Canadian Defense \u2060Minister David McGuinty said on Thursday he had discussed the advanced fighter jet program being pursued by Japan, Britain and Italy with his Japanese counterpart to learn more about \u200bwhat he described as a \u201cpromising initiative.\u201d<\/p>\n
The three \u200ccountries launched \u200cthe Global Combat Air Program (GCAP) \u200bin 2022 to field a next-generation stealth fighter by 2035, led by Britain\u2019s BAE Systems, Japan\u2019s Mitsubishi Heavy \u2060Industries and Italy\u2019s Leonardo. Canada\u2019s potential interest comes as the \u2060program attracts attention from potential new partners and a rival European fighter project has collapsed.<\/p>\n
Any Canadian involvement would mark \u2060GCAP\u2019s first expansion beyond its three founding members. Speculation has grown that additional \u2060countries could \u200bjoin the program, with Italian Defence Minister \u200bGuido Crosetto saying this month he would welcome \u200bpartners \u200cwilling to share development costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are interested in learning more about it. I\u2019ll take it back to my team and see what it looks \u200clike,\u201d McGuinty said in an interview after meeting Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi in Tokyo on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Officials in Rome and executives at Leonardo have floated Canada, Saudi \u200bArabia \u200band Germany as potential future partners \u200bor observers.<\/p>\n
Any expansion of GCAP would require the \u2060agreement of its three founding members.<\/p>\n
GCAP is one of two major Western sixth-generation fighter projects, alongside the U.S. Air Force\u2019s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program.<\/p>\n
A \u200brival European effort, the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), that was being developed by France, Germany and Spain, has collapsed amid a dispute between Airbus and Dassault Aviation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadian Defense \u2060Minister David McGuinty said on Thursday he had discussed the advanced fighter jet program being pursued…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":102956,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17,26938,1871,10304,5046,37160],"class_list":["post-102955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-canada","tag-canada-japan-relations","tag-defense","tag-gcap","tag-italy","tag-u-k"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}