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Time to finally commit to ditching the F35 boondoggle.

I really hope the Grippen offer goes somewhere as someone who grew up in an RCAF family and hopefully this will go the way of the F18 in the 80s (the original plan was to buy the F 16).

For one the F 35 is not a fighter it is a strike aircraft or CAS plane. Useless unless we are tagging along with the USAF and bombing yet more countries we have no fight with.


As early as 1996 the Pentagon acknowledged the F22 and F35 projects were already using obsolete stealth tech designed to defeat 1980s air defense but were going ahead with production anyway.


Stealth is a crutch that is very very quickly becoming irrelevant. New air defense designed to track and shoot down plastic drones will make a fighter as easy to track as a cargo plane at the current pace.

One lie that has been going around is that joining the F35 program will be an in for the F22 replacement which is nonsense. That line of plane are banned from export so that is nonsense.


The F35 should be immediately dismissed as a security risk after Trump mused about getting Lockheed to put backdoors into the systems to "turn off" jets if a country pisses him off.

The F36 has the worst readiness stats of any US combat aircraft even within the USAF.

They are astronomically expensive to the point that we cannot afford enough of them for it to not be a total waste of time and money.

Furthermore you don't buy weapons from countries that threaten to annex your country. It is idiotic.



Whereas Sweden is a country that actually knows what winter is so there is no question of whether the Grippen can handle cold weather.

The RCAF Already postponed a Reaper drone order because they could not figure out how to winterize them.


With the Grippen the engines would be made in Canada by Rolls Royce, not in a country that started a trade war with us and threaten annexation.


The Grippen is actually a fighter plane not a light bomber.

They are all around cheaper and can be produced in numbers that are actually useful.

You don't have all the security risks of buying American.
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Fukfacewillie · 56-60, M
FYI, The US has over 600 operational F-35 jets across its Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. The U.S. Air Force has a total of 187 operational F-22s,

The US operates over 800 F/A-18s. Replaced the tricky and dangerous F-14s of Top Gun fame.

So, about equal numbers of 18s and 35s/22s.

The US even still uses F-15s, arguably the most successful fighter aircraft program in history. Built for air superiority verses the Soviets!
@Fukfacewillie Your own numbers illustrate the problem. The F22 was supposed to replace the F15 1 to 1 and the F35 was supposed to replace the F16, F18, the Harrier, A10 etc again on a 1 to 1 basis.


The B52 will be the first combat aircraft to serve 100 years in the USAF because the B2 and B21 are both too expensive to produce in quantity. The same problem that befell the B1B too btw.

And as for the most successful fighter program in history that again goes to the Soviets.

You have the Mig 21 and the Flanker Su 27,30, 33,34, 35,35, and J 11 variants you get into massive numbers very quickly. And the Flanker ended production in 2010 and was introduced in 1982.

The Mig 21 was produced in such quantities by so many countries I think like the AK 47 nobody is entire sure how many were produced in total.