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Fucking finally!
I find it wild that we are still considering buying military planes from a country that is threatening our sovereignty lol. I'm sure it's more complex but ..... also, it doesn't have to be. Just buy from somewhere else.
I think as of now RCAF still wants them and the deal isn't off yet. I imagine it's also a card that's used in the negotiations with the US. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up staying with the F35s.
It's understandable that the RCAF still wants it; There's literally no other option with the same capabilities. The Gripen is an excellent plane, but it's not a fifth gen fighter. Unless we want to start buying planes from China, we're SOL if we want another fifth gen option. I'm not personally advocating to continue with the purchase, I think we should go ahead and build the Gripen here in Canada and use that as a stopgap while we get on board with one of the European sixth gen fighter programs. But I can absolutely see why the RCAF doesn't feel the same way. They're a small air force and they need every advantage they can get. Based on its performance against F-16s I have no doubt the Gripen could shoot down Russian fighters at a ten to one rate, but I also have no doubt that the F-35 would be closer to a hundred to one rate (in Fermi approximation terms), and one could certainly argue that we need that if we end up on the front lines of a war with Russia.
I still lean towards the Gripen, but I'll admit I go back and forth on this. It's not a cut and dry decision either way.
Most people don't really understand the problem. It's either make a deal with an ally run by lunatics, or suffer a decade long capability gap that your military may not be able to overcome.
There are no other 5th gen options, and 4++ are becoming more vulnerable with the proliferation of effective air defense. The first available 6th gen outside of US export controls will be on the wrong side of 2030.
This is an incredibly difficult choice for Canada with no perfect options.
Both China and Russia are expanding their arctic presence. The US is electing nationalist demagogues on a platform of betraying our allies. It's possible Canada may have a peer to peer conflict in the next 5 to 10 years. Canada possibly can't afford that big of a capability gap if that's the case.
You've hit the nail on the head here.
I don't know what the right answer is on this one. On balance, I lean towards getting the Gripen as a stopgap and prioritizing access to those European sixth gen projects. Select the one that looks the best suited for our needs and go in hard on collaborating on it.
This is part of why I think the Gripen makes sense; we can build it here, which opens up the possibility of being able to build a sixth gen later, instead of having to wait in line for our order to ship. The F-35 gives us better capabilities now, but doesn't solve the underlying problems down the road.
There is, I think, a version of events where we sign a deal with Saab to build Gripens in Canada to export to buyers like Ukraine, and then go ahead and take the F-35 order anyway. Most likely, we use this to extract concessions in other areas from the Americans, pointing at our new domestic fighter plane industry as a very credible threat to walk away from the F-35 deal. Then, if we're smart about this, we continue to build up our ability to domestically produce fighter craft, with an eye on that sixth gen project. This would make a lot of sense in the context of Carney's stated goal of making Canada a defence supplier to the EU, while still leaving us with an interim platform that can handle anything the Russians throw at us.
I imagine they will stall as long as they can to see if MAGA loses their grip. 0% chance of agreeing to the rest of the F-35s if MAGA is still in power.
I hope you're right and I do think that's likely what's happening but I'm not certain.
I imagine it's also a card that's used in the negotiations with the US.
I have no doubt that it is.
A smart negotiator doesn't play all their cards at the start. They gradually bring out their various pressure points over time when it is strategic to do so. And they hold back the "nuclear option" until it becomes necessary.
Definitely didn’t have that on my bingo card. “Trump kills military industrial complex”
c'mon Canada, you can do better than "a review"
They're trying, but there are already certain commitments.
commitments to american companies?
there is no such thing as a commitment to a company of a country that threatened to invade you. sure, it can get legally messy. so be it. fuck them.
News about the kill switch hidden in Chinese built electric buses must've been a wake-up call.
US military sales, by law, all have to have US controlled kill switches. This has been true since the 80s.
Sure which law?
I won’t trust Carney to fully scrap the deal after his embarrassing apology for the Ford ad last week. Keeping it in the maybe pile is more helpful for negotiation even though we would be better off with Typhoons or Gripens.
Can you blame them? When the country that produces it elected someone so profoundly dumb, you need to be able to trust at that level.
Just to give you an idea of how FUCKED our national priorities are: If we actually buy these lemons, it will cost more to just keep them unused in hangars per year than all the biomedical research in all diseases supported by federal grants.
The fact that we are wasting tens of billions on fighter jets with foreign controlled kill switches is just proof CAF spending has nothing to do with actual defence of Canada.
The F-35s have been the kid in a toxic custody trial for fucking ever, already costing billions more than expected. The same shit happened over the F-22 and we're still using goddamn F-18s.
In the year 2125 we'll finally welcome in a new fleet of F-69's to retire a squadron of Hornets being held together by spit and glue.
If only we hadn't shit-canned the Arrow half a century ago.
The Arrow was just the 60s version of the F35. It was proper to cancel it. Tories killed off Avro because the US told them to. Then Mulroney killed off a lot of CDN industry, again, because the US told him to. Then Stephen Harper...you get the point.
Smart. Those planes come with so many strings attached they may as well be fly-by-wire.
Fly by subscription.