“...Are French munitions any good?...”
In the mid ‘80’s I worked for an American military supplier subsidiary of Shchlumberger. The French companies tell the French military what the military is going to buy. As a result, they were still building a licensed Ford flathead V8 in the ‘60’s until the powerplant was so outdated it couldn’t power later vehicles. We would receive equipment we needed to build into our systems along with all the data saying it passed tests. But it didn’t work. Breaking the seals and opening it up we found it was lacking critical components. So, the data was a pure fraud so they could bill our company for the product. They said it was almost time for holidays in France and they had to ship it. They’d follow up with the finished components later. They booked a fraudulent sale so they’d get on time bonuses and we ate dirt in front of our customers. As far as quality, their hardware was moderately good but nothing exciting. An engineer once told me, “the French won’t copy anybody. And, NOBODY copies the French.”
Reminds me of the early 90s when some hard disk manufacturers were caught shipping actual bricks