this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, if there's some payoff coming or starting over is actually just as expensive, sometimes a sunk cost is worth considering.

Why not the Gripen?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I believe the main reasons Gripen was rejected by the 2022 report was lack of any Stealth capability, rarer among allies, and higher cost. Practically, while the Gripen is a pretty good 4th gen aircraft, non-stealth aircraft really arn’t capible of combating any airforce with stealth aircraft, and so Canada would be pretty much limited to only fighting Russia or smaller regional powers, and no small part of Canada’s NATO focus is on deterrence in Asia, where Gripen can’t really do much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

non-stealth aircraft really arn’t capible of combating any airforce with stealth aircraft,

That's a pretty absolute take. Can you back that up a bit? It lowers survivability, for sure, but even stealth aircraft aren't invisible, especially versus a technologically sophisticated adversary with cutting-edge sensors and networked warfare like we would be. The Gripen also has the advantage in that it can be operated from dispersed airfields with little supply chain, so it doesn't even have to spend too much time in the air - it was designed for a defencive war against a superior foe.

I believe the main reasons Gripen was rejected by the 2022 report was lack of any Stealth capability, rarer among allies, and higher cost.

Wait, higher cost? What for? I might actually have to read that. You'd think the minimal supply considerations and it being an older aircraft would make it cheap.

From what I've heard it was basically a forgone conclusion. The airforce really wanted the F-35 from the start, and were probably still in denial about if the good times with the US would ever end.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Stealth aircraft arn’t invisible, but if you need to get within 50km to even know there is an enemy aircraft there while they can can shoot at you from 500km away you are not going to achieve much beyond slightly depleting the enemy missile supply.

It also means that the enemy now needs advanced radars to be deployed every 100km to even know you’re there, as compared to deploying 1/10 the radars at every 1000km for the same effect. If you want the coverage to know where the enemy is above your country and not just they entered it, that goes up by the square root.

As for cost, the main driving factor is that there are ~160 Gripens flying for 6 countries, and 1100 F-35s flying for 10 countries, plus another thousand or so on order by the US itself. When it comes to extremely intricate and complex development and tooling heavy devices like aircraft, economies of scale matter a lot.

Getting the Gripen E down to ~121m CAD was a remarkable achievement in economic efficiency, no seriously this was incrediblely impressive, that involved significant compromises for cost, nevertheless it doesn’t change that Lockheed Martin can sell a more capible fighter at ~117m CAD just by being able to have an actual assembly line and tons of spare parts.