Canada’s CF-18s are 40 years old, no longer tactically relevant, and not survivable in a modern day, high threat combat environment. Replacing these 4th Generation fighters will be 88 newer airplanes that are meant to last for the next 40 years, patrolling the arctic and Canada’s coastlines, contributing to NORAD as well as the NATO alliance. The competition scoring is purportedly heavily weighted 60% on capability, with additional scoring of 20% on cost and 20% on economic benefits to Canada. However, Canadian military procurement has never been about capability of the hardware for a peace-loving nation. Instead, politics, geographical considerations and economics have always been the key drivers. As much as I personally want the advancement of 5th Gen technologies to be a part of the new Canadian fighter choice, the reality is that the decision will come down to employment and the economic benefits.
In 1992, one of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign slogans running against incumbent George H.W. Bush was “It’s the Economy, Stupid”. For Canada’s new fighter, that rings so true.
Does Canada Need New Fighters?
Let’s get past the argument that we hear far too often that Canada does not need a military except to help in humanitarian aid, support disaster relief and conduct peacekeeping. The reality is that Canada has the world’s second largest land mass, Canadian arctic territory is vast on a scale that few can grasp and believing that national sovereignty should be passed on to the US is absurd. With climate change and the arctic melting, access to Canada’s natural resources in the far north will have to be monitored by Canadians. And finally, for all North America, the path of least resistance for Russia to attack the infrastructure of the US and Canada is over the polar icecap and into Canada’s potentially unprotected backyard. If you put a fence around your property at your home to protect your kid’s toys and your belongings, why wouldn’t Canada protect the vast richness that makes Canadians so proud….so squash the argument that Americans will protect Canada for us. It’s our job to take care of our country.
Richard Shimooka contributed to an opinion piece recently that addresses this issue. CLICK HERE TO READ FULL ARTICLE.
Does Capability Matter? …” Good Enough Is”
What is the difference between a brand-new Boeing Super Hornet or a Swedish Gripen or a Lockheed Martin F-35? I will continue to write often trying to explain the difference between a fighter plane that first flew in 1976 (F/A-18), been upgraded and enhanced over the last 4 decades and a new generation F-35 is just starting its life and that will be upgraded and enhanced over the next 40 years of life. Ignore my comparison of buying a new iPhone vs the best, old Nokia Flip phone. I love to talk about capability and to explain the differences revolutionary 5th Gen technologies and the older 4th Gen aircraft. All of this will be lost in the Canadian context because without a compelling employment / economic story, technology and capability won’t be a deciding factor.
Recall that in Canada….” Good Enough Is” …and for many Canadians, picking any of these 3 fighters is good enough.
F-35 – Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
Canada has invested over $600 Million into the F-35 program as a partner from the outset. Canadian companies have secured over $2 Billion in production and maintenance contracts related to the 5th Gen fighter. With a projected production into the 2040’s, Canadian companies stand to contribute to building upwards of 3000 fighters and supporting the sustainment of a franchise fleet of F-35s worldwide into the 2070’s. OMX published projections of 150,000 jobs linked to F-35 and $17 Billion dollars of benefit over the life of the program. Canadian companies must compete for best value in the F-35 program which means no handouts BUT does reward those companies with the potential to build high tech components for a franchise aircraft program that will last more than 50 years. That means building parts for 3000 F-35s not just 88 jets as in the case with the other competitors. Lockheed Martin has a great cross-Canada economic story to tell, (see video below) but has never managed to get their message to penetrate and stick with as many as they hoped. The story of the many F-35 highly skilled jobs that remained in place through the Pandemic and will continue in the future was never told.
Finally, if Canada decides to buy a different fighter than F-35, all these contracts will end quickly, the work will go elsewhere and the technology advancements for the Canadian workforce will atrophy. The F-35 economic story is about job, jobs, jobs but no matter how professional their videos are, the messages haven’t stuck.
Boeing – Fuzzy Math
Boeing is pushing the latest and last upgrade to the Super Hornet which first flew in 1995 (27 years ago based on the F/A-18A which originally flew in 1976). The Boeing economic story is $61 Billion and 248,000 jobs linked to the future fighter. This is an incredible offer considering the procurement contract is capped at $19 Billion. How does a company make a promise this compelling when they are hemorrhaging $$$ Billions after the two Boeing 737 Max airliner crashes, the collapse of the airline purchasing agreements when Covid-19 hit, the much-delayed KC-46 refueling tanker problems, a one-year delay in the franchise development of the new US T-7 training jet, and more?
