That would be a silly assumption, to buy a jet fighter and assume you'd never run missions into enemy territory. More than that, if <<your own country>> gets invaded, guess what, they put SAMs onto your territory and suddenly it becomes <<enemy territory>> :-)
That's not quite how it works. It's not like a game of Civilization II where stealth beats SAM.
The problem modern stealth aims to defeat is that radar capabilities are networked with high speed processing.
Rolling a single S-400 into enemy territory doesn't suddenly make even mig-29s obselete.
Similarly an F-117 couldn't fly over even a S-125 with absolute safety.
They'd bring in the whole shebang.
So my rhetorical question to you would be: why would you not buy a system with a reduced radar footprint, advanced avionics, advanced weapons control systems and advanced networking? Even if it's only for defensive purposes.
Heck, even if it's for flying strictly over territory you control. Advanced radars cover hundreds of kilometers as do modern anti-air missiles. They can shoot you down without even going near their direct airspace. That's what Russia is doing right now, they're taking down Ukrainian aircraft at no risk to themselves launching a bunch of R37s from deep in their territory (50-100km) from Migs Ukraine can't reach or even see.
It's just that being in with NATO is more important than equipment case in point Ukraine.
F-35 is designed for ingress into densely covered enemy territory.
The stealth allows more flexibility in approach it stops jets being scrambled along the route, it stops assets being moved in to hangars and otherwise hidden.
It means you're less likely to be flying through a valley of manpads. Who were all warned of impending jets coming in.
Flying into an enemy carrier group with airborne radar being pinged from every direction.
These are the missions Israel runs against Iran and Syria (not the carrier group) or the US may theoretically run against Russia in a world war situation (during conflict it's likely the US would be protected by heavy ECW from growlers not just stealth).
This is not within Finland's likely missions unless it's acting with NATO.
If you don't need that then there are many cheaper, easier to run alternatives.
So does Finland want an F-35 or a bunch of gripen and hundreds of manpads and ATGMs?
Ukraine has repelled Russia very effectively with just manpads, ATGMs and NATO intelligence.
All things being equal that would be preferable. If buying US weapons NATO becomes more protective then the calculus changes.
It's a lot less likely now, but Russia could have very well tried the exact same thing against Finland, in which case Finland for sure would have been running the exact same missions against Russia. Suppress Russian threats in Russia itself to protect Finnish territory.
And Finland isn't in NATO, yet. Though their luck will probably be that Russia won't be able to do anything else major for at least a decade.
It's mainly because the attrition rate should have entirely depleted the S-300 system in the first 6 months (2-3 per week during the main phase).
Ukraine is a big country and there were loads of missile attacks to defend. It's very unlikely it was able to move S-300s continuously into needed areas compared with manpads.
Yet it would have been a PR disaster if NATO admitted to supplying weapons to Ukraine before the invasion started. So MANPADs are implied to have sprouted like mushrooms in Ukraine...
> Yet it would have been a PR disaster if NATO admitted to supplying weapons to Ukraine before the invasion started. So MANPADs are implied to have sprouted like mushrooms in Ukraine..
You can’t be serious, NATO openly delivered MANPADs and vast amounts of other munitions before the war started https://www.armyrecognition.com/defense_news_february_2022_g...
https://www.dw.com/en/russia-ukraine-crisis-who-supplies-wea...
Maybe try to learn some basic facts about the subject before commenting?
MANPADs are nice to have, but it's Ukraine's own Soviet air defense equipment which is keeping Russian aviation at bay.
The focus on MANPADs really makes it hard to take anything else you say seriously. It's the 100+ active S300 batteries Ukraine had that made all the difference, not MANPADs.
It's also rumoured that some large portion of Russian losses are due to their own anti air. So coordination is difficult.
The F-117 was central to SEAD operations during Desert Storm, and the F-35 is regarded as the most credible SEAD platform in the USAF inventory today.
Even with Sweden within NATO, Sweden would be a small industrial-military partner and the US a big one.
This is worth way less than it sounds like. Building runways is cheap.
> The Gripen is basically designed for Finland by virtue of being designed for Sweden
Sweden wanting to prop up their domestic industry does not mean that Gripen is the best fighter jet for Sweden.
