Boeing seems me something desperate sometimes, he is advertising for an heavy carrier born plane in a tiny EU member nation.
What of a chance they think they can have, even in the case of a refuse of F-35, that they would buy it instead of any of Eurofighters?

I’d say price was their selling point. The SH was probably the cheapest option of the three but also probably the least capable of the three, especially if we consider the jets in 2035. Denmark have to consider and buy for the next 40 years…

Found some more info here,

COPENHAGEN/PARIS: Denmark’s government will recommend the purchase of at least 27 F-35 stealth fighters built by U.S. weapons maker Lockheed Martin Corp, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.

Denmark would be the 11th country to buy the radar-evading jets, joining the United States, Britain, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Israel, South Korea and Japan.

The selection by Denmark’s minority Liberal government follows intense public debate about the cost of modernising the country’s air force, but it can still be blocked by parliament, where opposition politicians are urging budget restraint.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen called a press briefing for Thursday at 0800 GMT on the issue, but the government declined further comment.

The recommendation, first reported by Denmark’s TV2 News, will be followed by a public comment period of 30 days, said one of the people, who was not authorised to speak publicly. The final number of jets could shift during this period.

If confirmed, the decision will mark a setback for Boeing, another U.S. weapons maker that mounted an expensive last-ditch marketing effort for its older F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, and the four-nation Eurofighter Typhoon consortium that includes Airbus Group.

News of the recommendation emerged as doubts were raised over a crucial parliamentary committee hearing scheduled for Friday.

All three bidders have been invited to present their jets, but Denmark’s Conservative Party said Lockheed and Boeing had been told by Washington not to participate. A spokesman for the U.S. embassy confirmed they had been advised to stay away.

Airbus Group said it still planned to attend and called for a “healthy and transparent” public debate.

Although viewed by many as an outside contender, Eurofighter appears to be gambling on parliamentary support for a European solution after a bitter spat between U.S. rivals. The German government is expected to throw its weight behind the bid by sending defence state secretary Katrin Suder to give evidence.

At approximately US$100 million per jet plus infrastructure and spares, the F-35 is the most expensive of the three planes being considered after cost overruns and delays.

The United States says that will fall to about US$85 million per plane by 2019.

Some of Denmark’s biggest parties including the Social Democrats have raised concerns about the economic impact of fighter purchases at a time of spending pressures.

Lockheed, Boeing and Airbus said they had not received any official notification from the Danish government. The Pentagon’s F-35 programme office had no immediate comment.

Denmark is one of eight original partners that helped fund development of the F-35 and flies Lockheed F-16 jets alongside Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands.

Its decision is being watched worldwide as several other nations prepare to decide how to renew fleets. Lockheed is chasing further deals in Canada and elsewhere.

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/danish-government-to-reco/2777410.html

Never though that: I just used the pantshir as an example of the practise they use of organically attach Ciws unit to long range AD for selfdefense but in a typical OOB you would found several of such system operating together.
S-400 has 9M96E missiles also for point defense, 4 of them instead of a standard long range one, so if thanks to SDB F-35 can quadruplicate the number of targets it engage same apply to the defender.
Obviously, there will be also the S-350, the Morfey, the newer version of the Buk and of S-300V plus a myriad of other systems, some tasked with protecting the whole aereospace other aimed at protecting single army or airforce assets + air defense fighters coming into rescue.

Of course and each element of that is dangerous. But if you consider all the systems you just named, every one of them is reliant on X-band radar for the terminal phase, a radar band where western VLO stealth performs best…

On the other hands there would be other assets supporting F-35 but given that they would amount to be a greater numbers of all others USAF combat planes put together hope you would pardon me for same oversimplification.
So in the case of an (let’s hope just hypotetical) direct confrontation between two superpowers sky would certainly be blackened out but from both sides.
What I was actually contesting was the practise to examine just a system against the other without considering the whole scenario in which the battle would take place.

Indeed let us hope hypothetical. Looking at two systems in isolation is not an accurate representation of how nations and militaries fight wars. As I have said previously, especially when it comes to air warfare, command and control and the process of generating missions throughout a conflict is the difference between the men and the boys. If you can’t plan, integrate and communicate across two hundred + aircraft day after day after day then you can’t win…

Ozair, some time I oversimplify things but it is because of the sheer time and space limit of the media, not cherrypicking at all.

And the point of developing system like the above cited Nebo-M is right the one you highlight: given that VLO broke the F2T2EA sequence , you cannot use a single frequency radar to perform it: you will have to use different systems, one for the first phases of the sequence (VHS one), another for the intermediate ones (the l and X search radar) and one for the final ones (SAM battery radar and ARh sensor).
Critical would be the passage between one phase to the other it is because of this that an integrated command post, used for sensor and data fusion , is considered to an integral part of the system itself.

The problem is the volume search area where this can be handled. The VHF radars finds VLO targets with only 50% of the standard range and therefore the difference in search area is HUGE! A circle with radius 100nm has an area of 31415 nm. A circle with a radius of 200nm has an area of 126000 nm. Now extend that to volume up to 60k…

The same coverage issues occur with X-band but do a much greater degree. If you have an S-400 TER that has a capability of detection one fifth against a VLO aircraft versus a 4th gen aircraft then you now need a hell of a lot more of them before you can claim complete coverage. As has been displayed graphically previously what happens is the VLO aircraft threads its way between the WEZs of the various systems using its internal ESM to determine detection thresholds.

