I really wish that Germany would have gone with something like the Gripen instead of buying the very few white elephants that won't actually make a difference should it come to a real war with Russia. Bonus points with the friendly Scandinavians, too, and no dependence on the madman in the white house.
However, given the current political climate mixed with nato spending that will likely go up to 5% will likely not be bad for European military suppliers (and their supply chains).
There’s a lot to criticize in the f 35 program but there seems to be enough there there for it to succeed markedly in the export market - beyond Germany there is Poland, Czech Republic, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Greece, Romania and UK — and that’s just in Europe. This includes several countries that did not historically equip with US kit (and excludes Turkey, which ordered it before it got sanctioned). You’re saying all those countries have made a huge mistake?
And how is Germany supposed to integrate French nukes on the F-35 if Scholz wants to pursue “strategic independence” now?
Also, it was likely not a matter of cost, as the US has nothing to gain from allowing Germany to use a European plane to carry their nukes in the first place when they can sell them US planes instead.
Notably, those are the capabilities that modern near-peer warfare stresses most heavily.
I'm a huge F-35 fan myself, so I'm pretty hard-pressed to undersell the plane compared to other single-engine fighters. The Gripen isn't equipped to handle contested airspace whatsoever, the F-35 is absolutely king in that department. That said, a Gripen armed with Meteors is a mean payload even compared to an F-15 lugging around AMRAAMs. Unless you have expeditionary/naval operation roles to fill, the Gripen isn't lacking much that a normal customer would want.
As for the long run I've read that the Gripen is cheaper to run.
It's also absurdly expensive to maintain. it requires special hangers and maintenance bays, all up to US requirements.
Even the US military has to use Lockheed to do all the work.
The F-35 is a pork trough, designed to provide employment and jobs more than defense.
And anyone buying it is locked into wonderous maintenance costs, all benefitting US employees.
One telling sign of this is that Gripens are designed to be maintained anywhere. You know, like when you're in a thing called a "war", and your bases have been blown up?
You can turn around some Gripens in 30 minutes with them landing on a highway.
Try that with a princess like the F-35.
I prefer to have planes which are designed to be in the air, instead of to provide jobs.
1. https://www.dote.osd.mil/Portals/97/pub/reports/FY2024/dod/2...
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/f-35-the-part-time-fighter-jet
"The F-35 fleet can only perform the full range of its combat roles 30% of the time. This unreliability renders the entire program ineffective."
"The services consider an aircraft as mission capable if it can perform at least one of the program’s assigned missions. Such a threshold may be appropriate for a program like the C-17 transport, which has essentially a single mission. For a multi-role program like the F-35, however, a different standard should be used. Because the F-35 is designed to perform many missions, from delivering nuclear weapons to supporting troops on the ground, program officials aren’t even using the right yardstick to measure the aircraft’s performance.
Fortunately, such a yardstick does exist. It is the full mission capable rate, or the percentage of aircraft available to perform all the assigned missions. The testing director said the full mission capable rate standard is “a better evaluation of combat readiness” for the F-35 program. When this higher standard is applied to the F-35 fleet, the magnitude of the program’s failure becomes clear: DOT&E reports the full mission capable rate for the F-35 fleet was 30% in 2023."
Essentially, if a plane they approach cannot perform the role, they don't mark it as bad and move on until they find a plane capable, as long as the F-35 can perform a role.
Not very helpful if you need all planes for combat, or troop support immediately. Not very helpful if, unlike the US, you only have 70 planes spread across 5 bases.
Gripens shot down: 0
Q.E.D. /s
The Gripen is fine for what it is. But it's very small with limited thrust so performance goes to crap when you load it up with a bunch of external stores for a long range strike mission.
Economy of scale continues to rule all, basically, and there are already 3x as many Money-Gobbling Monstrosities in the air as there are Gripens.
“Oh you are correct, it is a school, I see it now »
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/aerospace-and-defense/ou...
Until we hear from captains who actually fly the aircraft, we will not know if this technology even works. Of course they will not be allowed to speak freely.
In Germany, the clueless Blackrock chancellor will of course back up all of this.
This demonstration is interesting. Basically they are trialing the concept of having planes without pilots. Which of course turns them into big drones. Lots of people talking about this but not a lot of companies demonstrating they can do it. I think that might stimulate sales a lot more than some panel work.
1: https://embraer.com/global/en/news?slug=1207196-gripen-e-pro...
Maybe in the future wars will involve sending multimodal LLMs in charge of fighter jets to strike enemy country's infrastructure targets with minimal loss to human life.
If there’s something pilots really don’t like, it’s when someone else does things without them knowing exactly what, when and why. There’s a reason you separate pilot flying from pilot monitoring.
Automated systems are obviously crucial but they need to be so reliable and predictable that the pilot can form a mental model of how they work. If not, even simple systems like MCAS can wreak havoc. It’s like having a silent copilot fiddling on the controls - even the ”right” decision can cause problems. This is similar in AVs - when you have L3 autonomy you end up in awkward inbetween split-brain in-between states, that can result in new failure modes.
> Maybe in the future wars will involve sending multimodal LLMs in charge of fighter jets
Probably not LLMs but yeah, it feels like this is the type of tech that belongs in a UAV without life support systems. We are probably in the last generation or two with humans in the cockpit anyway.
Refernece: https://youtu.be/A7FPenztrcw?si=-_s-kQ_D-nCUWJWh&t=2276 Disclaimer: i work on Hopsworks
cheschire•11h ago
Was not expecting planes.
Hamuko•10h ago
technothrasher•9h ago
jen729w•8h ago
dismalaf•8h ago
JoachimS•5h ago
SAAB Automobile was split out from SAAB AB in 1990 with General Motors (GM) taking a 51% stake, and was fully a part of GM ten years later. GM then tried to build SAABs on GM platforms which meant the quality tanked and tanked the company too. And as another posted, What was left became Nevs.
Wikipedia has a good writeup on SAAB, with its many divisions. It's a bit like Volvo. Both companies have had divisions that makes automobiles, heavy vehicles and other types of products. Volvo Cars was sold off from Volvo AB to Ford. The heavy vehicle division of SAAB (Scania) is now part of Volkswagen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_AB