On January 7, 2021, L'Armée de l'Air et de l'Espace (AAE; French Air and Space Force) received the first of 55 upgraded Mirage 2000Ds from Dassault Aviation. Since then, six more examples have been delivered, while 13 others are projected to have their upgrade work finished this year. While Dassault is upgrading the Mirage 2000Ds, a unit from the AAE together with the Aviation Unit of the Direction Générale de l'Armement (DGA) has been testing new systems and components of the mid-life upgraded fighter jets since 2017.
In this article, we review the recent fate of the project. According to the French Military Programming Law for 2009 to 2014, there had been planned to upgrade a fleet of 71 Mirage 2000Ds of the AAE to fill the lack of ground-attack aircraft after the retirement of the Mirage F1CT fighter jets. Due to budgetary issues resulting from extensive costs of the Dassault Rafale programme, the French Defence Minister, Hervé Morin, postponed the mid-life upgrade (MLU) programme for the Mirage 2000D fleet. The cost of modernisation of each Mirage 2000D had been estimated to be €10m.
Then, in late 2015, the French government decided to proceed with upgrading the Mirage 2000D fleet because the
