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.

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.

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

It was really expensive and he wanted to make budget cuts.

It would make it harder to criticise, which he’s pretty much openly said is his only job and concern right now.

I mean, if we play all our cards at once, we have no cards left for the next thing, and in the process that might raise enough American political will to invade for real.

It should be and I think is all on the table, though, and I have no problem with it if they want to escalate, because we also need to raise political will to sever our ties for good.