I don't think you understand. Sweden always planned to fight a contracting, losing war, eventually devolving into partisan warfare.
If I recall the Cold War plans correctly, one of the more realistic plans prepared for 3-4 weeks of war before being overrun and partisan warfare starting. The road-as-runway plan was critical for this, there would be no time to build anything, just keep everything flying and attacking from surprise locations for as long as possible. The submarine force tied into to this also, with its ability to stay submerged for 3 weeks.
The whole idea was never for Sweden to really win, just to make the Soviet win so momentally Pyrrhic they would think twice about an actual ground invasion. From a military standpoint, we never hoped for our major cities to be spared nukes. We counted on them being bombed to oblivion day one.
Try building runways when all major infrastructure and the country is in total chaos. That's why there were arms and fuel depots everywhere, with everything from missiles down to submachine guns.
Edit: and you say propping up defence industry as if insinuating it's just a boondoggle. When it comes to geopolitics, it's not. It's the only way to have total control of supply chains and constant upgrade of arms.
Gripen may have become something of a boondoggle over time, but it was born from the Cold War and still traces most of its design goals from that situation.
The idea of Sweden being overrun in 3-4 weeks is a bit absurd anyway, perhaps it's just not a reasonable assumption to start building upon.
>Edit: and you say propping up defence industry as if insinuating it's just a boondoggle. When it comes to geopolitics, it's not. It's the only way to have total control of supply chains and constant upgrade of arms.
Well, that's not what I was insinuating. But since you bring it up, the Gripen isn't exactly a great example of "total control of supply chains". That's a big part of why nobody wants to buy it, if you're going to deal with ITAR you might as well buy the F-35.
Regarding ITAR and such, I can only agree, except "might as well". F35 is more expensive and complicated to operate, Gripen is surprisingly expensive per airframe. But I think they still are very different systems good for different things. And as the Cold War wound down, Gripen became more of a pure industrial project. Still, for Sweden and Finland, it looks like hand-in-glove.
Are they operating to great effect? The HARMs are nice, but surface-launched anti-radiation missiles would be both far cheaper and more resilient than Gripens.
Presumably in a "partisan warfare" scenario, you wouldn't be worrying about stuff like Shahed drones destroying your infrastructure either.
> F35 is more expensive and complicated to operate
It does provide advantages for that money, and certainly has a brighter future than the Gripen E which nobody will buy.
Destroying runways is cheap and easy, look at Ukraine
> look at Ukraine
Go on, give me some actual examples. What sort of cheap missiles are used to cause more than a few thousand dollars worth of damage to runways in Ukraine?
Make a hole in tarmac, until it's fixed it can't be used, by the time it's fixed it can be targeted again.
It's all nice and easy when you attack third world countries with no real army from aircraft carrier but when a high intensity conflict with a real military power begins you can be sure most of your airports will be targets, which is exactly what happened to Ukraine, not even 2 weeks in the conflict: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/russia-ukraine-war/russian-forces-h...
Uh, how do you plan to use dumb bombs like that in a conflict like Ukraine?
That would require you to be able to fly right over the enemy airfield, they'd need to have no air defenses whatsoever.
You'll damage a runway at the cost of a pilot (probably $5M+), aircraft (at least $10M), and dumb bombs ($30k each). Putting your total price paid for thousands of dollars worth of runway damage in the tens of millions.
> when a high intensity conflict with a real military power begins you can be sure most of your airports will be targets, which is exactly what happened to Ukraine, not even 2 weeks in the conflict
That kind of damage is fixed within hours at a cost of low thousands of dollars at most. Russia can do only it using incredibly expensive standoff-range missiles, spending at the very least hundreds of thousands if not millions to punch a hole on a runway that takes a few hours to repair.
Eeeeh that's exactly what happened in the beginning of the conflict... they (Russia) had paratroopers in Kiev day 1
You wouldn't have any luck dropping bombs like those out of helicopters.
If they climb to power, they will still need to compel to hardcore nationalist population, in case of Sweden even more than Erdoğan, since they will need their social credit for topic they find important to them and won't burn it because of Sweden.
And if the opposition candidate wins, he will be busy repairing all the mess Erdogan did to Turkey's foreign relations - even if the nationalists in the coalition will whine, they can't afford wasting more political good-will for a couple hundred Kurds.
