no missile launcher, no visible teeth. It looks like a delivery truck someone wrapped in armor plate and forgot to arm. The officers watching from the factory floor are not smiling. They are replacing the most successful armored vehicle in modern French military history.

A machine that carried French soldiers through every war their nation fought for more than 40 years. A vehicle so reliable and so trusted that entire generations of infantrymen knew no other ride into combat. And this is the replacement. A quiet, digital, lightly armed box on wheels that costs roughly 1 million euros per unit and carries a machine gun a civilian could mount on a pickup truck.

Over the next 6 years, more than 700 of these vehicles will enter service with the French army. They will deploy to the Sahara desert and prove themselves across a thousand kilometers of convoy operations in Mali. They will network with reconnaissance vehicles, artillery platforms, and main battle tanks through a digital system that lets every vehicle on the battlefield see what every other vehicle sees in real time.

They will be ordered by Belgium, by Luxembourg, and pursued by Ireland. They will anchor the most ambitious ground force modernization program in Western Europe. Its designation is the VBMR Griffon, and it is the vehicle France built to fight the wars of the next 50 years. To understand why the Griffon exists, you need to understand what it replaced and why replacing it took so long.

In 1976, the French army introduced a vehicle called the VAB, the Véhicule de l’Avant Blindé. It was a simple four-wheeled armored personnel carrier built by Saviem, later absorbed into Renault. Its steel hull could stop rifle fire and shell fragments. It could swim across rivers. It weighed 13 tons.

It was cheap. It was reliable and it could be configured for almost anything. Troop transport, ambulance, command post, mortar carrier, anti-tank platform, communications relay. Over the following decades more than 5,000 were built in over 30 variants and roughly 4,000 entered French service alone. 15 countries bought it.

The VAB fought everywhere. France fought Chad in the 1980s where French armored columns chased Libyan backed insurgents across hundreds of kilometers of open desert. The Gulf War in 1991 where 376 rolled across the Iraqi desert alongside Leclerc tanks and AMX 10 RC armored cars. Lebanon where VABs patrolled Beirut’s shattered streets under United Nations mandate.

Rwanda, Somalia, the Balkans through the 1990s where French peacekeepers drove VABs through the ruins of Sarajevo and the mud of Kosovo. Afghanistan from 2001 where the vehicles faced a threat they were never designed to survive. Mali from 2013 where Operation Serval and later Operation Barkhane sent VABs deep into the Sahara to hunt Jihadist columns.

The Central African Republic where they guarded aid convoys through ambush country. No other Western armored vehicle of its generation served in as many conflicts across as many continents for as many consecutive decades. It was the backbone of every French expeditionary deployment for 40 years. Soldiers trusted it the way soldiers trust a rifle that never jams.

It was simple. It started every morning and it brought them home. Entire careers were spent inside VABs. A lieutenant who first rode one in Chad in 1983 might have retired as a colonel still watching them roll out of the motor pool 30 years later. But by the 2000s, the VAB was dying. Not mechanically, doctrinally.

The wars had changed. Improvised explosive devices were shredding vehicles designed to survive rifle rounds, not buried bombs. The VAB’s flat steel belly offered almost no mine protection. Its gunner stood exposed in an open hatch, head and shoulders above the roof line, and by 2007, every French soldier killed by a mine blast aboard a VAB had been the gunner.

The vehicle’s electronics dated to the 1970s. It had no digital battlefield network, no automatic threat detection, no ability to share sensor data with other platforms. In an age of networked warfare, the VAB was fighting blind. France tried to extend its life. The VAB Valor upgrade from 1998 improved some electronics.

The VAB Mark 3 added better armor and a remote weapon station. A Kongsberg Protector turret was retrofitted to roughly 60 vehicles sent to Afghanistan from 2009, giving gunners protection for the first time. But, these were patches on a platform designed before the microprocessor revolution.

France needed a completely new vehicle, not just a better truck, a new way of fighting. That new way of fighting was called Scorpion. Scorpion stands for Synergie du Contact Renforcée par la polyvalence et l’info-valorisation. In plain language, it is a program to replace every medium armored vehicle in the French Army and connect them all through a single digital combat network.

It was approved in 2010 and formally launched on the 5th of December 2014 when Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian stood at the vast military base and announced the names of the two vehicles that would anchor the program. The reconnaissance and fire support vehicle would be called the Jaguar. The multi-role armored troop carrier would be called the Griffon.

Le Drian chose the names deliberately. He said that to mark the importance of these two totally innovative vehicles, they needed names that strike the mind. He added that he had no doubt those names would soon become for French forces the symbol of their excellence in land combat. He was not wrong.

The contract went to a consortium of three companies. Nexter, now renamed KNDS France after merging with the German firm Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, builds the welded aluminum hull and handles final assembly at Roanne. Arquus, formerly Renault Trucks Defense, supplies the entire powertrain, the engines, the gearboxes, the suspension, and also manufactures the Hornet remote weapon station.

