What does the cold war gone hot have to do with Danish defence needs of today?

I think we all agree that Denmark faces no direct threat to the homeland. Fighters will therefore be needed for air policing and NATO ops. So let us look at NATO ops.

Say the budget allows to buy 12 F-35A or 18 Grippen E/F.

It think it is conservative to say that 1/3 of the fleet will be down to maintenance needs on average.

Which leaves us with 8 F-35 or 12 Grippen.

Denmark needs to have an air policing CAP ready. That means 2 aircraft at 15min + 2 more as back-ups that can be used for training.

That leaves us with 4 F-35 or 8 Grippen.

A easy NATO mission like the Baltic air policing requires F-4 aircraft to de deployed.
Operations like Libya usual saw at least 4 aircraft been made available each day. To generate 4 planes/sorties (no. of sorties depends on mission duration) each day the current standard is to deploy 6 aircraft. F-35A can not do this, Grippen could.

So with 18 Grippen Denmark would have “2 attrition reserves” / training aircraft available, while being able to meet its CAP needs and still deploy 4 effective aircraft to NATO.

With F-35 they would be limited to 2 to 3 aircraft deployed. Barely enough for NATO Air Policing duties.

So, we have come full circle back to post #14.

Does Denmark only expect their combat airplanes to do easy things such as airshow displays and fly-bys for Royal Holidays (or Libya)? Or do they expect to be part of a deployed coalition which can defeat a sophisticated, capable adversary?

I hope it is a, because there is no other country around Denmark who is a threat big enough to need more. And seriously 4 F-35 added by Denmark to any coalition would be quite unimportant.

Just imagine how much money could have been saved buying 476 instead of the A400.

the “official tender” was for an off the shelf aircraft, available immediately, so considering that the aircraft chosen (still to be developed and available only in several years) was out of the official tender from the beginning (only a politicians’ talk made it in by changing the terms of the tender which would be illegal in any civilized country) anybody is free to propose what they want, and the commission is most certainly in position to consider any offer, since the rules are obviously changing as swiss politicians want

Then Dassault might protest the tender results and have the process restarted from zero.

The Dassault offer has to be ignored anyway.

Obsolete depends on the mission and for air policing a small number of cheap and conventional fighters is enough. So no they won´t be obsolete.

Out of area missions, fighting modern enemies or even heavy weights like Russia or China will be out of the question though. NATO will be a paper tiger even more than it s today. And I think it is a good development.

They will buy – nothing.

refurbished/secondhand p-3s have done the germans well- they are still flying them too. i just think the nimrod was past its use by

Oh no. they did cost a lot more than expected to bring up to standard and the airframes where in a worse condition than expected.