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In the summer of 2027, the French Army will have its first fully robotic combat unit. This is what General Pierre Schill, Chief of Staff, declared before the Defense Committee of the National Assembly on April 10, 2026, the day after two weeks of intensive tests on the Coëtquidan base, in Brittany.
Two milestones mark this roadmap. A first operational demonstration is planned for July 2026. The initial deployment follows in the summer of 2027. The composition of the future Combat Robotic Unit is already largely decided: a heavy robot, five Aurochs 2 robots, Tundra 2 drones produced by the Hexadrone company, Anafi drones from Parrot. In total, around twenty robots and around thirty drones. Budget committed for 2026: 35 million euros.
A selection by proof, not by call for tenders
The Ministerial Agency for Artificial Intelligence in Defense, AMIAD, created on May 1, 2024 by decree and directly attached to the Minister of the Armed Forces, pilots Pendragon in connection with the Future Combat Command of the Army. It devotes nearly a quarter of its technical human resources to it.
The industrial selection mechanism breaks with usual practices. There is no classic call for tenders. Candidate companies must demonstrate their ability to integrate into a common architecture, on an imposed scenario: the taking of an enemy position. The standard is defined by the proof, not by the specifications. This principle extends the achievements of the CoHoMa challenge, Human-Machine Collaboration, organized by the Battle Lab Terre, the fourth edition of which was announced in April 2026.
The distribution of platforms follows a precise ratio. Forty percent consumable systems, forty percent expendable if the mission requires it, twenty percent cutting-edge platforms, equipped with high-performance sensors and increased firepower. Remotely operated munitions, remotely guided bomb drones, are absent from this first version, the composition remains evolving.
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What Ukraine has changed
Seventy percent. This is the share of attrition in personnel and equipment obtained by the action of contact drones in the Ukrainian theater, according to official feedback from the Joint Center for Concepts, Doctrines and Experiments. By 2023, Ukrainian forces were producing 600,000 FPV drones, flown in first-person view, per year. In 2024: 1.5 million. In June 2025, the director of CICDE, General Breton, specified that the Ukrainian forces would receive 4 million drones in 2025, or 10,000 per day.
In April 2026, according to information reported cautiously by several military sources, Ukrainian ground robots would have conquered an enemy position without direct human intervention, a first documented in this theater.
It is this feedback which accelerated the revision of the military programming law, presented to the Council of Ministers on April 8, 2026 by the Minister of the Armed Forces Catherine Vautrin. The text mobilizes 36 billion additional eurosprovides for a 400% increase in remotely operated munitions compared to initial objectives, and allocates 2 billion more for drones and remotely operated munitions. Pendragon appears explicitly among the new capabilities approved, according to an analysis by the French Institute of International Relations devoted to updating the LPM.
“Robotic” or “robotic”: two words, a break
Returning from Coëtquidan, General Schill introduced a distinction in vocabulary which involves much more than terminology. A unit robotiséeaccording to him, is a human unit supported by robots. A unit robotics places robots at the heart of the system, with humans remaining in the command loop without being the operational center.
The 2023 LPM aimed at the first logic. Its update on April 8, 2026 opens the door to the second.
This shift poses a problem that doctrine has not resolved. The OODA loop, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, theorized by the American strategist John Boyd, measures the ability of a fighter to process information faster than his opponent. The faster a fighter goes through this cycle, the more advantage he gains over an opponent who is still analyzing. Artificial intelligence compresses each step of this loop to the point that human decision-making risks being reduced to formal validation. In the words of Boyd himself: “The one who completes the race faster disorganizes the opponent, gains the upper hand and wins. HAS” In this diagram, man becomes the limiting factor. Maintaining real human authority while requiring machine-level responsiveness is a contradiction Pendragon has yet to resolve.
The legal red line
France has officially announced that it will not develop SALA, Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, these systems capable of identifying, engaging and neutralizing a target without any human intervention. Pendragon falls into another category: SALIA, lethal weapons systems incorporating autonomy. They integrate autonomous functions: detecting a target, designating it, offering to engage it. But the final decision rests with a human operator.
This distinction establishes the legal legitimacy of the program. It does not close the question of responsibility.
In October 2025, a CICDE conference at the Military School concluded that authorization for the use of an armed robot “will not be able to shield the responsibility of the one who implements it, here the military leader”. Direct consequence: additional compulsory training will be imposed on officers required to command these units. The international coalition of NGOs Stop Killer Robots also highlights the tension between the officially proclaimed ban on SALA and the active development of SALIA with its increasing capabilities.
First in law, eleventh in industrial robotics
France initiated discussions on SALA at the UN in 2013, within the framework of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, more than a decade before its main competitors formally committed to it. In September 2019, Paris and Berlin co-drafted a declaration setting out eleven guiding principles to govern the development of autonomous weapons systems. In November 2024, a resolution on SALA was adopted by the UN General Assembly with 166 votes in favor, with only three votes against, Belarus, Russia and North Korea.
This diplomatic advance coexists with two less flattering data.
France produces a few hundred kamikaze drones while Ukraine receives 4 million per year. On industrial robotics, a direct indicator of the mobilizable technological base, it declined in 2024, going from eighth to eleventh in the world, with a 24% drop in new installations. And since its initial position in favor of restrictive measures in Geneva, Paris has gradually moved away to oppose any legally binding mechanism on SALA, a shift that NGOs in the sector do not fail to document.
ASGARD, TITAN, and the closing window
On September 4, 2025, the Minister of the Armed Forces inaugurated at Mont-Valérien, in Suresnes, the supercomputer classified ASGARD: the most powerful in Europe according to the ministry, the third in the world, equipped with 1,024 chips latest generation. Operated exclusively by secret defense authorized personnel, not connected to the Internet, built by an HPE-Orange consortium, it is explicitly presented as a central tool for the development of Pendragon. In 2026, around 800 people will work on artificial intelligence within the Ministry of the Armed Forces. The latter’s AI strategy plans 2 billion euros over the duration of the LPM 2024-2030, with a budget which must double by 2030.
Pendragon is not an arrival point. General Schill set the program on a two-decade trajectory: the TITAN program, which will structure the Army between 2030 and 2040, must succeed SCORPION, the Army’s current communications and collaborative combat system. During his hearing on April 9, he indicated that the operational need around robotics is common to France and Germany, a still embryonic harmonization that Berlin and Paris have started to discuss.
The global military robots market is valued at $21.6 billion in 2026. Fortune Business Insights projects it beyond 42 billion by 2034. Whoever builds the standards today, technical, doctrinal, legal, will have an impact on this market tomorrow. This is the issue that Pendragon, with his 35 million euros and its forty industrialists in Coëtquidan, is supposed to open.