Thales provides the electronics, the sensors, the communication systems, and the digital brain that makes the Griffin fundamentally different from every vehicle it replaces. The vehicle itself is a masterpiece of practical engineering designed around one principle. Every component must serve the network.

The hull is welded aluminum not steel, saving weight while achieving protection to STANAG 4569 level 4. That means the Griffin can survive 14.5 mm armor-piercing rounds and the blast fragments of a 155 mm artillery shell detonating at 30 m. Its belly is V-shaped and hardened against mine blasts equivalent to 10 kg of explosive under the hull or under any wheel.

Add-on armor kits can be bolted to the hull for higher threat environments. A full chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear protection suite seals the crew compartment. Power comes from a militarized six-cylinder turbo diesel from the Renault and Volvo DTI 13 engine family, producing 400 horsepower through an automatic gearbox driving all six wheels with independent suspension.

Top speed is 90 km/h on road. Operational range reaches 800 km on a 400 L fuel tank. The entire engine and transmission assembly can be removed and replaced in under 4 hours. A design choice driven by the harsh lesson of Saharan deployments where overheated powertrains needed rapid swapping in the field.

The crew compartment carries two to three crew and up to eight dismounted infantry on blast attenuating seats accessed through a rear ramp with an emergency door. The Hornet remote weapon station on the roof is gyro-stabilized and can mount a 12.7 mm heavy machine gun, a 7.62 mm machine gun, or a 40 mm automatic grenade launcher.

The operator never exposes himself. Every round is aimed and fired from inside the vehicle through screens and sensors. The exposed gunner problem that killed French soldiers in the VAB is eliminated entirely, but the weapon station is not what makes the Griffin revolutionary. The network is. Every Griffin is fitted with SICS, the Scorpion combat information system.

Developed by Eviden, SICS provides a shared digital map of the battlefield, blue force tracking of every friendly vehicle soldier, and a real-time picture from the brigade command post down to the individual squad leader. Every Griffin carries Thales’ contact software defined radios, replacing the legacy PR4G system, enabling encrypted voice and high bandwidth data transmission across the battle group.

The vehicle’s sensor suite includes the Antares 360° optronic surveillance system, Metravib acoustic gunshot detection that pinpoints the origin of enemy fire within seconds, a laser warning receiver, and a missile launch detector. When one Griffin detects a threat, every Griffin in the battle group sees it.

The system can recommend countermeasures automatically, deploy smoke, reposition. A target geolocated by a Griffin’s microphones can be engaged by a Jaguar’s 40-mm cannon 3 km away without the Jaguar crew ever seeing the enemy themselves. The French call this combat collaborative info valorise, collaborative combat enhanced by information.

It is not a feature bolted onto an old platform. It is the reason the platform exists. The first order of 319 Griffins was placed in April 2017. The vehicle was qualified by the DGA on the 24th of June 2019. The first delivery followed 10 days later, on the 4th of July 2019, at Nexter’s Satory facility, where Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly described the Griffin as a connected vehicle that will change the combat of tomorrow.

3 days later, the Griffin rolled down the Champs-Élysées in the Bastille Day parade for the first time. Now, before we get into where this vehicle actually fought and how it performed under fire, if you are enjoying this deep dive into French military engineering, hit subscribe.

It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. Production accelerated rapidly after those first deliveries. 92 delivered in 2019, 128 in 2020, 119 in 2021, 113 in 2022, 123 in 2023, 151 in 2024. By mid-2023, the 500th Griffon rolled off the Rouen line. By early 2025, 723 were in service with the French Army, alongside 296 Serval light vehicles and 91 Jaguars.

The Rouen factory tripled its output capacity over 5 years, from 92 vehicles per year to roughly 300, with a target of 450 across all Scorpion models, two vehicles off the line every working day. But numbers on a factory floor mean nothing until the vehicle meets the desert.

In 2020, a small detachment of Griffons deployed to Djibouti with the 5th overseas combined arms regiment for a hot weather technical and operational evaluation. The vehicles were tested in semi-desert conditions exceeding 45° C. Chassis performance, the Hornet weapon station, electronics, and satellite navigation were all assessed.

One vehicle was fitted with wire cage slat armor to test protection against rocket-propelled grenades. The evaluation confirmed the Griffon could operate in extreme heat without critical failure. The real test came in July 2021. 32 Griffons of the 3rd Marine Infantry Regiment shipped from La Rochelle to Gao, Mali, forming the armored core of Groupement Tactique Désert Corrigan, the first Scorpion combined arms battle group ever assembled for overseas combat operations. This was not an exercise.

