Mooney_Driver wrote:
In that sense maybe ut is true that Saab can’t compete with the US war industry but it is certainly not because they were worse airplanes. They are also highly competitive in pricing. So why they are not much more successful has the simple reasoning of politics and pressure from the US.
Of course SAAB can’t because as you say the USA always applies strong political and economic pressure on prospective buyers. We’ve seen numerous times that the air force of a country wants SAAB aircraft while the government has chosen American aircraft for political reasons.
Airborne_Again wrote:
a country wants SAAB aircraft while the government has chosen American aircraft for political reasons
That was the case in Croatia few years ago and Israeli F16 was chosen over Gripen. Obviously it was some corruption involved because the aircrafts were total junk used in real combat and were more appropriate for a junkyard than being accepted to airforce. In the end the tender was canceled because of that and on the repeated one Rafale was chosen over Gripen because of lower overall cost.
Airborne_Again wrote:
We’ve seen numerous times that the air force of a country wants SAAB aircraft while the government has chosen American aircraft for political reasons.
Only according to SAAB I would think 
It’s rather the other way around. The only reason not to chose the F-35 is for political reasons. Either you cannot buy it due to US restrictions (which all are political), or you will not buy it due to some political or quasi-political reason. In terms of efficiency and capability in a war, the F-35 has no competition today. The only issue really is the F-35 is expensive to operate. In many circumstances it’s a waste of resources where much simpler aircraft would do just fine. The problem with that is scale and efficiency of operation. It’s cheaper to focus on one single systems than two. You have to have a really large air force to justify economically dividing recourses in several similar and often overlapping technologies.
The only non-political reason not to chose the F-35 is if another aircraft can do a similar job, but do it substantially cheaper. This aircraft does not exists. No other aircraft has the stealth capabilities.
It’s that, and there’s the fact that most NATO countries have their own military industrial complexes that is already deeply intertwined with US military companies. The F-35 and the F-16 are prime examples, but it runs much deeper and wider than that. Besides, Sweden was not even in NATO until recently. Also don’t mistake painstakingly bureaucrat thoroughness in doing multimillion governmental purchases for “fair, free and open competition”. The truth is that for Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and Italy there was never any other option but the F-35. It’s just that all other options had to be thoroughly investigated in every detail for documental purposes.
But things are obviously changing as the Ukraine war shows. Inexpensive (suicide) drones can keep on being launched, literally forever from far, far away. It’s literally like shooting down each bee in a swarm of bees. Possible perhaps for a very limited time, but super inefficient no matter how you look at it. You have to take out the queens and the nests. What is needed is stealth, range and speed. Perfect for the F-35 shooting stealth and/or supersonic cruise missiles.
The F16 was junk in real combat? Maybe the ex IAF ones were knackered – they fly a lot…
Re restricting who gets the F35, a lot is to do with the likelihood of one getting into Russian hands “too early”. Or other stuff e.g. Turkey was banned from getting it because they bought the Russian S400 and the Russians (via Turkish contacts) would be able to use the S400 to check out the F35 radar visibility
LeSving wrote:
In terms of efficiency and capability in a war, the F-35 has no competition today.
Wouldn’t F-35 require a whole lot more ground infrastructure? I mean, can it be based (at least temporarily) at improvised aerodromes like Gripen? For Ukraine, at least for some operations, it may be more important than absolute combat efficiency.
LeSving wrote:
The only issue really is the F-35 is expensive to operate. In many circumstances it’s a waste of resources where much simpler aircraft would do just fine.
That’s the point.
LeSving wrote:
In terms of efficiency and capability in a war, the F-35 has no competition today. The only issue really is the F-35 is expensive to operate. In many circumstances it’s a waste of resources where much simpler aircraft would do just fine.
At the time, the package offered by Saab was multiple times cheaper to buy and to operate for a top modern airplane. It could have been done via the normal army budget, THAT attractive it was. And IMHO at the time, it was an offer which was beyond great. The Gripen was supposed to be the replacement for the F5 and the FA18 as a single system for air policing and as an interceptor. The F35 if I remember right was at the time not even discussed, the competition was the Eurofighter and Rafale as well as the Super FA18.
The political blunder was that the minister of transport did not simply buy the Gripen out of the budget, but forced a popular decision. The result was a smear campaingn by the Greens and Left as well as some folks who wanted to force other options which in the end got the purchase defeated at a referendum. I’ve hardly ever been more frustrated at the outcome of a referendum than that one.
Today the F35 may well be the best variant available and that is what we are getting. But for a price which is massively more than the Gripen would have been.
Peter wrote:
The F16 was junk in real combat? Maybe the ex IAF ones were knackered – they fly a lot…
They were good before heavily used and consequently turned to junk.
Another well-made, gripping, and moving BBC documentary. It’s iPhone and GoPro footage from Chris Parry, a 28 year old civilian volunteer in Ukraine, interspersed with voicemails, posts, and interviews from his family, friends, girlfriend, and colleagues. The ‘old, poor, and stubborn’ refuse to evacuate, but have a change of heart, or their families want them extracted. Organised through Telegram, humanitarian workers drive 4×4s to find and rescue them. In reality it’s much harder than it sounds, as among other factors it is often in the ‘grey zone’ (basically no-man’s-land), and gps is jammed, reducing Google maps to a digital atlas. Interestingly the people doing it have considerable social media exposure, probably the best way to get donations to buy fuel and replace vehicles. Also, some of the interviews resemble the psychological effects of WWI. It’s not a happy ending: his body was returned in a prisoner exchange after an extrajudicial execution by the Wagner Group. The final note is he personally saved in excess of 400 people.
Ultranomad wrote:
Wouldn’t F-35 require a whole lot more ground infrastructure? I mean, can it be based (at least temporarily) at improvised aerodromes like Gripen? For Ukraine, at least for some operations, it may be more important than absolute combat efficiency.
No. They have already deployed the F-35 on roads in Finland. The Finnish air force have F-18 today which they used this way for decades. They will replace them with F-35, and the Norwegian air force has done several tests/exercises in this kind of operations, both in Finland and Sweden with F-35. In later years it was believed that this kind of deployment was a bit nonsensical, but the Ukraine war has showed it isn’t. In Norway, stretches of straight road are few and far apart but all the Widerøe airfields is used in a similar fashion.
Also, for years already, the F-35 have been deployed in Iceland, I think 2-4 of them, and operates there just fine with a tiny crew. The US air force used to have a small base there, but that ended in the mid 2000. From then on other NATO forces have been based there in a rolling fashion. F-16s for sure, but I would also think German/UK Eurofighters. Small scale deployment, even far away, is not foreign to European NATO forces.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
At the time, the package offered by Saab was multiple times cheaper to buy and to operate for a top modern airplane
This is not correct. The F-35 is perhaps 10-20% more expensive than the Gripen. The Rafale costs just as much as the F-35. But the Gripen is a tiny aircraft, so the operational costs are substantially less. The newest versions of the F-16, the F-16V, are equally capable (if not better all around) than both the Rafale and Gripen, and does not cost more than either of them. For all practical purposes, better here means being able to use the newest weapons and have the newest weapon systems (radar, sensors, coms and so on). Exactly what the airframe looks like, is less important, unless it is stealth. The cost therefore tends to become very similar.
