It's possible, switzerland.

Spain rules out buying F-35, choosing between Eurofighter or FCAS | Reuters

by swissthoemu

8 comments

  1. How do the Eurofighter, FCAS and F35 stack against each other?

    edit: asked chatgpt this question

    wasn’t aware that they are 3 distinct airplane generations

    Basically Eurofighter is available, faster and costs more but cheaper to operate than F35. Focused on air superiority and multirole.

    F35 is slightly slower, 10-15y younger, focused on stealth multirole.

    FCAS is only expected to be available in 2040.

    Made me wonder why these are the 3 options. They don’t seem to compete with each other.

  2. “Spain is no longer considering the option of buying U.S.-made F-35”. You do know that Switzerland signed the agreement?

  3. The big difference is that Switzerland has the contract signed for the F35. Spain does not.

    The first jet the Swiss Army had decided was the Gripen. Then it ended in a vote that was refused because you had the left that was opposed to buying a jet and a significant part of the pro army parties and the army itself that was not happy with the Gripen selection (they wanted a fancier jet like the Rafale).

    Then they restarted the selection process and the F35 came out of it. We then voted and the vote was barely in favour of the credit.

  4. It’s just political posturing from Sanchez, he never intended to buy it in the first place

  6. Ok, but I would argue that the situation is a bit different.

    Spain was considering the F-35 among others and probably chose the Eurofighter because the Trump administration behaves like an insufferable bully and it’s about time someone shows them the finger.

    We (as in we the Swiss people, since there has been a referendum on this) already chose the F-35 in 2019, knowing full well what we were buying and from who. Trump was already in power in 2019.

    So the political decision to not buy the jets from the US should have been made *then*. I don’t know if we can back out without penalties, maybe we can and I could even agree to doing that.

    The only thing we can do is to make the *financial* decision to back out because they changed the price on us, but even more than towards the US we should seriously discuss the incompetence of our government.

    I’m all for decentralization, direct democracy and if not small government at least a not-too-large government, but Amherd, Cassis and KKS look to me like fucking amateurs.

    “But they told us it was a fixed price! You can’t get angry at us guys…!”. Jesus Christ, you’re not buying a 10 year old BMW from Goran in Dübendorf, you’re buying fucking fighter jets. Double check, maybe?

    “But Don told me it was only 15%! Can’t blame me!”. No one forces you to become a Bundesrat. If you do, better get your shit together and grow a pair. Understanding Americans are not to be trusted should be basic stuff for someone with the level of access to informations that a Bundesrat has.

  7. I think that the rest of Europe tend to have a wrong view about Spain internal politics. Do you know why Spain is down the list in terms of donated weapons to Ukraine? Because international affairs dont give votes here in Spain, the electorate couldnt care less about international politics. The reason why we dont buy f35 or ramp up military spending is because simply it doesnt give votes, Spain is an anomaly amongst European countries as foreign policy is not important to us. We dont talk about ukraine here, we didnt even know about the f 35, is something people dont even discuss about because they dont care. Foreign policy is only used as a tool to discredit you contrary here “Look how we follow EU guidelines, thats something the opposition wouldnt do hahaha” meanwhile the EU is asking where the next generation funds are and we dont even answer the phone, because we dont care, and thats the norm with spanish politicians. Apart from that, we dont even have money anyways, the government prefers to try and spend everything they can on public pensions to try and convince the 8.000.000 retirees to vote them

  8. Artificially limiting the products you consider is a decision. A bad one indeed.

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