this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
279 points (97.9% liked)

Canada

8550 readers
1930 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
279
Defence analysts warn U.S. will control key systems on F-35 fighter jets, putting Canada at risk (ottawacitizen.com)
submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
79 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Supporters of Canada’s F-35 purchase point to the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts that Canadian companies have earned by supplying parts for the U.S. aircraft. That, in turn, has sustained or created Canadian aerospace jobs. But on Feb. 28, the National Post reported that Trump has told Lockheed Martin he wants those jobs back in the U.S. when the Canadian contracts come up for renewal.

During the 2015 election campaign, Justin Trudeau vowed his government would never purchase the F-35.

As prime minister, Trudeau continued to point out the Canadian military had no need for the F-35 and he blamed the Conservatives for agreeing to purchase a problem-plagued fighter jet. But, with the 2023 announcement, the Liberals not only committed to the acquisition, but also increased the number of jets to be bought to 88 from the 65 the Conservatives had wanted.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

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