Every air force buys equipment. The harder question is what to do with it — which tactics work, which switch sequence a pilot can manage at four g at night, how many mechanics a new pod needs, and whether the thing is worth carrying at all. The Centre d’expertise aérienne militaire is the French answer to that question, and it has been at Mont-de-Marsan since 1945.

It is older than the service it works for. A ministerial decree of 1 April 1933, signed under the air minister Pierre Cot, created the Centre d’expériences aériennes militaires at Reims — a year before the law of 2 July 1934 made the Armée de l’air an independent service. The centre was destroyed at Orléans in 1940. Colonel Constantin Rozanoff rebuilt it in 1945 on the German-built airfield in the Landes, testing captured German equipment and the first French prototypes, and it has not moved since.

The CEAM is routinely confused with the DGA’s flight-test organisation, and the distinction is the whole point. DGA Essais en vol, about 900 people on two main sites at Istres and Cazaux, does the engineering — instrumented airframes, telemetry, measurement ranges — and issues a qualification: a statement that the system does what the contract says. The CEAM then decides whether it is usable. It runs the operational evaluation, writes the tactical documentation and the technical manuals, trains the first crews and mechanics, and pronounces the adoption. The Rafale F3-R was qualified by the DGA in the autumn of 2018 and adopted by the air force on 16 July 2019; the nine months in between were CEAM work.

Today it is 39 units across 13 sites, about 700 experts by the Landes prefecture’s count, and more than 2,500 operational capabilities pronounced in a decade. It was renamed on 1 September 2015 from expériences para expertise, taking Air Warfare Center as its English title, and it has answered directly to the chief of staff rather than to the base commander since 1 February 1989. Its flying arm is escadron de chasse et d’expérimentation 1/30 Côte d’Argent, which keeps a deliberately mixed fleet — Rafale, Mirage 2000D, Alpha Jet and TBM 700 — alongside escadron 07/330 EPIGE for electronic-warfare programming and the CEILDT, created on 1 September 2012, for tactical datalinks. One thing the base is not: the Rafale conversion squadron, ETR 3/4 Aquitaine, is at Saint-Dizier, not here.

Groupe de chasse n° 3 Normandie was created on 1 September 1942 at Rayak in Lebanon, out of Free French pilots who had asked to fight somewhere that mattered. Sixty volunteers left on 12 November 1942 and reached Ivanovo, 250 kilometres north-east of Moscow, at the turn of the year. They learned Russian aircraft through interpreters in a Russian winter, flew their first operational sorties in March 1943, and stayed until the German surrender on 9 May 1945 — the only Western Allied flying unit that fought alongside the Soviet air force to the end.

The aircraft were Yakovlev fighters throughout: the Yak-1, then the Yak-9, and from the summer of 1944 the Yak-3, which the French pilots rated the finest low-altitude dogfighter of the war and preferred to anything the Allies offered them. The Soviet supreme command added the honorific Niemen in 1944 after the crossing of the river of that name, and the unit collected Soviet decorations including the Order of the Red Banner. Four of its pilots — Marcel Albert, Marcel Lefèvre, Jacques André and Roland de la Poype — were made Heroes of the Soviet Union.

The official record is 273 homologated victories and 37 probables in roughly 5,240 sorties, against 46 pilots dead or missing out of about a hundred who served. The 273 figure is a legal total that cannot now be revised, and the unit’s own association has published a Bundesarchiv cross-check suggesting far fewer German aircraft can be positively matched to those claims. Both things are true at once, and neither changes the loss rate, which was close to one pilot in two.

What happened next is the part nobody invents. Stalin gave the pilots their aircraft. On 15 June 1945 forty Yak-3s left Elbing in East Prussia and on 20 June landed at Le Bourget to a triumphal reception. The unit then went through Morocco, Indochina and Algeria, and through the Mosquito, the P-63 Kingcobra, the F6F Hellcat, the P-47, the Mistral, the Vautour IIN and finally the Mirage F1C and F1CT at Reims from 1966 and Colmar from 1993. It went into hibernation on 1 July 2009 and was re-created at Mont-de-Marsan on 25 June 2012 with about ten Rafale F3. It is the only unit in the French air force still called a régiment, and its escadrilles — SPA 91, SPA 93 and SPA 97 — carry insignia from the First World War.

