It's Time For Canada To Get A Gripen
Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MBS) visited the Trump White House last week and went home with a deal to buy American F-35 fighter jets. In Canada, we are reconsidering our plan to do the same, and with good reason.
The F-35, it has long been noted, is the most expensive weapons platform created in the history of warfare. It is expensive to buy and expensive to maintain. More importantly, it forces an on-going subservient relationship with an unstable United States.
The Saudi purchase of the jets has raised widespread concerns about a generations old American principle, known simply as QME. QME is the “Qualitative Military Edge”, wherein the United States guarantees that Israel always has the best weapons in the Middle East, and has done so since the 1960s. If Saudi Arabia is to get F-35s as Israel already has, will that not forfeit Israel’s QME?
The solution to that problem, for the American government, is to sell Saudia Arabia deliberately inferior aircraft, in spite of assurances from President Trump to the contrary.
The relative quality of weapons between Israel and Saudia Arabia is not Canada’s primary concern here. Rather, the issue is that the United States can sell different grades of F-35s at will and maintains control of these expensive weapons after their sale when the United States is no longer a dependable and reliable military ally for Canada.
Whether the F-35s are technologically superior today is a matter of debate. Until they face Chinese J-35s or Russian SU-57s in combat, we won’t know for sure. What we do know is that the J-35 looks suspiciously like the F-35 would with two engines, and was developed after the American program’s data was compromised by the Chinese earlier in the development cycle. There is no guarantee that the F-35’s stealth characteristics actually work, given that the main adversaries have had all the needed data to test against for close to two decades.
Canada committed to buying the F-35 after a decade of equivocation, which was split between recoiling at the absurd cost of the aircraft and hoping that drone technology would advance to the point of making manned aircraft obsolete before we had to make a decision.
But what is the purpose of a small and expensive fleet of relatively slow, complex aircraft, whose capabilities are controlled by a country whose intentions toward us are suddenly unclear? In order to cover Canada airspace and NATO obligations, larger numbers of cheaper and faster planes would seem to make more sense. If we intend to defend our own sovereignty, having aircraft we control would seem rather important.
In a country spanning nearly 10 million square kilometers, we operate just two fighter bases: Cold Lake, Alberta, and Bagotville, Quebec. These bases are exactly 1500 nautical miles apart, which happens to be exactly the maximum range of the F-35, and are nearly an hour and a half apart at the aircraft’s absolute top speed at high altitude of Mach 1.6. At high cost and restricted to prepared runways, the F-35 is of limited use in a hot war should Canada ever find itself in one, and if the United States isn’t on our side there’s no guarantee these clunky weapons will even work as intended.
Three days ago, President Trump went on the offensive after several military veterans serving in elected office circlated a video reminding members of the US military that they have an obligation to refuse unlawful orders. Why would the American President care if he did not intend to issue unlawful orders?
In that context, and in the context of continued attacks on Canada’s sovereignty by the United States, we cannot allow ourselves to rely on the long-term commitment of the F-35.
There is a better option. Sweden’s Gripen JAS-39 E/F aircraft are a fraction the price to purchase, a fraction of the price to maintain, are designed for their country’s Arctic service, and can take off and land on public roads and Canada’s abundant tiny runways. The aircraft come with a technology transfer to Canada that make them one step below domestic aircraft, and allow a modular approach to its features and maintenance.
We could buy several times as many Gripens as we could F-35s for the same money, train and maintain a larger pilot base, have better control of our technology, and have an aircraft that can serve as a decentralised combat system should Canada find itself in an unexpected war, staging them out in small groups across the country.
Given all this, why would Canada want the albatross of the American F-35s hanging around our necks?
Let’s get aircraft, technology, and sovereignty appropriate to our needs, and offer the 16 F-35s we are already getting to one of our allies who have committed to the platform or, better, donate them to Ukraine.
Oh wait, we can’t. We need American permission for that, too — and at the moment the Americans are fighting for Ukraine to concede the war to Russia.