Berlin is weighing bringing Sweden and the U.K. into the €100B project as tensions simmer with France’s Dassault.
  • tal@olio.cafeOPEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    In all seriousness, if France winds up on their own on another European joint fighter project and there wind up being three European fighter projects (Dassault’s CEO, in the past, threatened to just walk out the door and do an update of the Rafale, which seems like a bad idea for France if it’s a serious threat, the FCAS with the remaining members and now maybe Sweden, and the UK, Italy, and Japan doing the GCAP), I am skeptical that Europe is going to have the kinds of funds needed to produce globally-competitive fighters. And fighters don’t get developed every day, so this is talking about the state of defense for quite some time.

    Not only that, but France wants a CATOBAR-capable fighter, unlike basically every other potential partner/customer in the world except maybe India, so I’d expect that they face an uphill battle on exports.