On 1 July 2005 the SEPECAT Jaguar was withdrawn from French service, and the ceremony was held at Saint-Dizier because Saint-Dizier was where the type had lived since 1973. Escadron de chasse 1/7 Provence (fighter squadron) handed in its Jaguar A and E and waited. Eleven months later, on 27 June 2006, the first Dassault Rafale built for a front-line French fighter squadron landed on runway 11/29. The armée de l’air had taken Rafale before — the evaluation unit at Mont-de-Marsan had them first — but this was the aircraft arriving where it would be flown in anger.

The build-up was quick. By January 2007 the Provence had twenty Rafale B and C on charge. On 12 March 2007 three of them flew to Dushanbe in Tajikistan, and two days later they were over Afghanistan. On 28 March 2007 a Saint-Dizier Rafale dropped the type’s first bomb in combat, a GBU-12 laser-guided weapon in support of Dutch troops, with the laser held by a naval Super Étendard. For an aircraft that had spent twenty years being accused of never having fought, that fortnight settled the argument.

The base also became the schoolhouse. Escadron de transformation Rafale 2/92 Aquitaine was stood up at Saint-Dizier on 6 October 2010 and redesignated escadron de transformation Rafale 3/4 Aquitaine on 1 September 2016. It converts air force pilots and weapon systems officers, it converts Marine nationale (French Navy) crews, and it trains the crews of export customers — which is why a naval Rafale M is normally parked among the air force jets in Haute-Marne.

It was here, too, that Capitaine Claire Mérouze became the first woman in the world to fly the Rafale. Posted to Saint-Dizier in January 2012, the daughter of a Mirage IV navigator, she converted on the Aquitaine and joined the Provence, the twelfth Frenchwoman to hold a fighter pilot’s brevet. The Provence itself left on 24 June 2016, moving permanently to Al Dhafra in the United Arab Emirates and swapping places with escadron de chasse 3/30 Lorraine, which passed through Saint-Dizier on its way to Mont-de-Marsan.

France has three nuclear components. The ballistic missile submarines of the Force océanique stratégique carry the strategic weight; the Force aéronavale nucléaire puts an ASMPA-R missile on carrier Rafale M; and the Forces aériennes stratégiques, created on 14 January 1964, fly the land-based air-delivered weapon. The FAS took their first alert on 8 October 1964 with a Mirage IV and an AN-11 bomb, and have not been off alert since. The air component is now two squadrons, and both of them are at Saint-Dizier.

Escadron de chasse 1/4 Gascogne inherits the number plate of the first nuclear squadron France ever had — the Mirage IV unit that dropped the country’s first air-delivered atomic bomb during Opération Tamouré on 19 July 1966. It was re-raised on the Rafale B at Saint-Dizier in 2009, and on 1 July 2010 the ASMP-A missile was declared operational on the Rafale F3 here. Escadron de chasse 2/4 La Fayette, whose lineage runs to the American volunteers of 1916 and whose aircraft carry a Sioux head, received its first Rafale B at Saint-Dizier in August 2015 and completed the change at a ceremony on 29 August 2018. That day ended the Mirage 2000N era and made the airborne deterrent all-Rafale.

The weapon is a ramjet missile: roughly 5.4 metres long, 840 kilograms, about Mach 3, a reach of the order of 500 kilometres, carrying a tête nucléaire aéroportée (airborne nuclear warhead) of about 300 kilotonnes. The renovated ASMPA-R first flew from a Rafale in an operational exercise on 22 May 2024 and was declared in service on 10 November 2025. Its successor, the hypersonic ASN4G, is expected around 2035.

What makes the base different is the plumbing. Between 2008 and 2012 France reorganised its special munitions depots; of five, three were rebuilt as dépôts vecteurs ASMPA — at Istres, Avord and Saint-Dizier — and two were closed. Missile bodies live in the depot and are issued to the squadron; warheads are kept separately in their own guarded zone. France does not confirm where warheads sit, and nothing here should be read as saying that it does. What is published is the structure: three bases the air force calls strategic, one of which parks the aircraft, the missiles and the crews on the same field.

