Well MP703, I’m sorry if my analisys goes against your own views… But let me enphasise the reasons behind my reasoning…

I love fighter planes and to me, the hard core aviation enthusist, the Gripen is as good a fighter as can be built these days and the SAAB engineers are very competent and technichaly savvy as the best in the world… but that alone does not an international market sales hit make. 🙂

Having said that:

a) The Gripen in my opinion is the right plane in the hands of the wrong country and I mean no disrespect by this! SAAB fighter export success in the last 50-odd years has been negligible, not because of a poor product lining but because of a government option to “stay neutral” and the lesson that the major sellers US, USSR and France is that if you want to win in the arms bazaar YOU HAVE TOP TAKE SIDES! The whole concept of a forward leaning peeple like the Swedes selling billions of US$ worth of fighter jets to a third-world country with high poverty rates is very hard to digest for the average swedish taxpayer.

b)If you look at these last half century there are two ways fighters are sold:

1) To rich countries like Saudi, Japan, China or pre-revolutionary Iran. The client has deep pocketbooks and orders the best available hardware in large numbers. You can boicott these purchases as the uS does with China and you can put political pressure to direct them towards this or that aircraft as the French learned painfully in the recent Saudi Rafale x Eurofighter dispute…

or

2) Give them away (or forgiving MAP debt for instance…) to a poor country such as the Kenian and Salvadorian F-5Es or all the MiGs “sold” to sub-saharan Africa since the 60s…

The problem is Sweden hasn’t got the funds or the global political leverage (“Punch” if you wish) to be the big cat in any of the two options above.

c) if you look at a purely industrial aspect of it the Gripen program is a major sales failure. 232 aircraft bought by the designing country 20 odd for the three other clients, two of wich in a Leasing deal that can be easily disengaged from in the future… Now the Swedish governmente anounces the decision to sell at any cost or scrap up to 120 older airframes… What does this signal to prospective buyers? that there is no future for this aircraft… unfortunately

d) The Gripen-N modiufications are very far from simple the testing and certification program alone may cost up to hundreds of millions of US dollars, ad a new engine the cost would balloon tremendously! The engine may even fit the engine bay but the weights and stresses are certain to be all diferent. Take a look how many years it took from thje first prototypes flight to the in service introduction of the Gripen, its absolutely no stroll in the park. And further if OI was a Swedish taxpayer I’d be very concerned with my hard earned tax money bein squandered in the development od a Gripen derivative with no prospective client signed on yet. No, I may be a great may things but “naive” is definetly not one of them. 😉

e) As I said above the guys at SAAB are certainly very competent but they are not free from screwups or they would never have wasted their lead un the regional aircraft arena by sticking to turboprops when the market moved on to Regional Jets in the nineties. Do they know what they are ding, some times, but this is the way the capitalist enterprise exists.

f)Finaly, can you serously see Bulgaria or Romania leasing more then 20 units each? I don’t… These two most certainly come under the “poor states” category the ones that need their fighters given to them. On the other hand Greece and Denmark have the money and the means to pick what they will fly but can you see any of them resiting US or UK-Germany-Italy and Spanish political pressure in a open bid? I don’t. Pakistan wanted Gripens, why didn’t Sweden sell them the plane?

These are not my rules I didn’t make them but they seem to exist, I may be wrong or you may be wrong it doesn’t really matter, but eventually we’ll know who got it right..

Please don’t get mad at me it’s nothing more then a friendly discussion

Best Regards

Hammer

But, on the other hand. What competition in the same prizerange and capability does refurbished JAS-39A Gripens or new JAS-39N Gripen have? The only thing I can think about is older F-16´s and new F-16´s. I don´t think there are so many Mirage2000 left out there on the market and the russian jets…well, let´s just say they are russian jets…

George Bush have managed to **** off alot of contries the recent years and made not to many friends. Could a that be a factor for a country (let say in south america or asia) who is looking for a Gripen/F-16 kind of plane? I thought that market was still pretty big, not everyone can afford JFS/F-22/Rafales or Eurofighters.

