The Caesar de Nexter cannons begin their gestation in Limoges in the Arquus workshops. It is this specialist in motorized military vehicles that provides the truck that transports the famous cannon. To optimize production, this SME has just created a logistics platform to have at hand tens of thousands of components needed to produce armored vehicles. This gigantic hangar was inaugurated on Tuesday June 6 by the Deputy General Arms Delegate, General Engineer Thierry Carlier.
Accelerate the pace of production
The Limoges plant has already begun to ramp up Caesar’s production rates. A transport truck leaves the production lines every four days. The rhythm is uninterrupted. At the start of the journey, a chassis is gradually outfitted with an engine, transmission, hydraulic and electrical systems to become a ready-to-run truck in just four steps. These machines then go to the Nexter factory in Bourges to be armed with the 155mm gun.
Quite a spectacle when we know that the production of these trucks was relaunched just a few months ago because of the war in Ukraine. France gave kyiv 30 Caesars taken from armies’ stocks which now have to be replaced.
Thus, the new logistics platform, whose creation was launched in 2019, will become the epicenter of the war economy that the Head of State demands to encourage manufacturers to produce faster. The military programming law of 413,000 million euros that has been voted foresees the delivery of 109 Caesar guns by 2030.
international competition
The 30 cannons withdrawn from the armies’ stock must be replaced between November 2023 and March 2024. To supply them, Nexter and Arquus have already accelerated the production rate by 60%, going from 44 to 18 months to produce a Caesar ready for delivery to Army units.
Added to this are export orders that have increased since its use in the Ukraine against the Russian military. Nexter sold 55 of them in 6×6 version to Belgium and Lithuania and in 8×8 to the Czech Republic.
On the other hand, to replace the 19 Caesar donated to Kyiv, Denmark has signed with Israel the Atmos 2000 self-propelled howitzer from the Elbit Systems group. The reason would be precisely this ability of the Israeli to deliver more quickly.
Source: BFM TV
