Throwback to that time Canada rejected the F-35 and replaced it with the... F-35?
Every time I feel sad about German procurement, I always take a quick glance at Canada and breathe a sigh of relief after remembering it could be a lot worse.
Canada buys old shit and then gets it fixed up by our oligarchs. Our procurement system is just a bunch of make-rich projects.
Sounds like the USA. You sure Canada isn't the 51st state?
I mean, the F-35 is a bad buy. It is an all in one plane that can't do any single task well.
Nothing in the document you posted supports that claim.
Every citation in there is simply "It's expensive" and "It's taken longer than originally promised to be deployment ready."
None of this says anything about the ultimate value of the F-35 as a weapons platform.
And the headline quotes there are from Chuck Yeager and John McCain, men who haven't flown planes since dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
These are the kind of people who think the F-35 sucks because it "can't dogfight" and do not understand that dogfighting is as relevant to modern air combat as bayonets and cavalry charges.
Warfare has changed. Dogfighting is a thing of the past. You might as well strap on a suit of full plate and wade into combat with a longsword if you still think that way. Modern air combat is more analogous to submarine warfare; the goal is to detect and eliminate your target without ever being detected yourself. Your ability to do the cobra maneuver will not help you when you're shot down by an AMRAAM you didn't even see coming.
For a nation like Canada, an all in one plane is exactly what we need. It would be far beyond our means to maintain a fleet of bespoke craft for different tasks. But even if we consider only its role as an interceptor, it is still the best available choice. Is it the best interceptor in the world? No. But the best interceptor in the world is the F-22 Raptor, and the US refuse to sell that to us. So second best will have to do.
Is it a better interceptor than anything Russia has shown itself capable of fielding? Absolutely. Even according to Russian propaganda numbers, their stealthiest fighter has a radar signature a few thousand times larger than that of the F-35, and an onboard radar that isn't even close to comparable. In a real shooting war a Canadian F-35 would destroy any Russian plane it engaged without the Russian ever having seen the enemy that killed them. That, ultimately, is what we're paying for; the closest thing we can feasibly get to total air superiority over our most likely adversary.
lmfao
🤣🤣🤣