Canada needs to put the Gripen factory on an accelerated track, cancel the entire F-35 order, and move ahead with an immediate purchase of min. 50 Gripens using the F-35 funds to cover the gap and train up pilots until Gripens start rolling out of the factory.
Canada’s complete F-35 promise will cost the country $28,000,000,000 ($28B) with billions more needed to bring them up to full operational efficiency, and yet the Gripen costs only $65,000,000 ($65M) per aircraft, allowing us to buy 430 fully-functional Gripen jets instead of 88 partially functional F-35 jets.
Remember: tech superiority does not win battles. Sheer numbers do. WWII demonstrated this overwhelmingly on many different fronts, with many different technologies.
As just one example, the Germans had Tiger tanks that could face off against 6-8 Shermans at a time and win with barely a scratch on their hull, but when 10, 20, or even more came roaring over the hilltop for every Tiger that was fielded, their tech superiority ended being absolutely useless. They got overrun and overwhelmed with sheer numbers.
The F35 can be rendered equally as useless with enough Gripens in the air.
And the Gripens don’t come with a remote kill switch like the F-35 does.
Agree with everything you say, and yes quantity has a quality of its own, but I think that in addition we should fly the Gripens and the F35s that we have against each other and figure out how to beat the F35s with the Gripens. Then share that info with our new allies. If we need to modify or augment the Gripens then we can work with the Swedes to do that.
We can already figure much of that out from the technological specifications of the F-35. Simply looking at the capabilities can give us strong clues on how to neuter or at least limit the inherent F-35 advantages from a tech standpoint.
The rest of that comes down to how the pilot behaves, and what tactics they have been trained in. And this is where differences in training, corps attitudes, and even pilot personalities can dramatically affect performance.
And while I fully agree with you in regards to pilot training, our problem is that a Canadian fighter pilot is likely to behave (tactic chain, decision trees, emotional responses, etc.) considerably differently than an American fighter pilot. As such, while we need to train our pilots in Gripen jets against F-35 jets in combat-like scenarios, we need to do so against American pilots, not Canadian ones.
And that’s the tough part - how do we get the American administration to willingly play along with activities that are obviously meant to train our pilots to fight theirs, and gain a consistent toehold against pilots in F-35s even if it means losing a few Gripens for every one of their F-35s. It needs to be done with a great deal of subtlety and subterfuge.
I’m not suggesting we ask the Americans to help us discover exploits, and I’m sure there are more than just pilot-related exploits. These are very complex systems.
Competent pilots cost too. We need to invest in unmanned capabilities much more. All humans should just be behind their desks fighting a war remotely from Hawaii or something
As far as regular CPUs go, it’s not a rumour. Any AMD or Intel CPU made in the last 15 years can be remotely disabled via the network, even if the device is turned off (but connected to power).
I don’t know how it behaves on ARM (so Apple’s SOCs or your phone) but on Intel or AMD there are two manifestations:
They can intercept data and manipulate memory, and that’s pretty much transparent, you wouldn’t know unless you were a very advanced user running specific tests.
Or they can literally just brick the chip. It blows a few electronic fuses and corrupts it’s own firmware, you press the button to turn on the device and it doesn’t respond and will never respond again. Those fuses are permanent, once bricked its gone.
Canada needs to put the Gripen factory on an accelerated track, cancel the entire F-35 order, and move ahead with an immediate purchase of min. 50 Gripens using the F-35 funds to cover the gap and train up pilots until Gripens start rolling out of the factory.
Canada’s complete F-35 promise will cost the country $28,000,000,000 ($28B) with billions more needed to bring them up to full operational efficiency, and yet the Gripen costs only $65,000,000 ($65M) per aircraft, allowing us to buy 430 fully-functional Gripen jets instead of 88 partially functional F-35 jets.
Remember: tech superiority does not win battles. Sheer numbers do. WWII demonstrated this overwhelmingly on many different fronts, with many different technologies.
As just one example, the Germans had Tiger tanks that could face off against 6-8 Shermans at a time and win with barely a scratch on their hull, but when 10, 20, or even more came roaring over the hilltop for every Tiger that was fielded, their tech superiority ended being absolutely useless. They got overrun and overwhelmed with sheer numbers.
The F35 can be rendered equally as useless with enough Gripens in the air.
And the Gripens don’t come with a remote kill switch like the F-35 does.
Both are waste of time and money. US has over 2000 fighter jets. In hand.
Agree with everything you say, and yes quantity has a quality of its own, but I think that in addition we should fly the Gripens and the F35s that we have against each other and figure out how to beat the F35s with the Gripens. Then share that info with our new allies. If we need to modify or augment the Gripens then we can work with the Swedes to do that.
We can already figure much of that out from the technological specifications of the F-35. Simply looking at the capabilities can give us strong clues on how to neuter or at least limit the inherent F-35 advantages from a tech standpoint.
The rest of that comes down to how the pilot behaves, and what tactics they have been trained in. And this is where differences in training, corps attitudes, and even pilot personalities can dramatically affect performance.
And while I fully agree with you in regards to pilot training, our problem is that a Canadian fighter pilot is likely to behave (tactic chain, decision trees, emotional responses, etc.) considerably differently than an American fighter pilot. As such, while we need to train our pilots in Gripen jets against F-35 jets in combat-like scenarios, we need to do so against American pilots, not Canadian ones.
And that’s the tough part - how do we get the American administration to willingly play along with activities that are obviously meant to train our pilots to fight theirs, and gain a consistent toehold against pilots in F-35s even if it means losing a few Gripens for every one of their F-35s. It needs to be done with a great deal of subtlety and subterfuge.
I’m not suggesting we ask the Americans to help us discover exploits, and I’m sure there are more than just pilot-related exploits. These are very complex systems.
Competent pilots cost too. We need to invest in unmanned capabilities much more. All humans should just be behind their desks fighting a war remotely from Hawaii or something
That’s a funny Canadian place.
Ikr. It’s a tropical island in canada
Canada and EU really need to reconsider their option on this.
Us gear has kill switches in it.
Not only that, for decades now it’s been rumoured the us has secret code on most all computers, a kill switch, blue screen of death.
I bet corporations have their own.
As far as regular CPUs go, it’s not a rumour. Any AMD or Intel CPU made in the last 15 years can be remotely disabled via the network, even if the device is turned off (but connected to power).
Do you know how that manifests? Like if they killswitched it remotely, how would it stop working do we know?
I don’t know how it behaves on ARM (so Apple’s SOCs or your phone) but on Intel or AMD there are two manifestations:
They can intercept data and manipulate memory, and that’s pretty much transparent, you wouldn’t know unless you were a very advanced user running specific tests.
Or they can literally just brick the chip. It blows a few electronic fuses and corrupts it’s own firmware, you press the button to turn on the device and it doesn’t respond and will never respond again. Those fuses are permanent, once bricked its gone.