It is true, but it is not this plan that does it. It happened before, and was evident already at the disastrous meeting in the White House earlier this year, as well as at the Munich conference. This is just a repeat.
The correct EU response would be to cancel hundreds of F-35 orders across the board, and instead, five more Gripen factories being built across the continent.
That is the only signal that would make a difference. Carney's Canada knows what's up.
It depends on what you mean by "correct" here. It would piss off the United States, which might secure a short-term political goal for some people, but the Gripen is not a complete replacement for what the F-35 offers. The Gripen is a platform tailored around Sweden's need for survivable road-mobile air dominance; the F-35 fulfills a nearly-opposite role as a preemptive strike aircraft intended for fully-intact threat environments.
I'm a huge fan of the Gripen myself, and it's arguably the better fighter aircraft if you're in a WVR dogfight against a monster airframe like the Su-35. That being said, air dominance is not the only role the F-35 was evaluated on. There are lots of great European fighter aircraft, but pretty much nothing that rivals the F-35 in strike capacity.
According to your own analysis, does not the Gripen fit NATO's goals much more than than the F-35 A?
NATO, until it was first destroyed via Desert Storm, was just supposed to defend us all from the imperialist ambitions of Moscow.
The Gripen has a dispersed field capability that can be supported by only 2 trained men, and a few conscripts + 2 x 20 TU containers... vs. F-35 A... I feel like only one product is correct for the EU, which has only defensive ambitions.
Meanwhile, with F-35 A, not only is the supply chain a question, but it cannot be deployed unless the selling country, and selling company, feels like it on that given day. This is right to repair/right to save your own effing country. Can someone please explain to me how we are at this point, in 2025?
I'm absolutely empathetic to the European sentiment - the Gripen should be a mainstay in EU air forces on merit alone, F-35 be damned. But many of the nations buying the F-35 aren't being swindled into it, they're filling a capability gap that really does threaten Russia in a meaningful way. Both systems can work together to leverage their advantages, and are designed to cooperate using Link 16. It doesn't have to be one-or-the-other, and buying both systems hedges against the possibility of either side pulling support.
If Europe doesn't want a deep strike capability against Russia, don't buy the F-35. Fill the gap with a regional stealth-bomber program like China did, or pool the various European stealth fighter projects together in a serious joint project. As-is, the only competitor to the F-35 can be bought from China, who will be more capricious with the supply chain in the long run.
> This proposal turns the USA into an accomplice of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
I could not agree more.