JSF did not suck the money out of Europe. They never had it to being with.
Here is the development cost caps for the JSF project.
<br />
Table 5-1 (In TY U.S. Dollars)<br />
Participant Maximum Contribution<br />
Australia $0.690B<br />
Canada $0.551B<br />
Denmark $0.33B<br />
Italy $0.904B<br />
The Netherlands $0.586B<br />
Norway $0.33B<br />
Turkey $0.690B<br />
United Kingdom $0.952B<br />
United States $16.843B<br />
As you can see, the VAST majority of the development funds came from the US (as it should since they are buying the majority of the F-35s). The top two European Partners gave less than a billion each, some less than half a billion.
That’s just over 5 billion invested in the JSF from european countries (4,3+ if you exclude turkey).
Rafale air (without development of a navy version) development was said to cost 5,7 billion € (source Dassault’s Charles Edelstenne declaration to the french goverment on the side of the french senate http://www.senat.fr/rap/r07-340/r07-3405.html)
M. Charles Edelstenne a précisé, que selon les chiffres officiels publiés par les instances nationales compétentes en France, au Royaume-Uni et en Allemagne, le coût de développement du Rafale de l’armée de l’air s’établissait à 5,7 milliards d’euros, celui de l’Eurofighter étant plus de trois fois supérieur (21,6 milliards d’euros)
M. Charles Edelstenne specified that according to official figures published by national competent instances in France, the UK and Germany, the development cost of the Rafale of the armée de l’air was 5,7 billion €, while that of the Eurofighter was more than three times higher (21,6 billion €)
So for the 5 billion dollars spent on the paper JSF, a good chunk of a new project could have been developed. And when you consider that the Neuron technology demonstrator programme costs only 400 million €, you realise that the US were quite successful in sucking R&D budget out of european firms.
Nic
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