Rather than staying behind the fences of remote training grounds, France’s armed forces are preparing for ORION 26, a vast exercise that will unfold on real roads, over cities and along its coasts, shoulder to shoulder with allies. The aim is simple but sobering: train for a brutal, high-intensity conflict against a peer adversary, on home soil, under conditions that look and feel uncomfortably close to reality.
Orion 26: France’s war rehearsal at home
ORION 26 is billed as the most ambitious joint and multinational exercise run by France since the end of the Cold War. It will take place at the start of 2026, across mainland France, at sea and in the air, bringing together thousands of French troops alongside partner nations.
French planners are treating ORION 26 less as a simple drill and more as a national-scale dress rehearsal for a major war.
The exercise follows ORION 23, held between February and May 2023, which mobilised over 12,000 French and allied personnel. That earlier edition saw thousands of vehicles, major naval assets, fighter jets, drones, space and cyber tools all plugged into a single command-and-support chain, including reservists and civilian government services.
What sets ORION apart is not only its size, but its design. Much of the action plays out off-base, in “open terrain”, alongside real communities and real infrastructure. Units have to deal with traffic, weather, civilian communications, and the political sensitivities that come with fighting close to home.
A realistic, high-intensity war scenario
At its core, ORION 26 is built around a demanding, story-driven scenario: a high-intensity conflict against an adversary with similar technology and numbers. This is not counterinsurgency training, nor a peacekeeping dress rehearsal.
French planners want to test the full chain of operations:
- strategic planning and political-military decision-making
- rapid build-up and deployment of forces
- coordination between land, air, sea, cyber and space domains
- sustainment of heavy combat over weeks
- work inside a multinational coalition structure
ORION 23 already served as a “laboratory at scale” to spot tactical and logistical weaknesses, and to trial new doctrines such as dispersed operations and tighter integration of cyber and electronic warfare. ORION 26 is expected to push that logic further, with more complex scenarios and heavier pressure on French command-and-control systems.
Reservists fully in the fight
One force, two uniforms
One striking feature of ORION 26 is the treatment of reservists. They are not there to fill the ranks in a cosmetic way. They are embedded directly into active-duty units and command posts.
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For ORION 26, reservists are used as a real operational reserve, bringing civilian skills in cyber, logistics, engineering and medicine straight into frontline units.
This approach reflects how French defence leaders now see the reserve: as a societal pool that can be tapped quickly in a crisis. Many reservists work in tech firms, hospitals, transport or energy companies. In wartime, that dual background is a valuable bridge between the armed forces and the civilian infrastructure they depend on.
Logistics under stress: testing the “nerve of war”
French officers openly say that in a high-intensity fight, logistics can decide victory or defeat. ORION 26 is structured around that idea. Forces will be pushed hard on ammunition resupply, fuel distribution, battlefield repair, medical evacuation, power generation and movement of supplies under threat.
To do this, the military will run two parallel support chains:
- A real support chain that keeps the actual exercise going, ensuring troops are fed, fuelled and fit to train.
- A “played” support chain injected with simulated disruptions such as fuel shortages, broken bridges, cyber-attacks, or destroyed depots.
This dual system lets planners measure not just whether the textbook logistics plan works, but how resilient it stays when hit by friction, surprise and enemy action.
Digital backbone under fire
Networks built to survive attacks
Coordinating thousands of troops across multiple domains in real time requires far more than radios and maps. ORION 26 will lean heavily on secured and hardened digital networks.
The exercise is as much a stress test for France’s military IT architecture as it is a trial run for its tanks and jets.
Dedicated defence IT services and each service’s own digital systems will have to handle massive data flows: sensor feeds, drone imagery, targeting data, satellite information and encrypted chat between allies. Simulated jamming, cyber intrusions and outages will be built into the scenario to see how fast units can reroute communications and maintain situational awareness.
Simulators will also plug into the network, letting commanders blend live manoeuvres with virtual elements. A battlegroup in the field might be reinforced, on screen, by simulated squadrons or ships, forcing staff to plan like they would in a much bigger war.
A national-scale strategic rehearsal
ORION 26 is designed to pull in not only combat units, but also ministries, local authorities and national-level headquarters. The exercise helps Paris answer tough questions: how fast can it mobilise, how well can it coordinate with allies, and which parts of the system buckle first under pressure?
It also sends a message to allies and potential rivals: France wants to remain a serious, front-rank military actor capable of leading or heavily contributing to a coalition campaign.
France’s packed calendar of major exercises
ORION 26 does not stand alone. The French military has been running a dense schedule of large-scale operations and drills in Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.
| Operation / Exercise | Region | French troops | Framework | Main focus |
| Dacian Fall 2025 | Romania | 3,000+ | NATO | Conventional war at brigade level |
| Steadfast Dagger 2025 | NATO Europe | ~1,200 | NATO | Certification for NATO Response Force |
| Bold Panzer | Estonia / Latvia | ~500 | NATO | Multinational armoured manoeuvre |
| Scorpion Panzer | Estonia | ~300 | NATO (UK-led) | Franco‑British interoperability |
| Gulf 25 | United Arab Emirates | ~1,000 | Bilateral | Joint high‑intensity in desert |
| Chergui 2025 | Morocco | ~700 | Bilateral | Combined arms in harsh terrain |
| ANNUALEX 25 | Indo‑Pacific (Japan) | ~300 | Multinational | Naval and air interoperability |
Taken together, these activities show how France trains where it expects to fight: in coalitions, across varied climates and against opponents with serious capabilities.
Why “high-intensity conflict” is back in focus
French officials repeatedly talk about “high-intensity conflict”. The term refers to large, sustained clashes between heavily equipped forces, where artillery barrages, airpower, long‑range missiles and electronic warfare all come into play simultaneously.
Such a clash would generate huge consumption of ammunition and fuel, large casualty numbers and intense pressure on political decision-makers. Exercises like ORION 26 help simulate that environment without firing real shells at real cities.
Planners can, for example, test how long current stockpiles of artillery shells might last in a scenario modelled on the fighting in Ukraine, or how quickly repair units can recover damaged vehicles after a massed strike.
Risks, benefits and what comes next
Running a huge, realistic drill on national territory carries some risks. Local disruption, noise complaints, or public concern about the scale of military activity are all likely. There is also a chance of accidents when large convoys move on civilian roads or when live-fire elements are involved, even under strict safety rules.
The potential gains are significant. ORION 26 can reveal bottlenecks that would remain invisible in a smaller, more scripted exercise: bridges too weak for heavy armour, gaps in medical evacuation routes, fragile IT links, or unclear chains of command at the civil‑military interface.
For allies watching closely, the exercise will be a useful indicator: not just of France’s hardware, from Rafale jets to air defence systems and anti‑drone tools, but of its ability to knit together regulars, reservists, civilians and foreign forces into a credible warfighting machine on European soil.
As tensions stay high from Eastern Europe to the Red Sea and the South China Sea, ORION 26 shows how a mid‑sized nuclear power like France is quietly reshaping its training, preparing less for yesterday’s counterinsurgency campaigns and more for the kind of grinding state‑on‑state conflict that many hoped had been left behind with the Cold War.
Originally posted 2026-02-20 03:19:11.