Operation Barkhane was an active counterinsurgency campaign against jihadist groups affiliated with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State across the vast ungoverned expanses of the Sahel. French soldiers were being killed, convoys were being ambushed, and the Griffon was about to prove itself in the kind of war France had been fighting for a decade under conditions that had already exposed every weakness of the vehicle it was replacing.

The baptism came in late November 2021, a 12-day 1,000 km convoy security operation along the Gao to Timbuktu axis, supporting the French drawdown from the Timbuktu forward operating base. The route was seeded with improvised explosive devices. Jihadist ambush teams operated along the flanks. Temperatures during the day exceeded 40°, sand infiltrated everything. The Griffon performed.

The French General Staff reported that the vehicle’s great mobility and reliability allowed the subgroup to move quickly off established tracks to avoid IED-prone areas, a maneuver the VAB could never have sustained at that speed across that terrain. Where the VAB would have been confined to known routes, crawling forward at reduced speed while engineers swept for buried charges, the Griffon’s mine-protected hull and independent suspension allowed commanders to push their columns laterally into open desert, bypassing choke points entirely. The SICS network delivered what the staff described as fluidity of exchanges, adaptability in conduct, and clarity of reports. For the first time in French military history, every vehicle in a tactical convoy shared a single real-time picture of the battlefield, and every commander from the platoon leader to the battle group colonel could see the same map, the same threats, the same blue force positions. When the lead vehicle’s acoustic sensors detected gunfire from a tree line, the entire column knew the bearing, the

range, and the recommended response before the second vehicle had even slowed down. The Metravib acoustic detection system proved particularly valuable in the Sahel. Jihadist fighters had learned to fire from concealed positions and withdraw before French forces could identify their location.

The Griffon’s microphones pinpointed the origin of incoming fire within seconds, displaying the shooter’s position on every screen in the battle group simultaneously. Ambushes that once pinned down entire convoys for hours could now be answered with directed suppressive fire within moments of the first shot.

Field crews confirmed the assessments. A Corporal Chef driver with the third Marine Infantry Regiment told embedded journalists that the vehicle offered nothing but comfort compared to the VAB. Lieutenant Louis Marie, an infantry officer with the same regiment, reported that he found the Beast rather reliable and that the software teething problems from early production had been corrected.

A maintenance officer, Lieutenant Jose of the second material regiment, reported no blocking point on field maintenance, praising the modular powertrain design that allowed rapid component swaps in austere conditions. Not everything was perfect. Crews noted the Griffon’s relatively high center of gravity compared to the VAB, warning that overenthusiastic driving on uneven terrain risked rollover.

And as of 2025, only roughly 75% of delivered Griffons were fitted with the Hornet remote weapon station due to budget constraints, a gap the French Chief of Staff of the Army publicly acknowledged and committed to closing before the final deliveries in 2033. Beyond Mailly, the Griffon has entered service across the French Army’s medium brigades.

The sixth light armored brigade became the first fully Scorpion equipped combined arms brigade in late 2023. Units fielding the Griffon include the first Infantry Regiment, the 13th Mountain Infantry Battalion, the 21st Marine Infantry Regiment, the 126th Infantry Regiment, and the second Marine Infantry Regiment.

The vehicle has participated in NATO exercises in Estonia, validating its interoperability with allied digital systems through NATO’s federated mission networking protocols. The Griffon’s variant family has expanded far beyond the baseline troop carrier, and this is where the platform’s true versatility reveals itself.

The same hull, the same engine, the the same digital architecture serves radically different battlefield roles without requiring a new vehicle design for each one. The EPC command post variant qualified in November 2020 transforms the Griffon into a mobile regimental or brigade level headquarters. Stacked with additional screens, planning terminals, and extended-range communications, it allows a colonel to command an entire battle group from inside an armored vehicle moving at highway speed. 333 are planned.

Stéphane Mayer, then chairman and chief executive of Nexter and of the consortium, said at the qualification ceremony that this marks a new stage in the modernization of the French Army’s equipment. The SAN medical evacuation variant, qualified in June 2022, doubles the VAB ambulance’s capacity to four stretcher casualties with a mobile surgical table and a hydraulic lifting winch for loading wounded soldiers in full body armor.

196 are planned. In a conflict, a casualty evacuation speed determines survival rates. The SAN variant gives French medics the same level of armored protection and digital connectivity as the combat vehicles ahead of them. The VOA artillery observation variant carries the Muran tactical radar and a retractable optronic mast for rangefinding and laser target designation linked directly to the Atlas fire control network that coordinates French artillery batteries.

Roughly 117 are planned with the first received by the third marine artillery regiment. And the most dramatic variant of all is the MEPAC. It mounts a 120-mm Thales rifled mortar on a 360° turntable capable of firing 10 rounds per minute at ranges up to 13 km extending to 15 km with precision-guided ammunition.