One more thing, the idea that the S-400 would directly engage incoming ammo is a slip in what I call brochure-like vision: every long range system in russian service come covered by a bunch of CIWS sistem like pantshir tasked specifically to engage such targets.
What made a russian-style Ad complex formidable is not a single system even an excellent as the S-400 can be but the fact that is multi-layer, multi-system and multisensor.

You honour the threat… If you think the S-400 commander is going to rely solely on co-located CIWS systems such as panstir to destroy incoming SDB or other PGMS then you are mistaken.

A simple example. Each panstir has 12 missiles and 700 rounds of ammo per gun. For a battery of 6 panstir that is 72 missiles and 33600 rds of cannon ammo. The missile are effective only out to 12 nm and probably less than that against SDB style munitions while the gun is effective to 2nm. Wiki lists a maximum engagement of 10-12 targets in a minute per panstir, so probably at best 6 per 30 seconds per vehicle.

In context, a flight of four F-35s could have as many as 32 SDBs to launch against a priority target like an S-400 TER, all potentially launched within a 10 second window. Hence it would be relatively easy to swamp the attached CIWS of the S-400, forcing it to defend itself using its own missiles. Alternatively the S-400 uses other associated assets including other SAMS to defend itself, presenting these as targets of opportunity for engagement. All this while the S-400 TER realises that the moment it radiates to engage a target it has to move before its location is targeted by GPS guided weapons.

Even in this case are we talking about an acquisition box of 200X 1600 meters at 100 nautical miles, nothing than a ARH seeker can’t cope with.
Problem lies probably more in elevation error but in this case a altimetric radar can be easily added.
And Nebo SVU is a radar introduced in 2001, so hardly the newest kid on the block.

That scale of error probably is bigger than what an ARH missile can obtain but against a VLO target the ARH missile is going to be essentially useless. If you consider the journal article I posted, an F-16 radar is restricted to 5nm or less at detection.

The results from Table 2 confirm the argument that the average RCS increases as the frequency gets lower. However, they also confirm that the F-35 RCS is really low, at least as far as the fuselage is concerned. Especially in the X-band, the calculated (average) RCS is even lower than the one revealed by USAF and the decrease in detection range with respect to the “standard target” is dramatic. For example, the APG68 of the F-16 is expected to “see” the F-35 at a distance of roughly 5 NM. The expected decrease of the detection range for the F-35 with respect to conventional aircraft depicted in Table 3 indicates that the F-35 will be a real danger, and not only as a first strike weapon.

Extrapolate that to air based ARH missiles that have a seeker head with less than a tenth the area and power of the APG-68 and you begin to see how much of a difference a VLO airframe makes to survivability from both land and air based ARH threats.

Those critical of the F-35 in the media have stretched the partial truth:

Into, “the F-35 could be disabled by cutting connecting with ALIS, or conversely that ALIS could be used to shut down F-35 users freedom of action. Neither is true and it is a positive that GAO and JPO are having this row publicly.

It is a nonsensical argument, especially when you consider how reliant on comms in general a deployed fighter squadron is. Forget ALIS, if the squadron has lost all comms then it doesn’t get the air tasking order, the intel updates or targeting packs from the Air Operations Centre etc.

In the event of a dedicated cyber attack against internet facing ALIS servers, it would not be difficult to put sat comm on either end and transmit ALIS over dedicated military links.

The question remains at what range..

I think we can both agree that we won’t know the exact details on this so the rest is conjecture.

If the detection range of the F-22 is within the NEZ of the its AMRAAM, then Meteor for Gripen does not make any difference.
But if it isn’t, then Gripen would be a better BVR performer than the Raptor.

What we know is that US VLO airframes perform best against air based X band radar systems, exactly those flying in fighter jets today. Given VLO capability, I have doubts that a Gripen AESA would see the F-22 or F-35 at tactically significantly greater ranges. AESA radars bring higher average power and better gain but the radar equation remains the same, the target RCS being one of the primary factors in determining distance. Hence a low RCS, and with F-22 and F-35 we are talking a value of 0.001 or less, makes detection and tracking at significantly beyond BVR ranges unlikely, and that is before we add jamming to the mix.

The issue remains that non VLO airframes would be at significantly greater threat than a VLO airframe.

Finally, if all we grade BVR performance on is the range of the weapon and the radar range of the aircraft we are oversimplifying the problem.

The only thing is that those economic and political issues will have prevailed, in the end. Mainland China will have economically absorbed Taiwan without any military conflict taking place.

I agree that the likelihood of an economic or political solution is far greater than a military one but the question as originally asked was should Taiwan spend more on fighters or SAMs (other than the flippant “is Taiwan doomed”). As per the original RAND document, there is definitely a ratio that could be massaged with a preference for SAMs over fighters. It must be easier to train SAM operators that fighter pilots and the system as a whole is more sustainable and probably more survivable.

I don’t think either investment overly changes the military balance of a cross straight conflict though. Militarily, China cannot take Taiwan without putting troops on the ground and in doing so it becomes a question of logistical support. Can China put enough troops into the country, and most importantly sustain them, while preventing Taiwanese ground forces from pushing them back to the sea and Taiwanese naval forces from cutting supply? I don’t think so but perhaps 10-15 years from now the capability overmatch will be enough to guarantee success.