Eventually turkey will concede, but not before squeezing every drop of advantage they can obtain. It doesn't really matter who's at the top in turkey - the incentive dictates the behaviour.
Turkey feels safe already with respect to Russia. But increasingly slighted by Western attitudes.
Finland pretty much knew who would win the testing when they selected their definition of success, ignoring the unexpected (which to be fair did eliminate two competitors); either you want the traditional fighter model with inherent low cost and you go with Gripen, or you want in on the F-35's technology platform and true multirole capability (higher payload) and you politically bully LM into delivering you a reasonable price cut (probably on the basis of US jobs in the short term, I'd guess), like the article seems to describe. And frankly, good on the Finns for doing it.
> NATO.
Because that's not the main reason or even a primary reason. There are a bunch of NATO countries that don't use US aircraft. Similarly there are non-NATO countries that buy the F-35 and many non-NATO countries that would want to buy it if they were able to.
For a much better breakdown on why countries would buy the F-35. This portion of this presentation by Perun is a great intro: https://youtu.be/7Z_gTGJc7nQ?t=2219
In short, because of massive scale, the F-35 is cheap despite being highly advanced.
It's about avoiding a go pound sand stance no matter the US leadership.
If you're in NATO, or have applied you're relatively cozy. What if you don't want to do those things?
Except France and Spain, they all use US aircraft or are in the acquisition phase.
BTW Spain is also considering buying the F-35.
??? Stealth has myriad applications in defensive engagements. Dont like being killed by radar-guided missiles? Stealth helps.
But the kind of all aspect high quality stealth of the F-35 only matters when you're surrounded by advanced radar capabilities.
That's high power radar and high coverage to capture scatter at different angles..along with the bandwidth (processing) needed to detect coincident events.
Most of the time you want to destroy those assets and you have cheaper jets like the F-16/18 respond to every ping with an anti radiation missile.
Like maybe when you are defending a border against waves of incoming fighters?
>> cheaper jets like the F-16/18 respond to every ping with an anti radiation missile.
If those pings are in range of air-launched anti-radiation missiles, then those launch platforms are well within the range of the much larger ground-launched sams beside those pings. SEAD with non-stealthy aircraft is a much more complex mission than simply throwing harms at pings.
Then, to launch missiles, you need to network with a distributed group sharing sensor data. This mode of operation is possible in all modern fighter jets, and capabilities are being added continually with avionics/software upgrades. This is true for F-35, but also for Rafale, Eurofighter, and Gripen.
Dodging missiles depends on kinetics, but it's possible existing Russian radar homing missiles can't lock on to an F-35. In this respect, it is has an advantage.
I expect that most or all radar guided missiles (modern and historical) can be used to engage an F-35 (or any other stealth-y aircraft). The effective engagement range will be lower than against a less-stealthy aircraft though.
Dodging missiles does not rely exclusively on kinetics. There are several ways to try to break a lock or at least temporarily confuse a missile. (eg. notching, chaff, ECM) . Having improved sensor fusion and reduced RCS can obviously make these tools and tactics a bit easier and more effective too.
It should depend on its operation. If the missile is receiving guidance updates in the beginning phase from a sensor network, and only relying on its own sensors in the final phase (if at all), then spectral stealth will make less of a difference. But older missiles and platforms can not do this.
This is the gamble of the F-35; compromise the non-updatable specs in order to achieve safety from present day known threats.
If the opponent has less accurate data when compared to the less-stealthy situation; then the opponent will have a harder time guiding their weapons compared to the less-stealthy situation. It may also be easier to spoof, dodge, and/or hide.
Modern missile systems are getting smarter and smarter no matter what, you may need to stack several advantages in order to defeat them.
The US does not export the F-22, even to NATO allies.
Did the Ancient Greeks tell anyone how to make their flamethrowers?
NATO.
This is a way to pony up money in a way that would be appreciated if Finland joined NATO.
It's the killer feature of F-35 and F-22 and heck modernized F-16s.
I suppose it's hinted at. Finland can't find and maintain an air force alone...
Stealth simply isn't as important as one would think so long as you're not running missions into enemy territory.