How does Boeing with recognized financial woes guarantee a payoff of more than 3 times the original contract ($61B for a contract of $19B)?
My father taught me….”If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.
Those numbers seem so wildly great that I suspect that most of those projections are linked to Boeing commercial work that is being done and planned to be contracted in Canada. Boeing airliner work will likely happen in Canada regardless. Purchasing 88 Super Hornets built in St Louis, Missouri and not in Canada does not drive support for 248,000 workers or payoff $61 Billion in manufacturing and sustainment of such a small fleet of jets. Canadians and the media don’t look hard into military procurement; the topic is just not important enough now post-Covid, Delta variant spreading, economy returning but Canada facing a massive debt that could last a generation. If Boeing promises 3 times the payoff, wouldn’t everyone jump at that. During the 2000 US Presidential debates, George Bush called Al Gore’s proposals ‘Fuzzy Math’.
I am an engineer and a math guy, and to me, $61 Billion for a $19 Billion contract looks very much like ‘Fuzzy Math’.
Saab – This is not Lego
Saab has offered to assemble the Gripen fighters in Nova Scotia if their fighter is selected. Good high-tech jobs in the Maritimes would be a huge coup for the east coast workforce. Except…building a new fighter that is sophisticated enough to survive in the modern battlespace and into the next 40 years, is not something you assemble like Lego blocks. The precision to build a flawless, next generation fighter happens at the hands of the most advanced aerospace work force in history and the most secret technologies for manufacturing and assembly ever. It is great marketing to promise to build 88 jets in a foreign land (Canada) from where the jets are manufactured (Sweden). How does that happen with a work force in the Maritimes that has never produced a new plane let alone a next generation fighter plane? Based on my 40 years of watching airplanes being built from scratch, it certainly isn’t just assembling a Lego kit.
Great marketing yet impossible to imagine happening.
The Swiss Effect
We are talking about the economic considerations of the fighter competition but there is a cost variable introduced recently. In late June, Switzerland announced the selection of the F-35 as their next fighter after a very long competitive process. What was stunning in the debriefing by the Swiss Federal Council was that purchasing and operating 36 F-35s was assessed as costing $2.16 billion US (that’s nearly $3 Billion Cdn) less over a 30-year forecast period than the other 4th Gen competitors. How does the 5th Gen fighter cost less to purchase and operate by such an immense margin than fighters like the Super Hornet, Eurofighter and French Rafale? If anything, these older fighters should be cheaper and less costly to maintain than the newer generation F-35.
There is no one who would dare question the Swiss on financing and banking. $2.16 billion US is not a rounding error…. it’s a factor of 1000’s. This Swiss selection of F-35 will be impossible to ignore in Canada.
The Story to be Told
The election will likely give the Liberal government time to ponder spending $$$ Billions on new fighters when there are real crises to manage, like reopening schools, returning to a functioning economy, the collapse of Afghanistan after so much blood was shed there and much more. The topic of new fighters will not go away anytime soon and the debacle that has been the F-35 campaign in Canada over the past 10+ years looms over its chances of winning. Whatever the recommendation from the official procurement process, the final decision will come from behind closed doors and will have to be told in a compelling way to show Canadians how they will benefit most from the jobs and funds that will be invested in Canada.
Ultimately, “It’s the Economy, Stupid”.
Very good summary Billie. Hopefully some of our decision makers are reading your thoughts and acknowledging your experience and view point. Would you like to comment on the USAF turn about wrt their new look at the costing of F-35 and less expensive force multipliers!
Bruce – F-35 was a once in history program. Shortening development timelines, improving manufacturing techniques to produce faster even with extremely tight tolerances like those required for a stealth platform need to be investigated. Building a cheaper version of a modern day fighter won’t make it more effective or survivable or adaptable in the coming years however. Better, Cheaper, Faster used to be the mantra of a former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin. The reality is that you get 2 of the 3, just pick which ones matter most. I love the idea of developing new platforms to augment the technologies of 5th Gen as we develop NGAD and 6th Gen platforms. But there is no magic out there as history reminds us. So many programs in history promised so much, F-35 at the top of that list. While aircraft that started with a troubled beginning often matured into great fighters, like the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18, they never met the original promises or expectations. I suggest the same pattern would follow any new initiatives for follow-on fighters.
“You don’t drive your Ferrari to work every day, you only drive it on Sundays. This is our ‘high end’ [fighter], we want to make sure we don’t use it all for the low-end fight … We don’t want to burn up capability now and wish we had it later.” USAF Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. on Feb 17, 2021.