History is history. Sweden has manufactured some great weapons on their own but due to politics have´nt exported widely. After the end of the cold war and the fact that the swedish armed forces did´nt ordered as many as before the industry had to seek a new market abroad. The rules for swedish armed exports were, and still are, very strict thats why many of the companies or weaponsprojects were sold to either French, US or UK-companies. In order to follow their exportlaws, wich is basicly, sell everything to anyone who can pay for it. The weapons were still being designed and manufactored in Sweden but the ownership was 50/50 so it could be sold. In other words, were still kind of rookies in the international market, but I think in the last ten years we have seen a much more widespread of swedish weapons around the world then before. The CV-90 ICV is almost becoming a “eurocombatvehicle”, RBS-70/90 is selling more to it´s former customers and is also sold to Chzeck republic, the Bv206S/BvS10 all terrain vehicle is going like crazy and seems to just as succesful as it´s predessecor Bv206, Combat Boat 90 has been sold to navies all over the world, the SAAB RBS15Mk3 ASM-missile has allmost a monopoly on that market and been sold to both Germany and Poland, submarines to Singapore and the Sterling-engines to Japan, the MBT-LAW wich is a replacement to M136 have been sold to UK, and promising future projects like the SEP, the artilleryshells Excabilur or Bonus, the Visby-stealth corvettes etc etc etc. And lets not forget Gripen wich have been exported to South Africa, Hungary and the Chzeck Republic.

You say Gripen is dead just because the Swedish airforce (just like the most european airforces) has to downsize and another 70 fighters are put on the market. I think it´s the opposite, the more contries buying/leasing the fighter, the more of a future there is in Gripen. Every new customer wants their Gripen to be tailormade for it´s need and SAAB will fix that, that means more work, more money and the most important thing, more know-how to SAAB. And do you really think countries like Hungary or the Chzeck Republic (I know, I can´t spell that name) are only gonna stick with just 14 fighters? I don´t so, I think they wanta have a larger airforce than that and order new Gripens in the future.

All I´m trying to say is that if Sweden have decided on keeping all 204 ordered Gripens and the only sale was the one to south africa I think the Gripen project would have been pretty dead on the international market. Thanks to the fact Sweden have decided they only need half as much fighters makes it possible for contries like Hungary, Chzeck, and many other contries to get hold of a modern western fighter in a short period of time for a fair prize. That has opened up the market and makes me think there is a bright future in Gripen. Not only for those old swedish airforce Gripens that are out there, but allso for new built Gripens like the Gripen-N. The more contries using using them, the more know-how SAAB gets and the more attractive they get. In other words; if Sweden is cutting down their airforce and letting more Gripens out on the market it gives it a much more brighter future than if other countries is cutting it´s orders to JSF or Eurofighter – that only makes the fighter more expensive and the project more risky.

I hope you get the essence of what I´m trying to say, english isn´t my strong side so I speak swenglish 🙂

Sweden airforce:

48 JAS-39A Gripen (to be upgraded during MLU)
8 JAS-39B Gripen (to be upgraded during MLU)
32 JAS-39C Gripen
8 JAS-39D Gripen

(this basicly means another 80 Gripens can be sold off to other contries)

32 Sk-60 (SAAB 105, to be replaced in the future by a modern trainer)

4 S-100B Argus (Erieye on SAAB 340)
2 S-102B Korpen (Gulfstream IV ELINT)
2 An-124 Condor
6 C-130 Hercules (to be replaced in 2015-2020 by 4 A400M)
6 C-295M transporters
2 A310 MRTT (tanker/transport)
4 Maritime surveillance/ASW a/c (like the CN-235MP/P3 Orion or something, probably belonging to coastguard or navy)

