I find the Canada effort particularly puzzling. Outside of a few goofballs with blogs nobody thinks the Gripen would be anything but an absolutely nutty choice for Canada.

X2

The chances of Gripen landing the Canadian contract must be identical to getting a snow fall in Ougadougou. SAAB is going to land quite a decent number of exports, but not in a place like Canada!

except that “pooling resources” is the best way to waste money, while pooling is supposed to be about sparing some..

Off course! Thats why Airbus, Airbus Helicopters, MBDA, Ariane espace, etc, are such a waste of money…

you can’t have competitive offers if you have no competition to force the companies to do it…

Warn Sukhoi, and SAAB, and an awfull lot of other weapons companies. And if its competition that you want, Lockheed Martin and Boeing are not going to disapear anytime soon, and competing with those chaps while building airframes at a glacial pace is an obvious way of getting kicked out of the market.

and what’s more, it would be good if the claims about “european” stuff stopped as there’s no entity that could be considered as “europe” as such… there are countries qui coexist on european continent inside a web of agreements that every country tries to take advantage of.. as a result, you have fiascos like the Typhoon whose production is so explosed all over the continent for political reasons that it just is a waste of money and time (the development is hampered for years now by the fight between those who want to go forward and those who do not)

That “fiasco”, is the European combat aircraft with the more airframes built, the one with more external orders and the one that, for all its flaws, is a lot less expensive for the tax payers of the four partners than the two other alternatives, going alone (yes, the French tax payer pays more for each Rafale) or buy American.

You can have partnerships between a couple of countries who share similar doctrines and needs, but that would have Germans partner with Swedes and, eventually Switzerland, not France or UK

The Germans, the French and the British will eventually join up in severall defense projects, they wont go together in all of them, but they will share the development work on quite a lot of them, just like they are doing now. The replacement for the Leclerc and the Leo will be “European”, the replacement for a great big chunk of the “Eurocanards” will also be “European”, etc, the alternatives are a) buy American or b) spend an awfull lot more on defense and go alone.
We are entering the age of Continental countries, China, India and the USA. Huge countries, with massive populations and huge budgets, the European Countries on their own are starting to look like geopolitical midgets, either they work together or in a few decades will become irrelevant.

I think LockMart & Boeing will approve of that idea. Use higher production volume to suppress the cost and beat the competition on price. Pure capitalism.

You are entirely correct. Lockheed and Boeing will be delighted if Europe doesnt get its act together.
There’s absolutely no reason why Europe cant emulate what it did in the missile, the comercial aircraft area, the helicopter and the space business. The market is there, the resources are there (for crying out loud, even in this “almost nill defense budget” times, Western Europe spends three times more than Russia!), the industry is there. Do an “MBDA” out of Dassault and Airbus, get some realistic KKP’s, throw in 35 billion euros in R&D, wait till 2035 and serve the dam thing with white wine.
What it cant happen is having three european xerox airframes that do the same bloody thing.

Germany and Spain invite France to join the Airbus program to develop a new successor for the Typhoon but reject the United Kingdom.

It explains why the UK has joined the TF-X program.

More like “Airbus” invites “France”… There’s too much indefinition in Germany’s MOD regarding this particular theme, so Airbus and the rest of the industry is doing their job, lobbying.

And the the UK didnt join the TF-X. BAE won an international tender for consulting work for TF-X, vastly different thing. Chances of any hardware coming out of TF-X (if any actually comes out) ending with RAF colours are almost nill.

Some see a bit of contradiction in the Berlin-Paris pledges and the recent request for F-35 Briefing by Germany
https://www.lesechos.fr/monde/europe…se-2091403.php

If the Luftwaffe sticks in the KPP´s a LO RCS airframe for the replacement of their Tornado fleet, while toying with a date of around, lets say, 2030, reality is a cold hard place and the F-35 is the only game in town, if not they can go FCAS/Korean/Japanese/Martian/whatever.
While every single official document on this matter released by the Luftwaffe and the German MOD for the last few years has asked specificaly for an European solution i can easily see the F-35A has the replacement for the Tornado fleet (“only game in town” bit) while working with the French on a Eurocanard replacement.

Cheers

I also thought the UK funded 10% not 33%.

UK Plc funded 37.42% of the Eurofighter program and a lot less than 10% of the JSF program, the UK MOD funded 1744 million Pounds from its pocket for Dave development.

Cheers

Well the two programs – Rafale & Eurofighter between them spent ~$50 bn in development ($16 bn + $34 bn) which is more than what the US spent on R&D for the F-22 ($40 bn).

Hmm, the development costs of the Eurofighter were around 23 Billion US$, my source is the UK National Audit Office, and that number is consistent with quite a lot of articles that i´ved read.

https://www.nao.org.uk/report/management-of-the-typhoon-project/