There is a way the U.S. could play hardball with Canada, if the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney decides it wants to limit its purchase of F-35s in favour of the Gripen.
Critics who favour the Lockheed-Martin stealth fighter have long argued that the Swedish-built Gripen would not be interoperable with American aircraft and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).
That’s not what you see at the NATO air policing mission in Iceland, where Danish-owned F-35s have been training and operating alongside Swedish JAS-39 Gripens-Cs.
Commanders of both the Swedish and Danish air forces, speaking at the airfield in Keflavik on Tuesday, said the aircraft have been performing well together.
American approval required for system that allows Gripens and F-35s to communicate
Just means we need more Gripens, it’s not a red card because we don’t want any American tech in our military.
If they go that far, then yes, the only reasonable response would be to stop any purchases of US equipment altogether.
I doubt they will, for that exact reason. It’s the kind of hardball move I’m sure Trump would very much like to pull, but I’m also sure that his handlers / diaper changers recognize how damaging it would be, not just to any future sales to Canada, but future sales across the world. Nobody wants to buy from a store that constantly changes or refuses to honour their own terms of service. There are already concerns that the US might stop offering firmware updates to buyers of the F-35, but those concern are at least hypothetical, currently. If they pull this “red card” it very much stops being hypothetical. Maybe you sell a few more units to buyers who are currently locked in (that might even include Canada), but you lose basically any future business from everyone who has better options.
What is the difference if we buy 20 fighter jets or zero?
Our biggest threats have 250X that number. Canadians are delusional if they think a few subs or fighter jets is going to stop the US. But if we go into massive debt, drop healthcare and education for more toys, we might as well be the US.
Imagine you and twenty of your friends have ganged up on someone in a fight. Would feel exactly as confident if they were armed with a knife as you would if they were armed with nothing?
It’s not always about being able to win the fight. Sometimes it’s just about making the fight costly enough that the other party decides its not worth it.
This, by the way, is exactly why our military is still pushing for the F-35, despite the very high political costs and risks that it now comes with. When you get down to the brass tacks of what an air war between Canada and Russia would look like, the unavoidable factor is that Russia simply does not have any 5th gen fighters. Even on paper their only claimed 5th gen simply isn’t. The specs they’ve announced for the Su-57 it barely qualify as stealthy. And it’s well known that Russia overstates their specs (whereas NATO tends to understate ours). We also know from what’s been happening Ukraine that Russian radar is dogshit.
Everything in Russia’s current air fleet, including their grand total of 6 “5th gen” fighters, would get stomped into the ground by an F-35. Stealth is a huge force multiplier. When you can kill the enemy without them even seeing you, it’s not even a fight, it’s just a turkey shoot. Even a small fleet of F-35s would inflict unimaginable damage on the Russian air force. They’d be limited only by their ability to maintain locations to launch from, and their available supply of fuel, parts and munitions.
Something like that dramatically alters the calculations when it comes to considering any kind of attack.
There’s a pretty massive qualitative difference between 1 and 0. A small amount of jets means we can actually respond to flyover probes. Yes, the threat is asymmetric, but there has to be some token ability to respond.
I’d rather have a whole bunch of anti air systems with thousands of drones
It’ll be a fraction of the cost of the F35 or the grippen, won’t help you with attacking but fuck does it work well with defense, see Ukraine
Canada’s geography isn’t exactly conducive to relying on anti-air systems alone. It’s the same reason Trump’s golden dome is a fantasy; he’s trying to recreate Iron Dome, but Iron Dome only works because Isreal is tiny. Canada isn’t.
There’s also a huge cost to air defense systems. Just for some rough perspective, a single Patriot missile system costs as much as 10 F-35s. A Patriot covers a radius of about 160km, an F-35, without midair refueling, covers a radius of about 1800km.
You simply cannot create the same kind of air defence network with ground batteries only as you can with aerial interceptors, and when you need to cover a country as large as ours that makes a huge difference. Far from being a fraction of the cost, your proposal would actually be orders magnitude more expensive.
