this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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It has always impressed me tremendously that a small country of only about 8 million people, has it's own fighter jet, and that it's actually good!
As a child in the 70's, I thought the Viggen was one of the coolest jet designs.
Anyways, whether it is logistically a good idea for Ukraine to get Gripen IDK, but good on Sweden to prepare for it.
Gripen is designed to be easy to maintain and use roads as runways, which makes it better for Ukraine then F16. However the production line is not as strong and most users will not send theirs to Ukraine. The only NATO users are Sweden, Czechia and Hungary. Hungary is not going to send any and Czechia has 14 leased ones. So only Sweden might actually be able to spare some.
No, that's not it.
Sweden can't afford to fund an aid package including them itself, and the US would never spend money on financing a competitor to their own craft.
Which is a tragedy because it's basically the perfect platform for them.
The Brazilian Gripens were $86million per plane. Sweden just gave Ukraine a $400million military aid package. They are also an EU member and that allows them to use EU military funds for EU made weapons. So you probably could get 10planes or so going to Ukraine.
Obviously weapons matter as well, but those are not Swedish made, but German and American. No reason the US can not finance some Sidewinders for Ukraine for example.
The combination of a strong industry being untouched in WW2, the cold war and social democracy!
It's a tremendous idea for Ukraine to deploy Gripen. It is much better suited to the logistics and distributed operations model being used currently. It also has integration with Stormshadow and Meteor missiles, which the F-16 doesn't. Obviously Stormshadow is already in the Ukraine inventory and Meteor would be a very powerful addition to extend out past the reach given by F-16 and AMRAAM.
They’re not cheap, but they’re WAY cheaper to fly per hour than most other modern strike fighters by a pretty large margin. Also, one of their primary design criteria was to be a QRF/frontline/austere deployment aircraft - that is, one of the requirements was “you can pull this fucker out onto a straight stretch of highway, gas it up, slap missiles on, and start fragging hostile air right away”. That’s precisely the sort of system Ukraine would seriously benefit from.
Don’t get me wrong - the Vipers they’re using now are great, extremely flexible, and genuinely the bar-none best two-circle gunfighter ever built, but they are fragile as hell, and their support footprint is WAY larger.