The mortar can fire and displace within minutes, a shoot-and-scoot capability that makes the MEPAC nearly impossible to counter with traditional artillery radar. A four-man crew operates the system entirely from inside the vehicle through the Atlas digital link. 54 MEPAC variants have been ordered for France with the first delivered in December 2024 and initial operational capability achieved by the third Marine Artillery Regiment in October 2025.

Belgium has ordered 24 more. On paper, the Griffin’s closest rival is the German-led Boxer, an eight-wheeled vehicle weighing 36 and 1/2 tons with a modular mission pod system that allows the entire rear section to be swapped between roles in hours. The Boxer is faster, reaching 103 km/h.

It has greater range, over 1,000 km. It is heavier, better protected in its base configuration, and has been exported to Australia, the United Kingdom, Lithuania, and several other nations. But, the Boxer costs roughly 5 million euros per unit. The Griffin costs roughly 1.1 million. France will field nearly 1,900 Griffins for the price of fewer than 400 Boxers.

And the Griffin was designed from the start as a networked node in a unified combat system, not as a standalone platform. The Boxer is an exceptional vehicle. The Griffin is an ecosystem. The American Stryker, at 17 to 19 tons, is lighter and cheaper, but carries thinner armor and lacks the Griffin’s integrated sensor-to-shooter networking.

It has seen extensive combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, proving the eight-wheeled medium vehicle concept, but its electronics architecture was designed a generation earlier and requires continuous retrofit to stay relevant. The Finnish Patria AMV, in its eight-wheeled configuration, has achieved extraordinary export success with variants serving in Poland as the Rosomak, in South Africa, Sweden, Croatia, the United Arab Emirates, and Japan.

It is arguably the most commercially successful Western armored vehicle of the 21st century. But, no rival platform ships with the kind of fully integrated digital combat architecture that the Scorpion system provides out of the box. The Griffin does not just carry soldiers, it connects them. Every vehicle is a sensor, every vehicle is a node, every vehicle makes every other vehicle more dangerous.

This is not a marketing slogan, it is a doctrinal transformation. The French Army calls it combat collaborative info valerie’s. The laboratoire de combat Scorpion, a dedicated experimental unit created in 2014, spent years developing and validating the tactics that the Griffin’s digital architecture makes possible.

Colonel Loic de Kermabon, one of the officers responsible for shaping the doctrine, described it plainly. “A doctrine is never definitive,” he said. “It is a framework rather than a straightjacket.” The Griffin gives French commanders that framework in steel and software. Export interest in the Griffin itself has materialized decisively.

Belgium formalized its order in October 2018 for 382 Griffins and 60 Jaguars under the CAMO partnership, a bilateral agreement that goes beyond procurement to include shared doctrine, shared training, and shared tactical procedures. Belgium added 24 MEPAC mortar carriers in June 2022, and a further order of 92 Griffins in December 2025 raised Belgium’s total to 498 vehicles. Luxembourg approved 2.

6 billion euro Scorpion package in November 2024, including 16 Griffins for a bi-national reconnaissance battalion with Belgium. Ireland is pursuing an even larger Scorpion package valued at over 1 billion euros. The total French program calls for 1,872 Griffins, with 1,437 in service by 2030, and the remainder by 2035, at a total program cost of roughly 11 billion euros across all Scorpion platforms.

2019, the Nexter assembly plant at Roanne, central France. A vehicle rolls off the production line on six wheels. It weighs 25 tons. It carries a single machine gun. It looks like a truck someone armored and forgot to arm. It is not fast. It is not heavily armed. It does not carry a cannon or a missile by default. It cannot swap mission pods like the Boxer.

It does not yet have the long combat record of the Striker or the sprawling export footprint of the Patria. And yet it changed how an entire army fights. In the sands of Mali, it kept convoys moving through ambush corridors the VAB could no longer survive. In the training grounds of Estonia, it proved its digital systems could plug directly into allied networks.

In the factories of Roanne, it proved that a European nation could design, fund, and deliver a generational vehicle replacement program on time and on budget, something most of its allies have failed to do. The British struggled for decades with their Ajax program. The Germans took over 20 years to field the Puma infantry fighting vehicle in adequate numbers.

France, with remarkably little fuss, put 700 vehicles into its soldiers’ hands in 6 years. The VAB served for more than 40 years because it was simple, because it was reliable, and because it started every morning no matter what continent it woke up on. The Griffin was built to serve for the next 50 because it is connected, because it is protected, and because it thinks faster than the enemy can shoot.

1,872 will be built. 723 are already in service. Belgium, Luxembourg, and Ireland are buying in. The vehicle France’s critics called a quiet truck has become the backbone of the most coherent armored modernization program in Western Europe. That is not luck. That is what happens when a nation builds a vehicle not for the last war, but for the next one.