What do you say to people who think Canada doesn’t need a Ferrari fighter, but maybe a Corvette fighter where we could get 2 or 3X as many for the same price and generate more Canadian jobs with the greater numbers of jets? Many informed opinions think that Canada does not need a fighter for Night One of the war, but something for sustained ops as the CF-18 was.
Fitz – Small air forces don’t have the luxury of a stable of different planes to fill specialized roles. We get 1 plane and it needs to last for 40+ years; the CF-18 being the best example. There are no cheap solutions where you can buy 2 or 3 for the price of an F-35. As I noted in the blog, the Swiss assessed the procurement plus sustainment costs of 4th Gen fighters vs F-35. The F-35 was calculated at $2.16 BILLION US less than those 4th Gen Super Hornets, Rafale or Eurofighters. What other aircraft options are there? Canada’s military will need a fighter to conduct a number of missions sets as the F-16 and F-18 did. As for when a country is sent to war, let’s remember that you don’t get to pick and choose. Canadian CF-18s were in the first wave during Operation Allied Force over Kosovo in 1999. Saying that Canada doesn’t need a Night One capability ignores the obligations that we sign up for as a ally, fighting along side our partners wherever those conflicts occur. “Come as You Are” with capability, being able to survive against modern surface and airborne threats and adapting to fight against the very lethal future threats. Canada doesn’t get to pick and choose when to wage war.
General Brown really put his foot in his mouth with that statement. It forces you to ask how you would describe all the other fighters in USAF service since the entire F-35A fleet of “Ferraris” averaged readiness rates that exceeded all the other fighters in USAF service in 2020, including the F-16C and A-10. Viper and A-10 fleets have been the gold standard in readiness rates, maintainability, and reliability compared to other fighters. Nothing in the USAF or USN inventories from the teen fighters has demonstrated better FMC/MC rates than the F-16 and A-10, until now.
That includes all of the early Block 2 F-35As that had to be brought up to Block 3 standard, most of which are at Luke AFB for fighter conversion training as new UPT graduates go into F-35As. Those Block 2-built F-35As will never be sent to an operational squadron, will probably never go feet-wet from CONUS, and will truck-on as trainers just like we did with every other fighter fleet introduction with the force modernization trickle-through.
Look how fast USAF divested itself of F-15A/Bs and F-16A/Bs in the 1980s. They couldn’t get rid of them fast enough, and a lot of it was safety-related, let alone limited combat capability. They were quickly replaced by F-15C/D and F-16C/Ds.
Here’s the thing most people don’t realize either. There is no Western 4.5 Gen fighter that you could get 2-3 of for every F-35A. In fact, the opposite is true.
Rafale F4 unit flyaway cost: $144 million, unit program cost $213 million (per the recent Indian Air Force deal)
Rafale (used models) flown hard over 15+ years by Armée de L’Air are currently being sold to Greece…..for $115 million a-piece! Greece just asked to be cleared for the F-35 program after taking initial delivery of their old “new” Rafales.
Typhoon Tranche 4 unit flyaway cost: $142 million. Unit program cost for Spain in 2010 would be $235.87 million per in today’s dollars, 160 million euros at the time, for73 fighters.
Saab Gripen E/F: Unit program cost $150 million, unit flyaway not-stated by Saab. It was assessed to be $85 million in 2015 for the projected E model (doesn’t exist in full production form) and at least $92 million for the F model (2 ejection seats, 2 cockpits, more avionics interface for the crew, longer airframe, more work).
EA-18G Growler: $125 unit flyaway cost as assessed by the Australian deal and recent replacement for one that caught fire at Nellis a few years ago.
F/A-18E: $191.7 million unit program cost for Australia in 2007, which would be $253.6 million today. Those didn’t have APG-79(V)4 AESA with the new GaN TRMs that ave since emerged for the Block 3 SH. The unit program cost included 6 spare engines and 24 EW system sets.
All of those twin-engine designs require at least twice the maintenance and overhauls as you would have with a single engine. A huge portion of the additional cost for the 2-engine designs is that second engine and all the systems framework built around them. The other major cost is the Radar, and most AESA Radars are only getting more costly because of the quality and capability of the semiconductor technologies used in them, coming from exclusive US manufacturers who have to adhere to extremely tight dimensional wafer specs, as well as electron mobility performance.
The economy of scale favors the JSF program right now in spades, and Canadian industry is already a huge part of that. I’m somewhat (not really) surprised that so many people in Canada don’t realize how many Canadian companies and workers have been building parts and subsystems for F-35s for many years now.
