The fiasco with the big arms deals of our army gets worse and worse on every front.

Today the Federal Council announced that only 30 instead of 36 F-35 fighter jets will be bought – and yet the price will be 400 millions higher than the "fixed price" that has been promised for 36 jets.

(And this does not yet include additional increasing costs for infrastructure, maintenance, ammunition that they "forgot" to order and much more bad news that will certainly come in the future.)

So now they're failing in both directions: they overstep the cost cap that they wanted to not overstep under any circumstances AND we STILL get fewer product delivered…

A similar debacle is happening with the ground based air defense:

You have certainly heard that the Patriot system (that was scheduled for delivery in 2026!) has now been delayed for an "uknown" amount of time but "at least five years".

But the Americans do not only not deliver the arms (that in part have already been paid for, by the way), they are also raising the price.

Now the system is supposed to cost at least 3 billions instead of 2 billions. A whopping 50% increase. We probably can consider it a "late fee"… they deliver late and we pay the fee…

Oh… and if this wasn't enough: Because the Patriots are not delivered, they now want to buy an additional ground based air defense system. Because why not organize another arms deal, after having failed grotesquely with each and every of the already approved deals which they still don't want to cancel.

Needless to say that the centrist & right wing politicians who led the country into this foreseeable clusterfuck now have the audacity to go into interviews and whine around at the same time about "why do we need to pay more money?" and "why don't we have more money?" as well as "why don't we have more arms?". Well guess what. It's because you lied to get shady deals approved and now you're acting like everything is a surprise.

Sources: https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/entscheide-zu-armee-weniger-kampfjets-zusaetzliche-luftabwehr-hoehere-mehrwertsteuer (German) ; Radio news



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b00nish

8 comments

  2. The price went up in CHF but the CHF is worth way more USD than when the deal was signed. Heads need to roll, this is unacceptable

  3. I honestly thought it couldn’t get worse when news broke about how they didn’t factor in the cost of infrastructure.

    Well… We’re dumb enough to pay anyway. We always vote for or against something without even knowing the total cost or how something is done. Tell me that we would have voted for new jets if we knew the additional cost, please, I need to hear it. Because then I know we are stupid, instead of pushovers.

  4. We could just make those deals with our reliable, direct, powerful, neighbor.

    But at least we can own the *Wälsche*! /s

  6. Meanwhile the Iran conflict clearly shows (again!) what the Ukraine war shows for years.

    If you don’t have a cheap mass produced Drones for both attacking and defending, you will loose the next war. On top of that one needs top noch battlefield communication.

    We lack both.

    But hey, lets invest 10 Milliarden CHF in to F35 that will or will not work according to our great Leader form the East.

  7. Two billion? Yeah, that’s roughly one year of sustaining SRG. And we do that every year.

  8. Its what you get when you have terrible deal makers and a terrible trade partner (the USA). We should have sticked with European partners.

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