The first production SEPECAT Jaguar, the two-seat E2, landed at Mont-de-Marsan on 4 May 1972 flown by Commandant Gautier, was nicknamed Matou, and was formally handed to the CEAM on 30 May in an interim standard. Five pilots ran the evaluation. By May 1973 they had flown 500 sorties on the type. What came out of it was not a performance chart but a way of operating: the angle-of-attack indicator established as the primary approach reference, a brake-cooling rule of an hour and a half on the ground after landing, a brake parachute cleared without its container, and every normal and emergency procedure in the flight manual written from scratch.

That is the shape of the work, and it has not changed. The Mirage III, the Mirage F1, the Alpha Jet and the Mirage 2000 all went through the same squadron, escadron de chasse 5/330 Côte d’Argent until it was renumbered ECE 1/30 on 1 March 2016 under the re-created 30e escadre.

The Rafale is now evaluated here standard by standard. F3-R, qualified by the DGA in the autumn of 2018, brought the MBDA Meteor, the Thales Talios designation pod, the AASM Block 3 and the GBU-16, Mode 5/S IFF and automatic ground-collision avoidance; the CEAM ran the operational trials jointly with the navy’s CEPA/10S detachment so that one set of manuals served both services, and the air force adopted the standard on 16 July 2019. The first F4.1 aircraft arrived at Mont-de-Marsan in March 2023. ECE 1/30 evaluated it, the standard was adopted that August, and on 23 February 2024 the air force declared full operational capability — the first F4.1 air-policing alert was flown from this base. F4.1 added the Thales Scorpion helmet sight, hardened connectivity and improvements to SPECTRA and the RBE2 AESA radar.

The most recent example is the fastest. On 31 December 2025 the DGA contracted a laser-guided 68 mm rocket capability for the Rafale, to give a fighter a cheap way of shooting down Shahed-type drones. DGA flight testing ran at Istres and Cazaux through the first half of 2026, the missile range at Biscarrosse did its part in early July, the CEAM ran the operational firings and assessed laser designation performance, and the capability was declared usable on 7 July 2026. Less than eight months from contract to first operational capability — which is what the CEAM exists to make possible.

Aviation came to Mont-de-Marsan in 1911, when René Labouchère flew from the Hippodrome des Grands Pins on 1 May and a crowd of ten thousand came to watch. Georges Guynemer was among the pilots trained on the racecourse field during the First World War. The town laid out a proper aerodrome of about a hundred hectares south of the hippodrome in 1932, opened it as the Aérodrome Henri Farbos on 17 June 1934, and handed it to the state on 1 June 1938.

The Germans arrived on 27 June 1940. Messerschmitt Bf 109s of Jagdgeschwader 2 Richthofen used the field that September and October, and from 1941 the Luftwaffe built the airfield that is still here — a 2,000-metre concrete runway, hangars, repair shops and dispersed storage cells, put up with French prisoners and requisitioned labour. From late 1943 it became one of the most important maritime reconnaissance stations on the Atlantic coast: Fernaufklärungsgruppe 5, flying the four-engined Junkers Ju 290, hunted Allied convoys for the U-boat command from here. Between November 1943 and mid-August 1944 the group flew 191 missions, located some twenty convoys, and lost nine aircraft and 91 men doing it.

The Americans came for it on 27 March 1944 with forty-seven Consolidated B-24 Liberators. The French account puts the toll at thirteen dead and ten wounded among civilians and Italian servicemen, and six dead on the German side. The Ju 290s and the Heinkel He 177s left in July 1944; Mont-de-Marsan was liberated on 21 August.

France took the field over on 15 July 1945 and gave it to the CEAM, which installed itself under Colonel Constantin Rozanoff on 1 November. The designation BA 118 dates from December 1948. An air-defence mission arrived in 1958 with a zone operations centre, the strategic bombers in 1964, a detection and control centre in 1969, and the air defence and control instruction centre in 1986. The base was officially named for Rozanoff on 20 July 1985. In 1991, a hundred of its people went to the Gulf while the base simultaneously hosted two hundred American servicemen and their equipment. The 91e escadre de bombardement was dissolved on 1 August 1993; strategic reconnaissance carried on with ERS 1/91 Gascogne until the last Mirage IVP was retired on 31 August 2005, and the nuclear weapons depot, DAMS 16-004, closed on 30 June 2011.

