A Primer For The Confused – Nov. 20, 2025
There are a lot of myths and misunderstandings surrounding the renewed competition between the Lockheed Martin F-35 and the Saab JAS 39E Gripen, and a lot of people are being paid very well to maintain them.
“Fear, uncertainty and doubt”, or FUD for short, was an IBM sales watchword back in the stone age of computing. “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, was another. FUD consisted of amplifying the risk of buying from smaller competitors, who might exit the market, be acquired, or fail to deliver. FUD has been a Lockheed Martin tactic for decades.
Lockheed Martin has a built-in strength: the fact that multiple generations of military aviators worldwide spent their careers on F-16s or F/A-18s. They learned the US approach to airpower and grew up alongside American colleagues, spending years on exchange visits with US units and other air forces with US equipment, their families enjoying sun, Safeways, and swimming pools. Non-NATO Sweden wasn’t on that itinerary; indeed, it might as well have been Neptune.
US companies have engaged the services of hundreds of retired officers over the decades, whether directly or through consulting firms, and Lockheed Martin has done that to push the F-35 worldwide – and since the F-35 is the flagship US defense export, they can draw on both F-16 and F/A-18 communities. Its competitors can try to emulate them, but they are swimming against shared culture. I’ll leave it to business-school geeks to argue about who first said “culture eats strategy for breakfast” but ignore that maxim at your peril.
It may shock you that the retired senior officers who advocate publicly for certain defense products are being paid to do it, but it happens all the time. Look at the partners and sponsors of CFN Consultants, just one advocacy firm.
Culture imbues the ostensibly objective process of source selection. Quite properly, air force and defense ministry teams evaluating competing bids don’t take the estimates and promises therein as Holy Writ. Everything gets evaluated and reviewed, and often a high, middle, and low number will be fed into the final calculation.
That’s where the different, or unknown competitor faces a problem. In one F-35-vs.-Gripen evaluation, for example, the evaluators applied low risk to Lockheed Martin’s numbers and assumed that the Gripen program would terminate prematurely, leaving the operator paying billions for bespoke support.
That’s particularly important considering the discussion around the current competition – in which many people seem to believe absolutely in anything Lockheed Martin promises while barely being aware of the Gripen’s technology or history.
Myths and memes count. Let’s look at a few.
“Fourth-generation fighters are obsolete.”
A couple of weeks ago in a video briefing to a conference in Rome, a senior US Air Force planner walked away from the fifth- and fourth-generation argument. “That nomenclature doesn’t really help us anymore,” he said, arguing that advanced weapons and electronic warfare on an F-15EX give it “capabilities more akin to 5gen”. (I’d quote his name but the conference has strict Chatham House Rules and i want to be asked back.)
The origins of “fifth-generation” are murky, but there was Russian influence involved and the taxonomy was always retrospective. It made some sense from a Russian perspective, because central control had resulted in tidily delineated eras of development, but Western attempts to define Gens 1-3 are usually a hot mess. No, an F-104A Starfighter and an F-4E Phantom are not that easily pigeonholed.
“Stealth trumps everything.”
What people actually mean by 5gen is a fighter that incorporates stealth technology to the point where it relies primarily on being undetected by radar to evade ground-based air defense systems and dominate air combat. These aircraft, typified by the F-22, F-35 and China’s J-20, are defined by their distinctive shape, with flattened and canted body sides, and by internal weapon bays. When first planned, they were expected to slip past air defenses and shoot down other fighters before they were even seen.
This is not as universally true as it used to be, if it ever was. There are ways to use radar camouflage short of an all-out stealth design – which with its big weapon bays, tends to be big and expensive. One is to make the aircraft a smaller radar target so that its electronic jamming systems have a smaller real echo to mask. That is done to a varying extent on Gripen and its European contemporaries the Rafale and Typhoon, and on the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet.
Supremely confident in the potential of stealth, the US in the early 1990s put the brakes on development of automated electronic warfare (EW) systems that sniff out hostile radars and try to confuse them. The Europeans did not. The Gripen E now has the third generation of fully integrated EW on the Gripen.
