Supporters of Canada’s F-35 purchase point to the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts that Canadian companies have earned by supplying parts for the U.S. aircraft. That, in turn, has sustained or created Canadian aerospace jobs. But on Feb. 28, the National Post reported that Trump has told Lockheed Martin he wants those jobs back in the U.S. when the Canadian contracts come up for renewal.
During the 2015 election campaign, Justin Trudeau vowed his government would never purchase the F-35.
As prime minister, Trudeau continued to point out the Canadian military had no need for the F-35 and he blamed the Conservatives for agreeing to purchase a problem-plagued fighter jet. But, with the 2023 announcement, the Liberals not only committed to the acquisition, but also increased the number of jets to be bought to 88 from the 65 the Conservatives had wanted.
If only we had made a decision not to scrap the Avro Arrow. Thanks Diefenbaker.
the buck stops here
Doesn’t give an actual reason
It was really expensive and he wanted to make budget cuts.
The Ottawa Citizen is American owned media pretending to be Canadian, infiltrating Canadian culture and politics.
Gripen might be a stopgap, but it is an older platform. At least with updates it’s at least considered a “4.5” generation fighter. F35 is pretty much the best option atm.
Planning ahead though, Canada needs to get involved with either GCAP (Global Combat Air Platform or FCAS (Future Combat Air System).
We can’t realistically pull off another Avro Arrow with modern 5th/6th generation features by ourselves. We can partner with more reliable allies though, and help bolster our own defence aerospace industry at the same time. In either GCAP or FCAS, we would be the junior partner though.
Well, stealth is part of the definition of 5th gen, so the F-35 is kind of the only one in production. The Chinese and Russian equivalents are rumoured to be not actually that stealthy.
Ignoring the “generations”, Gripen vs. F-35 is an apples-to-oranges comparison; they follow totally different philosophies.
Gripens are designed to be a workable fighter jet, while being operable out of an improvised runway with a small, untrained ground crew. It has air intakes that are resistant to swallowing rocks and only needs 500m to take off, for example. Notably, Sweden was preparing to slow down an invasion by a neighboring superior force with it until their allies could arrive, and that’s reminiscent of our situation now.
Meanwhile, F-35s are designed for general air operations in a large military, while being stealthy. They managed very impressively few sacrifices on maintainability and performance to get that stealth, but it still needs a massive supply chain to run. You’re not launching it from somewhere in the bush. I’m not even sure if a standard airport will cut it. Stealth is nice, though, for obvious reasons.
They both are NATO compliant and have network-centric warfare capabilities
I think Canada needs to accept a stopgap measure - the Gripen, Typhoon, Rafale, or Super Hornet - and dive headfirst into GCAP. FCAS is tempting as well, but GCAP is farther along and the countries are probably closer in goals to Canada.
I agree.
GCAP includes Japan (CPTPP partner), and they seem very motivated to not dawdle with getting a modern fighter. GCAP also includes the UK (CANZUK + NATO) and Italy (CETA/EU+NATO).
FCAS is France, Germany and Spain, off the top of my head, and has much less urgency. Of course that could be changing. They’re all EU and NATO, so more eggs in a single basket, but more reliable than US.
One other edge to GCAP is that Sweden had considered joining GCAP, but backed out. They might get back in maybe? Saab is pretty damn competent as well. It would be an even better team. Plus if we went with Gripen and already had some cooperation with Saab, could be even easier to work together.
Perun had a good video a little while back… here it is https://youtu.be/TTjdEtHYDJ4
I remember before the purchase was made, I was really hoping the government would purchase the Swedish Saab Gripen. I think it was one of the finalists for consideration (that’s what I remembered from a few news casts at the time, but not sure if it was an actual finalist, or just someone saying they thought it would be a good option.)
The main reason for me thinking we should have gone with the Saab, was that I trusted buying from Sweden more than the US. I can see the US putting some systems in place that could give them control or some way to negatively affect the F-35s. I remember someone saying that countries don’t have friends, only interests, but I’d still trust Sweden more than the US to not betray us in some way.
It was a serious finalist, and that’s even more impressive when you considered that our airforce went into the bid already knowing they wanted the F-35.
They kept the bid’s website up, and IIRC basically said “we’re around if you change your mind”.
I remember someone saying that countries don’t have friends, only interests
Charles de Gaulle. He was full of shit on that one, though. Countries have domestic politics.
There’s a problem with the engine. It’s an US design and the US just blocked a sell to Colombia. I think Saab should make another design with the Typhoon engine or some other European engine that has roughly the same size and push.
The engine was originally of Volvo design
It’s a General Electric F404 license.
Yes, on the newer versions. The earlier versions still in use, have the Volvo engine installed.
Then why the US can veto it’s sell to Colombia?
Because they are buying the newer version…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_RM12
That’s the engine of the Grippen.
Saab Gripen
The fighter from the 80s?
The US is still reliant on the B-52 for most of it’s bombing, and it’s from… 1952.
In both cases, the internals have been utterly and completely updated, and the shape of airframe basically isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing.