The base sits in the largest man-made forest in western Europe. Until the nineteenth century the Landes were a sandy, malarial plain of wet heath where shepherds walked on stilts; an imperial law of 19 June 1857 under Napoleon III ordered the marshes drained and the whole of it planted with maritime pine. Roughly a million hectares of forest came out of that decision, about ninety per cent of it Pinus pinaster, and with it a landscape of straight sand tracks, drainage ditches and firebreaks that happens to be ideal for military aviation: flat, empty, cheap and a long way from anywhere that complains.

It is not a benign landscape. A fire in 1949 killed 82 people, a single fire in 1942 took 66,000 hectares, and the response was over twenty-one thousand kilometres of firebreaks. Storm Klaus, on 24 January 2009, flattened timber across a quarter of the forest. Every military use of the area is conditioned by fire risk, which is why the air-to-ground range at Captieux — the Camp du Poteau, 10,000 hectares with a 45-kilometre perimeter — is surrounded by a firebreak wide enough to be visible from orbit, and why it is heath rather than plantation inside the wire. Two Natura 2000 charters apply to the base and the range together; the range is one of the last big wet-heath zones in Aquitaine and winters thousands of birds.

The clustering is the other thing the geography gives. Within a short transit are BA 120 Cazaux with its over-water ranges and the DGA’s test aircraft, the DGA missile range at Biscarrosse on the coast, BA 106 Bordeaux-Mérignac and the Dassault Aviation line that builds the Rafale, and BA 709 Cognac with the Reaper and the PC-21 school. A CEAM evaluation team can be over a live range within minutes of take-off, shoot, land, and be in a factory conference room the same afternoon. The Landes prefecture makes exactly this point when it explains why the CEAM is here rather than anywhere else: proximity to operational Rafale squadrons, to the Captieux range, and to the regional aerospace industry.

The base itself takes roughly 700 hectares of that forest, with fifteen kilometres of fence and more than six hundred buildings. It is one of the largest employers in the department, and the department has organised itself around it accordingly.

The base is two things at once. The 30e escadre de chasse, re-created on 3 September 2015, holds three Rafale squadrons — ECE 1/30 Côte d’Argent, régiment de chasse 2/30 Normandie-Niemen and escadron de chasse 3/30 Lorraine — plus ESTA 15/030 Chalosse, the technical support squadron that keeps them flying. Around them sit the CEAM, the air defence squadron EDSA 12/950 Tursan with the SAMP/T Mamba, a detection and control centre, and some sixty-six units in all. Roughly 3,500 people work here and about 45 Rafale are on strength. Two aircraft stand at immediate readiness around the clock for the permanent air-security posture over the south-west. Colonel Matthieu Cereghetti, a Rafale pilot and former squadron chief in the Normandie-Niemen, took command on 28 August 2025.

The tempo is the story of the year. On 27 January 2026, without warning, General Pierre Gaudillière of the brigade aérienne de combat ordered the wing to disperse: exercise Topaze, part of the French agile combat employment concept, scattered part of the Rafale force to Cognac, Cazaux, Mérignac and Clermont-Ferrand at no notice, then had the aircraft strike back from their host bases. In February the base was one of ten fed into the kinetic phase of exercise Orion 26, which put fifty combat aircraft, six ground-based air defence systems and 1,500 aviators into the air with German, Greek and Qatari units. In October 2025 it had hosted Volfa, running about twenty fighter sorties a day with Greek F-16s and Italian Tornados on the ramp, explicitly practising against Shahed-type drones — a target, as the wing commander noted, that is hard precisely because it is slow.

In early September 2026 four Rafale F4 of the 30e escadre left on Pégase 26, the seventh of the air force’s long-range deployments: 38 days and about 300 aviators, with three A330 MRTT and two A400M, routing over Greenland to North America and Alaska, then Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, then splitting between the Tarang Shakti exercise in India and the Indian Ocean, and finishing with Qatar and the Franco-Egyptian exercise Amun 26.

What changes under the current planning law is standards rather than bricks. The Rafale force grows towards 185 to 190 aircraft by 2030, the F4 standard fills out in increments, and the nuclear rebuild at Luxeuil takes the infrastructure money. Mont-de-Marsan’s job is the one it has had since 1945: everything new gets tried here first.