Four fighters is not an air force. Four fighters, three tankers, two airlifters and three hundred people who can put all of that down on a foreign runway and have it flying again the next morning — that is an air force, compressed.

On 8 September the French Air and Space Force sends exactly that package out of the door on a 40-day, 40,000-kilometre loop that starts in Greenland and ends in Egypt.

The mission is called PEGASE 26, and it is the seventh in a series that began in 2018. It is also the most ambitious: France has never attempted a projection on this geographic scale.

The route is the message

Read the itinerary and the strategy reads itself. Greenland, Canada and Alaska first — the Arctic leg, which lets the Air and Space Force validate a new air route to North America and train at high latitude in polar conditions. Then Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and India, the four Indo-Pacific partners France has been courting hardest. Then Qatar and Réunion, with Egypt as the last stop.

That is an arc from the top of the world to the Indian Ocean, and it deliberately touches every region where France has either territory, customers for the Rafale, or an argument to make about who gets to fly where.

Why the tankers matter more than the fighters

The Rafales get the photographs. The three Phénix do the actual work.

An A330 MRTT is a tanker, a transport and a passenger aircraft in one airframe. On a deployment like this it refuels the fighters in the air, carries the maintainers and their tools, and removes most of the dependence on whatever happens to be available at the destination. Add two A400M Atlas airlifters for the bulky and awkward freight, and the package can arrive somewhere with no French infrastructure and start generating sorties.

That self-sufficiency is the whole point of the exercise. Very few air forces can do it. The United States can, obviously. Britain and France can, at small scale. Almost nobody else can move fast jets to the other side of the planet and keep them serviceable without help.

The phrase about freedom of air navigation is not filler. It is the aerial equivalent of a freedom-of-navigation sail, and it is aimed squarely at the parts of the Indo-Pacific where airspace claims are contested.

Commanded from a hill outside Lyon

One of the more interesting details is where the mission is run from. PEGASE 26 will be supported remotely by CAPCODA, the Air Operations Planning and Command Centre at Lyon-Mont-Verdun Air Base.

In other words, the force scatters across ten countries and three continents while the planning and command stays in France. Demonstrating that you can coordinate a dispersed force from home, thousands of kilometres away, is arguably a bigger capability claim than the flying itself.

French Air and Space Force footage from PEGASE 23, an earlier edition of the same deployment series, during its Indonesian stop.

What to watch

Previous PEGASE editions have produced genuinely notable moments: first-ever joint drills with partner air forces, Rafales appearing at bases that had never seen one, and a steady flow of export conversations that follow the aircraft around.

The Arctic opening leg is the new element this time. Greenland, Canada and Alaska in early autumn is a serious test of cold-weather operations for an air force that spends most of its expeditionary time in far warmer places, and validating a northern air route to North America has obvious value in its own right.

Forty days, ten countries, nine aircraft. If it all works, France gets to point at the map and say: we did that with nine aeroplanes.

Sources: French Ministry of the Armed Forces and Armée de l’Air et de l’Espace; Aviation News; Opex360; Raids Aviation.