16 WAH 64 Longbow Apache
16 NH-90 (transport/SAR) + 6 NH-90 for ASW/ASuW (belongs to navy)
4 CH-47 Chinook (transport/SAR)
10 AS321M Super Puma (SAR/transport)
12 Agusta A109 (training/transport/SAR) +4 A109 for ASW/ASuW (belongs to navy)

(Peacetime airbases; F21 Luleå, F4 Östersund, F16 Uppsala (training), F7 Såtenäs (transport) and F17 Ronneby)

Army:
4 tankbrigades (2 with 60 Strv122/ 120 CV9040C and 2 with 60 Strv121/120 CV9040B, all have 12 Archer SPH, 12 AMOS and 6 MLRS)
4 mechanized infantrybrigades (2 with wheeled SEP and 2 with tracked SEP, all have upgraded FH-77 howitzers)

Navy:
2 New stealth frigates
4 Visby corvettes
4 Göteborg covettes
2 Gotland subs
2 Södermanland subs
1 LPD (like the Enforcer)
2 Amphibious battalions.

Small plane, biggest punch 😮

😉 (Or maybe not, a joke from another forum)

Edit: Perhaps I should post the original picture…

GBU-10?

I have a very dumb Rafale question. What does Rafale means in english? :confused:

I again refer you to Swedish submarine ops doctrine. The fact that they have invested quite substantially in SSKs over the years even though the operational area is the Baltic, shallow and very small by comparison to pretty much any other sea, and thus not ideally suited for submarines should make one wonder. But with shallow water, bottom features and wrecks sonar detection is difficult and visibility is similarly not good enough to allow visual detection from the air. Similar conditions exist in the Persion Gulf and explain why the introduction of a few Kilo class subs by Iran in the 1990s (and now efforts to build boats themselves) caused quite a stir in the area and resulted in proliferation of ASW equipment.

But there are some things that makes finding subs in the Baltic Sea much more difficult than in the Persian Gulf I would guess. In the Baltic Sea you have a unique mix of saltwater/freshwater (a narrow strait to the atlantic for saltwater to enter and thousands of rivers filling it with freshwater), this makes several of confusing layers of different waters and hard to detect a sub. The visuability is zero and no chance of detecting a sub from the air, compared to the persian gulf wich I would guess has pretty clear waters. In the archipelago regions (specially along the coastlines of Sweden and Finland) a sub have thousands of underwater mountains, ravines etc. to hide at.

I would guess that the swedish navy is (or at least was) the best littoral ASW-navy in the world. They fought an over 15 year old war against intruding subs in their archipelagos (roughly between 1980-1995). IIRC they launched over a hundred live depth-charges, dozens of mines and ASW-grenades and a couple of torpedoes. The subwar offcourse started much earlier than that but back then the Swedish navy were more focused on a bluewaternavy, technologyimprovements and other reasons made the intrusions really take on in the 80´s. At first the navys ASW-capabilities was at a terrible state but new ships (the coastalcorvettes), new sensors and new weapons (such as ASW-grenade ELMA with a shaped charge. After all, they just wanted to damage the sub and force it to surface or force it to leave our waters. It would not be such a good idea to destroy a sub and have dozens of dead russians sailors as a result) gave the navy the upper hand. They also produced a mini-sub to act as target. And just as the ASW-capabilities was at its highest USSR fell apart and the intrusions ended in the mid 90´s. But before that at least one damaged surfaced russian sub was photographed heading for home with a long trail of oil after it…

http://www.e.kth.se/~eskil/photos/utflykter/ubatsjubel/img_0779.jpg
(the mini-sub “Spiggen”)

As for the An-124, yes they did plan to restart the production line, but currently of the supposed 80 planes on order, only four have been paid for and those are the ones for Jordan. I have heard rhoumors that Peru are wanting a couple as is Uncle Omah in Libya (again) and even the Saudi’s are looking that them as well.

But with those orders the productionline should still be open despite what TinWing said.