The Forces aériennes stratégiques run about seventy training events a year. Two of them matter more than the rest. The first is called Banco. Real ASMPA-R missiles come out of the depot and go under real Rafale, the crews go to the cockpit, and the exercise ends with the aircraft loaded and the pilots strapped in, waiting for an order that does not come. General Bruno Maigret, then commanding the FAS, told the Assemblée nationale defence committee in 2019 that this often happens after a week spent in buried command posts waiting. The aircraft never take off with a live weapon: flying with a real nuclear weapon is forbidden in France in peacetime. Banco is run roughly twice a year and touches nearly every warhead the FAS hold.

The second is Poker, and Poker is the flight. Four times a year the FAS mount a complete nuclear raid with an inert missile — a full-size mock-up under the aircraft. A typical profile has the Airbus A330 MRTT Phénix tankers lifting off at dusk, the Rafale B of the 4e escadre de chasse (4th Fighter Wing) and their escorts joining them at high level over Brittany, a first refuelling, then a transit out over the Bay of Biscay, across the Pyrenees and into the Mediterranean. A last top-up, and the package fights its way through a simulated enemy — other French fighters and real ground-based air defences — over the Massif Central and central France, penetrates at very low level and makes a fictitious launch.

Poker can involve up to fifty aircraft plus ground troops deploying air defences and securing the bases used. It is not secret. NOTAMs go out in advance, and tankers and AWACS are visible on public flight-tracking sites, which is part of the point: a deterrent nobody can see working is not deterring anybody. The edition of 16–17 March 2026 used about forty aircraft, Rafale B from Saint-Dizier, Phénix from Istres and a Boeing E-3F for the air picture, across airspace from Brittany to the Massif Central.

There are smaller relatives. Belote is a reduced Poker. Excalibur is a live firing of an inert ASMP-A. And the FAS periodically stretch the geography to make a point: in January 2019 two Rafale flew more than 9,000 kilometres from La Réunion to metropolitan France in a raid lasting over twelve hours, escorted by Mirage 2000 and opposed by simulated hostile aircraft.

The 7e escadre de chasse arrived from Nancy-Ochey in May 1973, the first wing anywhere to convert to the Anglo-French SEPECAT Jaguar. Three squadrons flew from Saint-Dizier: escadron de chasse 1/7 Provence from 1973 to 2005, escadron de chasse 3/7 Languedoc from 1973 to 2001, and escadron de chasse 2/7 Argonne, the training unit, from 1974 to 2001. Two of the three were nuclear squadrons. Their war role until 1993 was the AN-52 free-fall tactical bomb, France’s “final warning” weapon, and the Provence took its first nuclear alert on 1 September 1974.

It had earned it the hard way. On 25 July 1974 a Jaguar A of the Provence released an AN-52 in the test called Maquis, an 8-kilotonne shot carrying an experimental core intended for Pluton warheads. It was the last of only three French nuclear tests ever conducted by dropping a weapon from an aeroplane.

The conventional record is long. From November 1977 to May 1978 French Jaguars flew from Dakar against Polisario columns in Mauritania in Opération Lamantin. They were in Chad almost continuously — Tacaud, Manta, Épervier — including the raid on the Libyan airfield at Ouadi Doum on 16 February 1986 and the strike on its radars on 7 January 1987. At least four aircraft and two pilots were lost in the Chadian operations.

The best-known mission is also the worst. On 17 January 1991 Jaguars flew the French air force’s first offensive mission of the Gulf War, against the Kuwaiti airfield at Al-Jaber, with 250-kilogram bombs and BLG-66 Bélouga cluster munitions. The run-in was at thirty metres. On the way out the formation crossed an Iraqi command post at seven metres that was not marked on anybody’s chart; four aircraft were hit by anti-aircraft fire and every subsequent French mission was flown higher. French Jaguars finished the war with 615 sorties and 1,088 flying hours. Turkey, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo followed. The 7e escadre itself was dissolved on 22 June 1995 when the armée de l’air abolished the wing level, but its squadrons kept flying, and the type bowed out at Saint-Dizier on 1 July 2005 with about 1,700 French pilots trained on it there.

