The French Air and Space Force’s Military Air Expertise Center (CEAM), based at Mont-de-Marsan, ran the Black Crow 26 exercise from September 21 to October 1, 2026, training French and allied units to operate inside a deliberately contested electromagnetic spectrum. According to the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, more than 350 contributors and several hundred participants supported the event, which drew units from all three French services and from five partner nations.
The exercise comes as Paris works to rebuild an electronic warfare (EW) enterprise that eroded after the Cold War. A National Assembly fact-finding report released February 18, 2026, found that the term electromagnetic appears only three times in the 2024-2030 Military Programming Law (LPM), noted that France abandoned dedicated suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) capabilities in the late 1990s, and described a national legal framework that tightly restricts live jamming on French soil, leaving large exercises as a primary workaround. French doctrine frames the discipline as GCEM, or warfare in the electromagnetic field: exploiting the spectrum, protecting friendly systems, and countering adversary systems through jamming and deception.
Black Crow 26 Sortie Volume and Threat Replication Under Jamming
For nearly two weeks, planners reproduced a high-intensity operating environment in the air and on the ground using real and simulated surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, jamming and deception capabilities, aircraft, and dedicated EW systems. The ministry counted more than 50 missions, comprising 180 fighter sorties, 50 helicopter sorties and 15 transport aircraft sorties, supplemented by roughly 20 satellite passes and numerous drone sorties. It did not identify the aircraft types, SAM systems, jammers or airspace involved.
The training objective extended beyond detecting threats. Crews and operators had to understand what jamming and deception did to their own systems, adapt tactics, and complete missions once assured access to the spectrum was gone. In practice, that means planning for jammed communications, deceived sensors, and aircraft operating inside the engagement envelopes of ground-based air defenses.
The ground-based air picture included a Thales Ground Master 200 (GM200) radar tasked with detecting and tracking air threats. Publicly available specifications for the baseline GM200 describe a mobile S-band 3D medium-range radar with a 250 km instrumented range in surveillance mode, dropping to 100 km in engagement mode as antenna rotation doubles from 20 to 40 rpm to refresh tracks faster, with elevation coverage up to 70 degrees. The ministry did not say whether the unit was a baseline GM200 or one of the newer gallium nitride (GaN) GM200 Multi-Mission variants. A GM200 is also part of the short-range air defense system Ukraine ordered from Thales in February 2023, a theater where radars operate under persistent jamming.
DGA Testing, Joint Integration, and Allied Air Defense Contributions
Black Crow 26 doubled as a test range for the Directorate General for Armament (DGA) and industry. Laboratory trials can measure a system’s performance, but only a contested live environment shows whether it keeps functioning once the surrounding spectrum is degraded. The ministry did not disclose which capabilities were evaluated.
The exercise integrated units from the French Navy, the French Army and the French Air and Space Force. Fighters, helicopters, drones, transport aircraft, ground-based air defense systems, space assets and EW systems combined to create a dense training environment intended to strengthen joint coordination and interoperability under near-combat conditions.
The allied contribution split along functional lines. Belgium and Morocco sent fighter aircraft, while Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom contributed ground-based air defense systems. The ministry named neither the aircraft nor the SAM systems. The arrangement placed partner aircrews against air defense crews from three other nations inside a shared jamming environment, rehearsing common procedures within a single force package. Morocco was the only non-NATO nation among the five partners.
Analysis: Black Crow 26 reads less as a showcase than as a workaround for two structural French gaps. The first is regulatory: with live jamming tightly constrained on national territory, concentrated exercise windows remain one of the few ways to train against real emissions instead of simulations. The second is capability: France is rebuilding EW and SEAD skills it allowed to erode for a generation, and a sortie mix weighted heavily toward fighters signals a priority on keeping strike packages survivable in jammed, SAM-defended airspace. Facing German, US and UK air defense crews adds a variable French units cannot generate alone: unfamiliar operators with different procedures.
Key unknowns remain the capabilities the DGA evaluated, the SAM types allied units fielded, and the exercise location. The next indicator is budgetary. The same parliamentary report noted that €80 million was secured in the 2024 annual LPM adjustment to give the three services an initial electronic attack capability. Whether follow-on funding scales that effort will determine how quickly lessons from Black Crow 26 become fielded capability.