Even when you throw drones into the picture they’re simply not going to adjust that calculation in any meaningful way. A drone capable of intercepting enemy aircraft or missiles as effectively as a fighter plane is going to cost as much as a fighter plane. There’s really no avoiding that.
Yeah. I’d like to see fighter planes, or heavy drones, built without the needs of g-sensitive, heat-intolerant, oxygen-needing meatsacks. The major problem is communication links and jamming, but on our own territory, keeping a pilot in a bunker with a good link to a plane seems like a better bet.
This is an idea that’s been toyed with, but simply doesn’t give the same kind of situational awareness that a human pilot directly in the situation has, not to mention the issues with communication links, which not only present the problem of jamming as you said, but also make stealth much more difficult. With a human pilot, the craft can shut off all radio comms for a much lower signature.
What we’re seeing instead as the expected path forward is a hybrid approach; wingman drones.
You build a top of the line stealth fighter, and then you give it two drone buddies, which can be remotely fed instructions by the human operated craft. You retain situational awareness, and from a flying platform you can fall back to laser communication; unjammable and undetectable. Pilot safety is significantly enhanced because they can hang back and let the drones engage, and each pilot (a very expensive asset) can now command significantly more firepower.
Saab are working on this for their upcoming sixth gen fighter, which I’d very much like to see us collaborate on developing.
Even if they don’t go that far, anyone in our history who approved the purchase of equipment from our historically biggest enemy should be in jail.
Congratulations on your purchase of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II! Your new stealth strike fighter will enable you to rain death upon your enemies from afar like never before.
WARNING: Any use of your F-35 in conjunction with non-Lockheed branded aircraft or ground support, against unauthorized targets, or with 3rd-party non-authorized fuel or ink cartridges may impair the normal operation of your aircraft. No user-serviceable parts inside. Only authorized dealerships may repair the F-35. Attempts to disassemble the ECU may result in loss of data. Advertised maintenance costs are typical and may differ from your experience.
This is true of all CAF toys.
if we didn’t have our heads up our asses, we would take the purchase price of ONE F35 and make thousands of drones that would actually defend us.
The engines for the Gripens are also made by the US and can be restricted by them. Talk of a Rolls-Royce replacement never seem to have materialized into anything that isn’t still many years away.
TIL the Rolls-Royce thing went nowhere.
I kind of wonder if ground based missiles might be better for defending ourselves from the US, anyway. Although the US is thought to make the best there too.
Have you looked into how we’re integrating with the Golden Dome? The Over the Horizon Radar systems we bought from the Ozzies are there to integrate with the Golden Dome as part of the sensor system feeding into the Command and Control. Politically, it’s being framed as NORAD enhancement in Canada, but senior Canadian military leadership have said there have been plans to integrate into a system like the Golden Dome for years.
No, I haven’t actually. How much is even known publicly about what it is, and to what extent it’s an actual thing rather than just a Trump-brand marketing label for more air defence?
I know the name make it sound like it’s the same thing as the Iron Dome, but we’re talking about very different scales and very different threats.
There’s information if you go looking.
It’s quite different from the Iron Dome. The Iron Dome is regional batteries focused on mostly short-range missiles. The Golden Dome is air, sea, ground, cyber, and space, and it’s being set up for long-range missiles like ICBMs and hypersonic missiles and drone swarms. Space-based systems are big part of the plan.
The big plan is knitting together all of these different sensors and weapons systems into an integrated whole, stuck together by a Command and Control system.
The command and control is in the process of being set up and is planned for a first demonstration this summer. Canada’s over the horizon systems fit into that system by providing the sensor data for the lower level of the shield, below space-based systems but still long-range detection.
Canada’s engaged on the path to building this and expected to be part of the test this summer. The biggest questions for Canada going forward will be to what extent we have any say over use of response systems in our airspace, and there’s no guarantee of that.
It is something that will take many years to fully set up, but it has the top-level administration, architecture, and funding in place, and it’s moving forward on the plan.
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In that case use our F and CF series for NORAD exercises and Gripens for joint-EU and NATO exercises.