The UK and Italy also worked very hard on the tricky business of making infrared search and track (IRST) systems work. IRST can detect targets at great range with better bearing and elevation accuracy than radar. The challenges are determining range and rejecting false alarms: they have been mitigated through engineering and fusing IRST signals from more than one airplane in a formation.
A stealth fighter may see a target first, but it also has to track and identify it – with minimal use of its own radar, which would betray its presence and cue IRST. That’s where EW makes things… complicated. At the same conference in Rome, a US F-35 partner company said that an F-16 with its new jamming system – the US is finally playing catch-up – can get to “the merge” with F-35s, the point where the fight becomes visual.
“More than 1,000 F-35s have been built, the program is solid.”
Fact: the F-35 program is not delivering combat-capable airplanes today, and a major set of upgrades and fixes that started in the late 2010s, known as Block 4, with an estimated research and development bill 60% of the all-new B-21 stealth bomber, is in disarray.
The problem started with a new central computer ordered from L3Harris in 2018. It was delivered late, and was not test-flown on a F-35 until early 2023 – months before it was due to replace the previous unit on production airplanes. The combination of hardware and software proved unstable, frequently resetting itself in mid-air. Deliveries had to be halted until 2024, but aircraft delivered since then are lacking qualified software modes essential for combat.
But the lack of a capable central computer has added to the difficulty of developing 80-some new features. In early 2024 it was disclosed that the entire Block 4 effort was being “re-imagined” (sounds a bit like a flopping Netflix franchise) and it wouldn’t be delivered until 2029, three years late. By now, the upgrades have been cut to about 60 and all that can be said about the schedule is that it won’t be delivered before 2031. Completion date is receding, not approaching.
One of the few certainties is that Canada won’t get the capabilities it signed up for. New radar? Sorry, US-only. Other promised upgrades included the ability to carry six air-to-air missiles internally: where that is, is classified.
“Gripen is old and lower tech, and who are the Swedes anyway?”
Heard of any of these ideas? Ejection seats. Swept wings. Real supersonic fighters. Packet-switched datalinks. Integrated-circuit airborne computers. Passive radio-frequency air-to-air targeting. Pulse-Doppler radar for engaging low-flying targets. Airborne active, electronically scanned array radar. A few dozen more important air-warfare innovations.
What they have in common was that Sweden was either the third nation to introduce them (behind the Cold War superpowers), the second (beating the Soviets) or the first.
The Gripen E may look like the JAS 39A (Adam and Erik, to the Swedes) that flew back in 1988, but under the skin it is completely new. A crucial innovation from the start of the Gripen E program is that the avionics that fly the airplane are partitioned from those that run the mission – so you can change the mission software without running a ton of regression testing to ensure that you have not inadvertently monkeyed something vital to flight safety.
Example: this summer, Saab loaded an AI program from Germany’s Helsing company into a Gripen E’s mission computer. They took it out over the North Sea, launched another aircraft as a threat and performed a beyond-visual-range attack – a complex multivariable exercise – with the AI in control. Worked. One and done, home for coffee.
“The US can block the release of the Gripen engine for export”
They can, but the difficulty of replacing the GE F414 engine is overstated by the FUD merchants. The Typhoon fighter engine, the Eurojet EJ200, is very close to the F414 in the most critical parameters – thrust, weight, and airflow. Engineering and testing would have to be done, but if those parameters are close and the engine and airframe are inside their proven limits, it’s not high risk.
You know which aircraft is going to need a new engine? The F-35 has chronic thermal management problems that get worse with higher speeds and lower altitude (that’s to say, when delivering weapons). The jet can’t get rid of the heat produced by electronics, electric actuators and the engine, and starts to cook itself until speed is reduced or systems shut down. The so-called engine core upgrade (which replaces everything except the jetpipe and the low-pressure compressor) is required unless the operator accepts shortened life for the $15m engine. In a genius contracting move. The US has picked Pratt & Whitney to carry out the program but hasn’t negotiated a price.