Before you say anything simplistically foolish as “it’s all politics” … I’d suggest you look at MMH/FH (maintenance man hour per flight hour) and aircraft commission rates. Not to mention “life cycle costs”, hourly cost figures, and of course spares, heavy maintenance and training availability

I haven’t seen the figures….but I’m sure the Aussies have and those facts helped them to make a decision.

Even if the life cycle cost is higher, how much money are we talking about? I mean, jeez its just four (4!) planes, not an entire system of advanced fighters. Remember that they offer versions with Rolls-Royce engines and avionics from Honeywell, the maintenance and fuelcosts should not be that high with an all western equipment. And those planes can pack twice the cargo as a C-17 and are twice as efficient, that should be calculated as well. According to this page http://www.sfu.ca/casr/id-strategicair.htm the maintenanence and support costs isn´t higher but I don´t know how credible that source is. It also claims that a purchase prize of the C-17 is between 160-230 mil. us dollar while the cost of a Condor is only 25 mil. us dollar. 25 mil. seems ridicoulus cheap…

In another swedish forum it was described how the swedish Base-90 system worked. I hope I understood it right and can give a comprehensive and understandable picture of it in english.

Base-90 replaced the Base-60 in the 1980´s and had a Basebattalion -85 for it´s protection and support. It was just a development of the Base-60 with further focus on dispersing the planes, e.g. using roadbases and such.

A typical airbase-90 consisted of:
A main runway (often located out in the forrest)
Several, up to five, short runways (usually public roads)
A “sidebase” (normaly a civilian airport)
A reservebase

All these runways was connected with a system of roads so the planes could move around and the ground-supportteams were mobile. A typical airbase-90 only consisted of 4-8 planes so they were VERY dispersed and had a lot of runways to chose from.

Such a base were supported of a Base-85 battalion that consisted of 1500-2000 men. 1500 men to support only 4 planes seems much but most of them were airbaserangers that would hunt and kill spetznas, repairteams to fix the runways and clear them from unexploded bombs and mines and groundsupport , they had to be plenty since they were dispersed in such a large area and there were so many runways.

The threat was a sudden massive attack from soviet. Our fighters would hopefully get airborne and counter the first wave. Since we had so many (several hundreds) runways they could´nt possibly destroy all. The ones that would have been destroyed would have been fixed again before 24h. Rearmed and refuelled the fighters would have left again within 8 minutes and be on the way for the next mission. Even if the attack came as a surprise and some fighters were on the ground not many of them would have been destroyed thanks to the fact they were so dispersed (only 4 planes in a huge airbasesystem). Another threat was russian Spetznas, but we trained special airbaserangercompanies to deal with that.

From what we have seen in recent wars it was clearly the right idea. Instead of having a few airbases with many planes and counting on the concreteshelters would give your planes protection, many airbases with several runways dispersed over a huge area with just a handful of planes is a better choice. In todays wars mobility is the key.
On the other hand, if the first wave would have been a couple of hundreds nuclearbombs against these bases we would´nt had stood a chance. I don´t know in wich extend we used the mountainhangars built in the 50/60´s in the base-90 system.
One must also remember the capabilities of the soviet airforce in the 80´s. They did´nt have that many Su-24/MiG-27 that had such a range that they could reach Sweden from the Baltic states, and certanly not enough fighters (Su-27/MiG-25/31) to give them support.

But now Base-90 is coming to an end. The focus of the swedish armed forces is now on international use and so are our basebattalions. Nowadays the few ones that are remaining will be able to be transported anywhere in the world, find a reasonable straight strip of highway and turn it to an airbase for our Gripens that will participate in a coalitionforce.

Last, some pics from the Base-90:

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0413722/L/
the main runway in Frösön

http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0647719/L/
Byholma main runway

http://www.f17.mil.se/photo.php?id=55478&nid=16860
and the main runway in Visby- Gotland. (Gotland is a large island in the middle of the baltic sea wich we called our carrier)