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While 16 F-35 fighters remain contractually committed for delivery starting this year, the full 88-jet procurement is stalled amidst trade friction with the Trump administration.
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Rising program costs—now estimated at $30 billion—have reopened the door for Saab’s JAS 39 Gripen E.
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The Gripen offers superior industrial benefits, including 12,600 domestic jobs and Arctic-optimized maintenance.
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Ottawa must now balance the F-35’s unmatched NORAD interoperability against the Gripen’s economic sovereignty as the aging CF-18 Hornet fleet reaches its structur
On one side no one wants the American option.
On the other side they cost way more.
There’s a reason it’s not debated.
Cut your losses, and fuck america.
Canada needs to start building its own shit.
We had blackberry, we had Avro aero,we are capable of building things. We have good education. We should be building things and selling them. We dont uave a large population, but we are capable of that.
I fully expect Canada to go ahead with more F-35s. Not the full order, but more than just the current 16. We seem to be all-in on NORAD/Golden Dome participation and investment and the Arctic bases being invested in are being invested in with F-35 compatability in mind. Looks like a slow walk because the direction we’re headed will be politically unpopular.
its not, were not buying those fucking planes
I will never understand what the hell went through Trudeau’s mind when he thought going through with the F-35 deal was a good move.
He literally told Canadians that the Liberals would never go ahead with buying F-35s, and then trapped us into this predicament by going back on his word when it was clear as day how hilariously unreliable the aircraft were.
They’re exceptionally reliable, and better than anything else at what they do. He went back on this word because he was actually put into rooms with airforce experts who made that clear, and he didn’t expect the US to turn evil at the time.
Cost Per Flying Hour F-35A: $36,000 - $48,000 USD Gripen E/F: $7,000 - $36,200 USD Difference: ~25-75% cheaper for Gripen (varies by source) Maintenance Hours Per Sortie F-35: 20-25 man-hours Gripen: 6-8 man-hours Difference: Gripen requires ~70% less maintenance labor Operational Availability (Readiness) F-35: 70-75% Gripen: High 90% range Difference: Gripen achieves roughly 2x readiness rate Total Lifecycle Cost (8,000-hour lifespan) F-35: ~$400 million (operations only) Gripen E: ~$180 million (operations only) Difference: F-35 costs ~2.2x more to operate
Nice. I’m guessing the F-16 would be closer to the F-35?
And then any other stealth aircraft is going to blow both out of the water.
I thought they said the F35s were terriblly expensive to maintain per hour of flying. Things can seem reliable in air if most of their time is on the ground getting replacement parts, and adjustments, but that quickly can lose a war by expenses.
Nope, you’re probably thinking of the F-22. The F-35 got it back down to reasonable hanger time and care, at the cost of a long, multi-trillion dollar development period.
Per the other commenter the Gripen is a bit cheaper yet, but that’s because it’s built like a car from the 70’s or something. All off-the-shelf parts combined in obvious ways with lots of allowances. The cost of that is it shows up to radar like a 70’s car. It’s basically just a very different aircraft for doing different things.
They’re getting blasted out of the air in Iran right now. One confirmed with a second loss possible. How many F-16s has Ukraine lost in combat? I’m not saying the F-16 is a better aircraft than the F-35 but I think it does show that “stealth” isn’t all that and an “old” aircraft like the F-16 or (for that matter) Gripen, with a modern sensor and weapons load-out, is actually pretty similar in capability.
Then what’s dropping all the bombs straight onto Iran, lol?
Meanwhile, Ukraine keeps their F-16s well behind enemy lines fighting cheap drones.
I understand the whole Norad interoperability, but I truly agree with your thought.
Justin was neither competent nor as straight laced as he seemed, quite a few times his admin was caught doing really shady shit, stealing gov money, mispending budgets, giving friends contracts for nothing. so im not going pretend this decision was made with any real thinking in mind.
Buying F35, at this point, is a bribe to appease impetulent Trump
Imagine being dumb enough to invest into the military industrial complex of a country that’s actively threatening to invade you.
Imagine being dumb enough to invest into the military industrial complex of a country that’s actively threatening to invade you.
And to buy defensive weapons that can be summarily and remotely shut down by that invading country.
That would be the most moronic decision possible.
The Gripen may not be a 1:1 match with the F-35, but neither was the Sherman a 1:1 match with the Nazi Tiger tank. It took an average of 8 Shermans being KO’d to take out a single Tiger. But when 10, 20, or even more Shermans could be fielded for every Tiger that hit the field, victory came down to numbers, not technological superiority. As has been copiously demonstrated across nearly every conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries.
And instead of 88 F-35 aircraft, that exact same dollar value could buy us 420 Gripen aircraft, at even less on-going maintenance costs on an overall basis.
True, even with 420 Gripens we don’t stand any chance of defending ourselves. But effective defense is not the goal… the goal is to make any invasion as prohibitively expensive for America as possible. And 420 Gripens that cannot be remotely shut down is that answer.
As we’re seeing in Iran, you don’t actually need jets to take on F-35s at all. You just need a lot of missiles and targeting systems that home on the giant heat signature.
This! Swarms of FPV drones is what Russia and Ukraine use. Even at 10% target hit because of defense systems, you can inflict considerable damages.
Yeah, it looks like the whole 20th century military doctrine is obsolete now. Investing in expensive toys like jets makes little sense especially if the goal is self defense.
If Ukraine had 420 Gripens and the trained pilots to fly them, their war would be a totally different scenario.