“But mixed fleets are unaffordable”
There is a cost saving from a common fleet, and a penalty for having a small fleet or partial fleet. But those are overwhelmed by a substantial cost difference between the two parts of the fleet, and it seems that there is such a differential between the JAS 39E and the F-35. This is what we know:
The US watchdogs, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, have been sounding the alarm over F-35 cost and mission-capable rates for more than a decade. (The two are related: MC rates are sometimes low because the operator can’t afford the spares or people to keep them high.) Lockheed Martin and the Joint Program Office constantly assure Congress that the watchdogs have old data, things are better now, and will improve. But largely, they have not. The USAF has fired a shot across the program’s bows by halving its FY28 order, and buying more F-15s.
At the Dubai air show, LM bragged that sustainment costs had fallen by half in the last decade. But 2015 was pre-IOC. The customers (dominated by USAF numbers) were spending money to train maintainers and staff repair facilities for future production aircraft – high cost – while flight hours were few because the new aircraft were often faulty or broken. Cost per flight hour was accordingly astronomical, and half of that is nothing to brag about. F-35 CPFH by any account is higher than the USAF’s increasingly elderly F-16s.
It’s a mature program, too – after nearly 25 years in development and eight years since initial operational capability, the idea that there’s much improvement to be squeezed out is a fantasy.
One estimate from Rome – from an F-35 supplier executive, no less – is that the current cost is four times that of a new F-16 with modern avionics and an AESA radar. (F-35 advocates point to closer comparisons with the USAF’s F-16 fleet, without noting that the USAF’s F-16s have been rode hard and put away wet for more than 35 years on average.) The Gripen is smaller than the F-16, but more to the point is designed from Day One for highly mobile, dispersed operations, which tends to drive low cost. For example, the Swedish air force standard is for five trained conscripts and an NCO to turn a Gripen between sorties in 10 minutes with no powered ground equipment, using geared winches to load bombs.
“We might have an orphan fleet”
That might have been more persuasive more than a decade ago, before Crimea and long before the invasion of Ukraine and Swedish NATO membership. The Cold War defense industry in Sweden was the ward of a neutral state, and after 1991 it was sent out into the harsh outside world to earn a living. Now? The Gripen E is around into the 2050s, will be teamed with GlobalEye and an uncrewed combat aircraft that may be closer than some people think, and is designed for rapid upgradability.
“But Finland, Czech &c had open competitions and chose F-35”
Yesterday, there was one counterpoint to this argument: that what all the second-wave buyers are going to get is not what they ordered. But after US Ambassador Pete Hoekstra’s outburst yesterday, it’s apparent that the US Government has no problem with using any means of pressure at all to sell its products – and also gain direct control over allied militaries. It’s not new, but in the past, when McDonnell Douglas competed with General Dynamics, USG had to remain neutral between them. Today, the only game is F-35.
“There isn’t a kill switch”
Maybe there isn’t but if the US withdraws the ability to update the crucial mission data files, an F-35 force’s usefulness will decline rapidly. See full story here.
But a UK source also reports about the Royal Navy F-35B that had to divert from the carrier Prince of Wales to Thiruvananthapuram in bad weather on June 14 – and remained there until July 22. The jet landed in working order – but apparently, when its systems could not log on to the F-35 network, it performed a hard reset, and the PoW’s crew did not have a fix for it. A team had to be assembled, equipped and flown out from the UK.
“Trumpism is a bubble, it will pass”
Trump’s time is fixed. His administration has no intention of leaving power and adheres to the doctrine that the 2020 election was rigged and that must not be allowed to happen again. JD Vance, statistically the most likely next President, is the creation of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and others who believe that “woke” and migrants are a bigger threat to the world than Russia. Much of the US ruling class and media has withdrawn into spineless Vichyism. It’s depressing to say this, but do not bet on Trumpism being eradicated. Invest to survive it instead.