https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-weighing-cutting-f-35-jet-order-to-buy-alternatives-carney/

Canada now the 2nd country after Portugal to officially rethink their decision to invest into this hardware and the perceived security umbrella that might no longer come with it. Isn’t it time Switzerland looked at this again? I for one never bought the „cheapest package“ argument. International media is full of billions of cost overruns for this project. Thoughts? Referendum?

What’s going on here, I feel like this an Intransparent issue and has been all along.

by emptyquant

6 comments

  1. Switzerland may or may not reconsider this after everyone else did, but not before.

  2. Afaik the overruns were mainly in the development phase of the project. And that Phase is over, now it’s iterative updates. The early adopters paid partly for this development.
    Also the overall costs aren’t even unprecedented. Development of the F14 was more expensive when adjusted for inflation.

  3. We don’t know what Switzerland got from the USA in return from buying its F35s. It’s not a one sided deal. It may or may not still be very valuable to Switzerland. Unlike the military protection that USA offered to some EU countries.

  4. I don’t know whether a Referendum would even work in this scenario.
    For the Gripen a law was passed to finance them, then the Referendum was launched, got the signatures and then the law was rejected via vote.

    The credit for the F35s was granted in ’22. Regardless of whether we could’ve even launched a Referendum against that, the time for that is long gone by now.

    Only thing that might have some success would be a Initiative banning the gov from these planes

  5. Also the AVS money in America when the oligarchs are set of devaluating the dollar and crash everything 

  6. We could either cancel, which costs 700million. But thats a pretty cheap price for our indepence.

    Or we could buy a second tranche of european made jets to augment the F35 force. That way we have both the best jet (in case it happens to be working because a reasonable US president might be in office by the time we need them.

    And also jetd that definetly work, even if they are a bit less good. In case of war these could be used for missions that dont necessarily require risking an F35.

    We need more jets anyway and to triple our defense spending. 36 jets was found to be adequate for policing our airspace, not fighting wars.

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