And the appeasement will only last a few weeks max, before he gets distracted by something else
My name’s not Max, but thanks for the info.
EDIT: Aw, they edited the capitalization, making my dumb joke… more dumb.
The Iranians shooting down an F-35 is a game changer. The F-35 is almost invisible to AMERICAN technology, but they never tested it against FOREIGN technology. And if the Iranians have technology to track it, guaranteed the Russians and Chinese have the technology.
The TLDR: it is now official - the F-35 is obsolete.
Iranians have used conventional optical tech. The promise of the F35 is to be detected late by conventional long range radar. They were never supposed to be invisible or quiet.
Granted that makes the stealth advantage very limited in terms of usage: coming from far away undetected. Then be very visible.
Besides yes, China claims they can detect them with their satellites network and a France military equipment maker is apparently developing a radar that detects stealth jets. So that advantage is apparently not going to last.
No, the Iranians haven’t discovered a kind of radio wave that the rest of us just missed. The “almost” in almost invisible means something, and there’s a variety of situations that can dramatically increase the radar signature, or that can make radar not the important consideration at all.
Modern “stealth” aircraft like the F35 uses split-ring resonator patterns in the skin of the aircraft. This is much more durable than the iron spheres suspended in a top coat that the F-22 and older aircraft use. (There’s a reason why the F-22 can’t be left out in the rain). The problem is that the resonator pattern is highly dependent on radar frequency. So yeah, the Iranians may very well have found radar frequencies that aren’t absorbed very well by the F-35.
The details are classified, but just a look at the visible design and common sense about if the engineers were dumb will tell you they didn’t only pay attention to a few frequencies. The coating isn’t only (a variety of) split-ring resonators either, it sounds like there is a chemical component of some kind.
From what I’ve heard, any frequencies where they’re weak will be very low ones, which both require bigger, more obvious equipment and are less precise. And even then it might be a matter of a basketball-sized signature rather than a golf ball-sized one, and will be somewhat directional.
Gripen!
A mixed fleet is probably optimal. The Grippens are far more pragmatic to form the bulk of our fighter capability. A stealth fighter has unique benefits so keeping the 16 already committed to isn’t unreasonable until 6th gen and beyond can be procured from actual allies.
The big mistake here is going all in on 88 F-35, when the future of aerospace defense is AI drone and missile/counter-missile defense. Not just because of American backstabbing. It’s costs far exceeds its strategic value and in true Canadian fashion our defense paradigms are always one to three steps behind.
Edit: Militaries win with effective + cheap + scale. Not ultra-expensive showpieces (heh) with critical flaws that do not scale.
It’d be way more expensive to split the order. Canada needs arctic recon and interception. That’s all it has ever needed. Gripen was built to do that mission. Going with Gripen would both put Canada with a cheaper platform that fulfills the mission, and it sticks a thumb in the eye of Trump’s war machine.
That’s all it has ever needed.
I appreciate the truth of your comment, but respectfully disagree.
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You don’t build a defense force and strategy for the conflict you hope happens. Hubris kills.
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Our needs include all of NATO’s needs, and to a far far smaller degree, any UN peacekeeking or similar function.
A 5th gen stealth fighter presents desirable attributes for specific purposes, but to your point they aren’t the bulk of the work to be done.
The cost saving of a single fleet of F-35 also inject various fragilities of their own. Not the least of which is the catastrophic losses from a single plane going down from anything ranging from enemy action to training accident to supply chains fuckery.
I won’t shed a single tear for the F-35 if we cancel the whole lot. But having some 5th gen makes sense. We should be going with the Brit or French led consortiums of middle powers, not US, Russia or China.
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Exactly, there may be times a topline fighter is needed, but most missions for air superiority aren’t going to be best plane vs. best plane.
We’ve seen in WWII, and we see in the asymmetric age of Ukraine and Iran wars, that a horde of thousand dollar problems wear down a million dollar problem solver.
The f-35s have kill switches in them. A fusible link that bricks them. Do not buy them.
I’m also not convinced their stealth capability is that great.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the US knew of flaws and that’s why they’re fine selling them.
I wanna say the Danish have already jail broken theirs, not saying we should get them and jail brake them just saying it is possible.
100% Gripen
I’m not even sure that’s a good deal, honestly. They wouldn’t be any good on missions abroad, and would they actually last long if the US invaded? Hopefully the military is thinking it through carefully, and the politicians are listening.
Maybe we buy 30 billion in RBS SAMs from Sweden instead.
I don’t think our conventional military would last long if the US invaded regardless of the F35 or Gripen. The only hope in that situation is that the US sucks at occupying territory, and they would double suck in winter. That is if Daniel Smith, Scot Moe, Ford and their followers don’t just roll out the red carpet.
The neat thing about the Gripen is that it theoretically could run in a guerilla-type scenario. It takes an unskilled ground crew of IIRC five, and can take off and land on a dirt runway. If that’s enough, I have no idea.
The F-35 could be useful for hitting the US back in the very short term, but is very dependent on working airbase infrastructure and supply chains, which would be obliterated shortly.
We’ve already spent a quarter billion on the RBS-70s, which adds up to around 75 MANPADs occupiers would have to worry about when landing and taking off, maybe more if there’s more missiles in the order than launchers.
Have the Iranians shot down a Gripen yet?
Have they ever had a Gripen within missile range?
Grippens flying over Canadian airspace are outside of Iran’s range, so we should be fine there.
The 12600 jobs should be the only number the government should take into account.
