I'm not really sure what maintenance costs over that period in a contract look like: certainly getting them down to a number introduces a bunch more risks for someone (inflation etc), and not having them has other risks. Getting numbers here is sadly hard, and I agree my comparison might be not apples to apples.

Even if the flyaway cost of a Grippen is $50 million the number of planes to accomplish the same mission is a lot more, and some of that number will be lives lost. I'm pretty confident it's within half an order of magnitude of F-35 price.

The wikipedia page lists 9 digit flyaway costs for other Gripen versions, so even if it includes some support, the bulk of the price is the jet.

Edit: 5th generation jets are just incredibly expensive. I can't imagine how mad Turkey was when the US bilked them for their F35s, keeping both the jets and the billions Turkey paid.

Shouldn't have planned to let Russia see the radar returns then.

Interesting. My understanding is that the US refused to deliver after Turkey bought S-400 systems from Russia, and will still sell the F-35 to Turkey if they stop. Do the systems share radar returns with mother Russia or what exactly is the concern?

https://web.archive.org/web/20240202005500/https://ca.news.y...

Bingo. These systems are not packaged goods, but come with services that depend on getting a lot of the data to improve the system, and it's hard to control how they share. An air defense system is part of a network.