Well done with the costing figures. Not a single aircraft manufacturer advertises the fly-away cost of their fighter except F-35. If the Canadian or Finnish public knew that a Super Hornet costs more than $93 million without the pylons, fuel tanks and EO pod, there would be a loss less support from the public for those 4th Gen airplanes. The sticker shock would get a lot of attention because no one would believe a government should spend more money for less capability. The sole source purchase of Boeing’s Super Hornet in the summer of 2016 didn’t die because of the Bombardier / Boeing trade dispute, it died because of the astonishing price that Boeing / US Government floated for 18 jets. The Bombardier C-series fight became the excuse to mask the sticker shock of those jets. Even now, you will never hear anyone from Boeing or the US Navy mention the cost of a new Super Hornet especially with the price of an F-35A at less than $78 million per copy, all in as you say.
Another thing I noticed about the Super Hornet is that over its service life, which coincides closely with the production and flight years of JSF in about the same production numbers, we have lost 18 of them due to crashes, with 7 fatalities. One of the F/A-18F total losses was from dual-engine failure, both crew died on final approach attempting to land on one engine, which failed at a terrible time in the pattern. Both ejected but perished.
Within the past 15 years, across all 3 JSF variants, we have had 2 F-35B and 2 F-35A crashes, and 3 losses from fires, with 1 fatality in JSDF due to CFIT. That’s across 716 airframes, which is probably larger than the Super Hornet fleet now.
Total losses and fatalities based on mishap rates are never part of the cost discussion, but should really be at the top of it.
With JSF, you get a significantly lower up-front cost airframe/motor, with all the legacy ancillary-type systems fully integrated into the airframe from the start, with mishap rates so low as to be unbelievable. I was almost relieved when the first F-35B crashed because it just was crazy how many years they went without any crashes.
I remember the teen fighters having major problems with mishaps and fatalities out of the gate, especially the F-14, F-16, and F/A-18.
The F-14 crashed on its maiden flight and had 59 write-offs in its first 10 years, with 19 fatalities.
First 10 years of service for each:
F-15: 54, 26 fatalities
F-16: 143, 71
F/A-18: 94, 27
A-10: 59, 26
Harrier: 100, 20
The Rafale and Typhoon have very safe records as well, but not as safe as all 3 JSF variants.
Typhoon: 9 w/o, 8 dead (over 17 years), 7 w/o and 8 fatalities over just 10 years, but a much smaller fleet production at 571 units.
Rafale: 6 w/o, 3 fatalities over 14 years within a 237 unit production run
The most criminal sin of omission we’ve been witnessing is the safety story about JSF, which is a marvel unto itself.
“Saab has offered to assemble the Gripen fighters in Nova Scotia if their fighter is selected. Good high-tech jobs in the Maritimes would be a coup for the east coast workforce…. …How does that happen with a work force in the Maritimes that has never produced a new plane let alone a next generation fighter plane?”
WOW.
I’m sure the fine folk at IMP, who have not only kept the CP-140 Autora flying, but updated to modern capabilities; (among other things) appreciate THAT vote of confidence.
I guess us Maritimers can’t be trusted with building anything as important as fighter jets. Best we stick with something simple like NAVY FRIGATES.
The Saab Gripen E might represent the most cost risk of all, since after 15 years, it isn’t even fully developed. Some Finnish observers asked the Saab test pilot how the Gripen E works at night, and he stated they haven’t even flown it at night yet.
We’re seeing “Gripen E” airframes being delivered to Brazil and the Swedish Air Force without their IRSTs as well, and without the copycat F-35-ish cockpit with the promised panoramic display that Saab advertises as their own.
Saab also won’t list a unit flyaway or unit program cost for Gripen E/F, but from the Brazil deal, unit program cost appears to be $150 million per, with long-term financing by the Swedish government to Brazil at 2.6% APR.
Meanwhile, F-35As have been rolling off the production lines with a unit flyaway cost of $77.9 million since lot 14 with all their sensors, weapons capabilities, and operational unit high OPTEMPO use all over the world.
Media-driven public perception: Gripen E is cheaper, and bypasses 5th Gen with its magic EW system (that doesn’t even compare well at all to JSF EW capabilities). The truth is, nobody knows what it actually costs to operate a Gripen E squadron because none exist.
Saab promises opportunities for helping develop the Gripen E if you buy it, which means they need your financing to get it barely operational.