Excuse my long post…
Bang for the buck is horrendous, & it remains to be seen if SA is all that much better than competitors, whether WW support works (good luck to greece when they have to send their F35 to the upgrade shop in turkey), low cost of upgrades (haha low cost & F35 in the same sentence).
I doubt that is ever going to happen. Lockheed Martin would have to bribe everyone, even the last conscript airman for such a deal to go through.
Looks like the EU citizens will be providing bailout payments to Greeks who will, in return, go shopping to the US to get the most expensive and the most useless fighter in existence today… Yes, you can bet on that.. 🙂
even if someone was willing to fund Greece for such a procurement, which seems already impossible, I don’t see that happening.
Buying more F-16s instead of the Typhoons was a smart move on their part.
It was a smart move indeed, but it was also an extremely lucrative one for those who participated in it.
Nonsense! Greece is entirely independent. The Greek government can do whatever it wishes.
The Greek government cannot do whatever it wishes; as with any government, it can only do whatever it can pay for. If somebody else does the paying part, he can then intervene at any time, which is hardly indepedence.
Useless for Greece, not useless in general… That means not fitting their doctrine, structure and budget… When was it last time Greeks needed to penetrate anyone’s air defenses to strike a high valued target? Was it ever?
Rest assure, there are quite a few high value targets in Turkey.
Before that, HAF was tasked with penetrating then WP member Bulgaria’s airdefences. At the time it was hardly an easy task. But you are right that in terms of doctrine the F-35 does not suit our needs, especially our current needs.
There’s not a hope in hell of Greece buying F-35 in the near future. No money. Even before the world banking crisis they had to scrap their intended Typhoon purchase due to lack of funds.
The Eurofighter purchase was not scrapped due to lack of funds at that time; it was scrapped mainly for political reasons: Mr Sarkozy strongly insisting in selling his own toys and UK proving to be in love with Turkey over Cyprus much, much, much more than with Greece. Later on it proved the right thing to do after all, judging from the purchase outcome in Austria.
Only way I can foresee Greece buying F-35 would be if Turkey had it in service and it proved to give them a big advantage over the non-VLO aircraft in Greece’s fighter fleet.
That’s true, but then again we are talking at least beyond 2025. Many things could be different by then.
Greece was never particularly big or rich, yet throughout its NATO service it could maintain a more than respectable and quite capable actually, Air Force with diverse assets maintaining about 300-350 front line NATO fighters up to the 2000s. Well all that is gone now and the spectacularly high F-35 price is not going to allow that to change.
One thing that most people don’t understand about Greek military procurements is that unlike other NATO members we were not preparing for war against the Warsaw Pact as much, but rather against a fellow allied NATO member. This understandably is incomprehensible to a neutral outside watcher, but it’s the truth. This is why we did not scrap our military after the Cold War, like the other European nations.
As for the numbers, HAF had always tried and mostly managed to acquire seven fighters for every ten THK did. So if HAF had 300-350 operational front line fighters up to the 2000s, at the same time THK would have 450-500. This ratio hasn’t changed dramatically so far and I doubt it will change in the future – numbers may be dropping in HAF, but they also drop in THK. For instance initially they claimed to buy at least 120 F-35s. Today nobody knows how many will be bought, and out of those bought, how many will be flyable at any given time. We withdrew some sqns due to age, but so did THK; We lose a few frames in accidents, but THK in time loses more over Kurdistan. We can’t buy new frames, and THK has been postponing their own buys in turn and so on.
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