I will never understand what the hell went through Trudeau’s mind when he thought going through with the F-35 deal was a good move.
He literally told Canadians that the Liberals would never go ahead with buying F-35s, and then trapped us into this predicament by going back on his word when it was clear as day how hilariously unreliable the aircraft were.
Nope, you’re probably thinking of the F-22. The F-35 got it back down to reasonable hanger time and care, at the cost of a long, multi-trillion dollar development period.
Per the other commenter the Gripen is a bit cheaper yet, but that’s because it’s built like a 70’s car or something. All off-the-shelf parts combined in obvious ways. The cost of that is it shows up to radar like a 70’s car. It’s basically just a very different aircraft for doing different things.
I mean, saying that any single factor is why you “lose a war” is completely ignoring how incredibly complex warfare is. No one loses a war because of one piece of equipment.
But if we were to take that framework as true, it would be just as fair to say that you can lose a war by having inferior equipment.
There are a lot of factors that go into military procurement decisions. That’s a part (albeit a small one) of why they take so damn long.
It would, if you know nothing about how the Canadian military operates.
We’re a small country. We’ve always had to punch above our weight in any military conflict we’re involved in. The most expensive, hard to replace, and hard to maintain element of any weapon system isn’t the weapon, it’s the human operator. So for our purposes, giving that human operator the best equipment possible has always been the better choice.
In air combat the better platform wins. Dogfighting is a thing of the past. You’re not beating highly superior aircraft with guts and barrel rolls. We know this, because we’ve tested it. We’ve studied it. There’s real hard science that goes into this stuff. If we have an aircraft that’s broadly on par with everything the Russians have, that’s a speed bump. They’ll bury our air force in numbers and not even notice. If we have an aircraft that’s vastly superior to everything the Russians have, that’s a real threat. They might still have the upper hand, for sure, but if our pilots are shooting theirs down at a ten, twenty or fifty to one rate (all realistic numbers for the kind of hypothetical match ups we’re talking about here) that suddenly becomes a very, very expensive war to contemplate getting yourself into.
Binzy_Boi
CanadaPlus