Every number I find shows that the "flyaway" unit cost for the Gripen E is about 4% higher than that of the F-35A (the closest comparable model), but its "cost per flight-hour" is a mere fraction.
Parent is very mistaken. The F-35 is famous for taking a long time to turn around, for long repair times, and being non-mission capable frequently.
It's also absurdly expensive to maintain. it requires special hangers and maintenance bays, all up to US requirements.
Even the US military has to use Lockheed to do all the work.
The F-35 is a pork trough, designed to provide employment and jobs more than defense.
And anyone buying it is locked into wonderous maintenance costs, all benefitting US employees.
One telling sign of this is that Gripens are designed to be maintained anywhere. You know, like when you're in a thing called a "war", and your bases have been blown up?
You can turn around some Gripens in 30 minutes with them landing on a highway.
Try that with a princess like the F-35.
I prefer to have planes which are designed to be in the air, instead of to provide jobs.
The latest report on the F-35 by the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation [1] (typically referenced as DOT&E) describes an aircraft that struggles to meet its operational goals, with under 50% of the fleet fully mission capable at any given time. In short, the F-35, while a very capable military aircraft when fully operational, is also a "hangar queen".
"The F-35 fleet can only perform the full range of its combat roles 30% of the time. This unreliability renders the entire program ineffective."
"The services consider an aircraft as mission capable if it can perform at least one of the program’s assigned missions. Such a threshold may be appropriate for a program like the C-17 transport, which has essentially a single mission. For a multi-role program like the F-35, however, a different standard should be used. Because the F-35 is designed to perform many missions, from delivering nuclear weapons to supporting troops on the ground, program officials aren’t even using the right yardstick to measure the aircraft’s performance.
Fortunately, such a yardstick does exist. It is the full mission capable rate, or the percentage of aircraft available to perform all the assigned missions. The testing director said the full mission capable rate standard is “a better evaluation of combat readiness” for the F-35 program. When this higher standard is applied to the F-35 fleet, the magnitude of the program’s failure becomes clear: DOT&E reports the full mission capable rate for the F-35 fleet was 30% in 2023."
Essentially, if a plane they approach cannot perform the role, they don't mark it as bad and move on until they find a plane capable, as long as the F-35 can perform a role.
Not very helpful if you need all planes for combat, or troop support immediately. Not very helpful if, unlike the US, you only have 70 planes spread across 5 bases.
This comes across as really uniformed. Gripen is a pinnacle of aerospace engineering, providing abilities to handle unique infrastructural and geographical scenarios present in Sweden and northern Europe. It covers all abilities you would otherwise get with an F-35 at a third of the cost. It is simply remarkable how genius it is.
It lacks the range and, most significantly, low-observability of the F-35.
Gripen is a 1980s design updated with the latest software, just like Typhoon and Rafale. The F-35 is a 2000s design, there's just no way to close the stealth gap with it.
Stealth gets a lot less effective when either bistatic or passive radar is used. I'm fairly certain that we'll find out in the long run that it's been countered by our adversaries.
This vulnerability is why KrakenSDR had to pull one of their git repos a few years ago.
Stealth might help at long ranges, but think of it like locks on doors, only effective at keeping honest people out.
"Cripples" might be stressing things a bit hard. Modern near-peer warfare is network-centric - you don't need your radar to be perfect if your AWACs can share a 300km lock over Link 16. Similarly, active radar SEAD is just one option, and passive homing/home-on-jam should also be fine for anti-radiation strikes (though I still wouldn't want to send a Gripen on a Wild Weasel mission). It isn't a Marine or Navy plane, so it really doesn't have to fill the Joint Strike Fighter role in it's entirety.
I'm a huge F-35 fan myself, so I'm pretty hard-pressed to undersell the plane compared to other single-engine fighters. The Gripen isn't equipped to handle contested airspace whatsoever, the F-35 is absolutely king in that department. That said, a Gripen armed with Meteors is a mean payload even compared to an F-15 lugging around AMRAAMs. Unless you have expeditionary/naval operation roles to fill, the Gripen isn't lacking much that a normal customer would want.