Gripen E is newer than the F35
Yes, but it’s been updated a lot since then, I think the current iteration is the E-series.
F16 (70s)? F18 (70s)? B2 (80s)? F22 (80s)?
The F22 is not from the 1980s.
It’s design is from the 80s. It was first built in the 90s. The maiden flight of the prototype was in 1990.
Get drones and missiles instead. Stockpile them in locations kept secret from the US. Refit our submarines so they’re capable of launching missiles again. Keep a few subs in the Caribbean at all times so they can hit their King’s winter palace in Florida.
That would be the best deterrent, other than nukes of course… which we’d need missiles for anyway.
I’m not sure how serious your comment is but anyway…what you’re describing is a decades-long reorientation of military doctrine and procurement strategy. Getting a different multi-role fighter is already a huge expense with lots of ramifications but no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Edit: IMO, if you really wanted to alter air force strategy to deter the US, you should look to Sweden and Finland who have been facing an asymmetric threat for decades. Aquire the Gripen, train with the Swedes in how to run and operate a distributed air force of small independent units capable of generating and performing missions from random roads in the woods.
Are you suggesting that CAF fighting against US air power with our own air power has a chance of success?
The only interest the Trump regime has is monetary. Drones and missiles would inflict damage to the US, and if we keep their locations secret we’d have second strike capability. To achieve deterrence we’d only need to have the capability of inflicting enough damage to the US economy to cost the ruling oligarchy enough money to not be worthwhile to them.
The only immediate threat to Canada is the US right now. Europe won’t have a fifth gen fighter for quite some time, we’d obviously get cut off from parts for F-35s if there were a conflict with the US. We’ll need time recruit more people into the military to operate any plane and time to train them. We can start buying and producing drones in a much shorter time frame, which is critical given the pace Trump is betraying US allies.
Canada has a shit load of random roads in the woods, so it makes sense
Canada can perhaps purchase from Turkiye or South Korea. Turkiye’s fifth gen fighter had its maiden flight recently but it is still a few years away from entering service.
This would be easier if another ally (or an ally, rather) made a 5th gen fighter, but there are none. We’d be stuck either with ageing platforms or waiting another 10-15 years for Eoropeans to finish one of the 5th gens they’re working on.
The problem is that in the event of a conflict with the US, those jets would be entirely unusable because they’d shut them down. And we’d be billions of dollars down.
It would be better to spend that money elsewhere, even if it’s out of date, than to have nothing.
At that point China, Russia and America will be at their 6th
China and America kinda already are, China has it’s J-36 and J-50 prototypes flying right now, America supposedly flew a prototype associated with it’s next-gen fighter program, but there’s just some pictures of airframes on tarmac that nobody can identify so they assume it must be the next-gen fighter.
Screw this “waiting another 10-15 years.” We need to join the GCAP program, and get seriously active.
Lead time is necessarily immense, but we could both shorten it and improve the end product.
“Waiting for someone else to develop” has been a symptom of Canada’s Aerospace industry since the Arrow was shitcanned, and has crept into our national subconscious stream. We need to attack that attitude.
I’d be on board with that, but it doesn’t solve the short-term problem. I seriously doubt our CF-18s will last another 15 years.
True enough, but we can get stopgap gen 4.5 fighters at about half the price of the F-35, and with a vastly lower operational cost.
Get a fleet of Gripen Es, and run them in parallel with our existing Hornets, replacing the Hornets as they age out over the next decade or so. By then the new GCAP fighter should be in full production.
How long would it take SAAB to ramp up? We’re supposed to receive the first tranche of F35s next year.
Well thats what we need to be putting our money in right now (speaking as a european). Even if america does not turn full authoritarian in the next 4 years and we get them back to our site, we can not sit this out right now. We need to be able to fight for our own interests, thats one of the few things Trump is right about (even though it is simply an excuse to drop us).
South Korea won’t sell theirs will they?
Oh well
So we’ve apparently committed to buying 88 of these things. What direction out of the contract we have, and what are the consequences?
If our European friends want to start a made in Europe defense plan, ordering a boatload of next generation fighter jets from them seems helpful…
Europe doesn’t have a 5th gen fighter, and they’re beholden enough to the US that they did nothing when we blew up their natural gas pipeline, forcing them to buy our natural gas at exorbitant prices, during winter and are trying to fund our war even after we’ve stopped. America’s other vassals aren’t going to help you stop America.
China exports the J-35, Russia exports the Su-57. Making Lockheed stock crater when even Canada abandons them would light a fire under more congress member’s asses than anything else you can do.
Then again, it’s not like GD, LM, and Boeing would ever let their politicians fuck up the bag.
We’ve already seen that Boeing is willing and able to cause accidental falls from balconies.
So buy from Russia instead because the US has become a Russian puppet and we can’t trust them anymore?
Yeah we feel that issue as well. Hindsight being what it is we should have bought the Rafaele
The contract needs to be cancelled ASAP !!!
Even funnier - putin has all the backdoors into American weaponry from trump’s first term in office. This made the F-35 obsolete just as they were figuring out how to keep it in the air - you see… it had this crashing problem for years…
RIP canada