An aeroplane came down near Saint-Dizier in August 1910 and drew a crowd, and the townspeople — the bragards — formed an aviation committee to build a field and give it to the ministry of war. The terrain de Robinson was formally inaugurated on 24 August 1913. Military aviation returned in September 1939, and a succession of fighter and reconnaissance groups used it until June 1940. Fifteen kilometres away at Orconte, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry arrived on 3 December 1939 to fly with groupe de reconnaissance 2/33; the winter he spent in an unheated farmhouse there became Pilote de guerre.

The Germans held the field until August 1944 and used it hard: Jagdgeschwader 54 with Bf 109E in 1941, Nachtjagdgeschwader 4 with Bf 110 and Do 217 night fighters from 1942 to 1944, Jagdgeschwader 27 in 1943, NJG 1 and NJG 5 in 1944, Jagdgeschwader 301 in June 1944, and in June and July 1944 Kampfgeschwader 101 with Ju 88 and the extraordinary Mistel composite — an unmanned explosive-filled bomber flown from a fighter mounted on its back — in the weeks when the Mistel was first used against the invasion fleet off Normandy.

American forces took the airfield in September 1944 and ran it as Advanced Landing Ground A-64. Headquarters 100th Fighter Wing sat there from September to December 1944, and the 27th, 367th and 405th Fighter Groups flew P-47 Thunderbolts from it alongside the 10th Reconnaissance Group. It went back to French control on 5 July 1945.

Reconstruction began in 1949 and Base aérienne 113 was formally created in 1951, the rebuild finishing in 1956 with a jet runway and modern hangars. That same year Colonel René Gavoille, commanding the base, chose his old comrade Saint-Exupéry as its patron; the memorial stele was unveiled on 29 March 1957. Then came the bomb. In 1965 escadron de bombardement 2/94 Marne (bomber squadron) formed at Saint-Dizier with six Dassault Mirage IVA, one of nine Mirage IV squadrons dispersed across France, and held nuclear alert from the base until it was dissolved on 1 July 1988. Saint-Dizier has therefore been a nuclear base, in one form or another, for sixty years.

The base today is the 4e escadre de chasse, reformed at Saint-Dizier on 26 August 2015: the Gascogne, the La Fayette, the Aquitaine conversion squadron and escadron de soutien technique aéronautique 15/4 Haute-Marne (aircraft maintenance squadron). It also has its own ground-based air defence unit, escadron de défense sol-air 5/950 Barrois, with the Franco-Italian SAMP/T Mamba and Aster 30 missiles — a rare thing for a French air base, and an obvious thing for this one. The Barrois fired its first operational Mamba round at the DGA range at Biscarrosse on 20 May 2014.

The arithmetic is tight. The armée de l’air et de l’espace had 109 Rafale in 2024 against a planning-law target of 225 combat aircraft by 2035, and 24 of its Rafale had already gone to Greece and Croatia. General Jérôme Bellanger, the chief of staff, said in 2025 that the service was over-using its Rafale by fifteen per cent to hold its operational contracts. The nuclear squadrons are protected inside that squeeze rather than exempt from it: twenty of the forty-two aircraft ordered in January 2024 have been deferred to 2033–34 so that they arrive in the F5 standard, the standard that will carry the ASN4G.

Saint-Dizier will soon stop being the only airborne nuclear base. Base aérienne 116 Luxeuil-Saint-Sauveur is being rebuilt from 2027 to 2035 for at least 1.5 billion euros to take two new nuclear Rafale squadrons and a depot for the ASN4G, roughly doubling its population to about 2,000. Saint-Dizier keeps its own role, and gained a piece of the future on 8 October 2024, when the Forces aériennes stratégiques marked sixty years on the base and the minister used the occasion to launch the stealth combat drone that will fly alongside the Rafale F5.

It remains a large employer in a thin part of France. An INSEE study published in October 2024 counted 2,024 people working on the base — 1,932 military and 92 civilians — plus 192 reservists, and found that close to 3,800 people across a 110-commune area draw income from it, roughly one resident in twenty. The base is also learning to look up: in early September 2026 the air force trialled a tethered surveillance balloon flown at about 200 metres over the field, with an electro-optical and infrared sensor feeding the protection squadron directly — a plain answer to the drone incursions troubling NATO nuclear-related sites.