this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
43 points (92.2% liked)

Canada

11691 readers
455 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
otter@lemmy.ca
mp3@lemmy.ca
otter@piefed.ca
mp3@piefed.ca
43
U.S. could hold a 'red card' over Canada's Gripen fighter jet option (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 3 days ago by HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works to c/canada@lemmy.ca
18 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

There is a way the U.S. could play hardball with Canada, if the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney decides it wants to limit its purchase of F-35s in favour of the Gripen.

Critics who favour the Lockheed-Martin stealth fighter have long argued that the Swedish-built Gripen would not be interoperable with American aircraft and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).

That's not what you see at the NATO air policing mission in Iceland, where Danish-owned F-35s have been training and operating alongside Swedish JAS-39 Gripens-Cs.

Commanders of both the Swedish and Danish air forces, speaking at the airfield in Keflavik on Tuesday, said the aircraft have been performing well together.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This is an idea that's been toyed with, but simply doesn't give the same kind of situational awareness that a human pilot directly in the situation has, not to mention the issues with communication links, which not only present the problem of jamming as you said, but also make stealth much more difficult. With a human pilot, the craft can shut off all radio comms for a much lower signature.

What we're seeing instead as the expected path forward is a hybrid approach; wingman drones.

You build a top of the line stealth fighter, and then you give it two drone buddies, which can be remotely fed instructions by the human operated craft. You retain situational awareness, and from a flying platform you can fall back to laser communication; unjammable and undetectable. Pilot safety is significantly enhanced because they can hang back and let the drones engage, and each pilot (a very expensive asset) can now command significantly more firepower.

Saab are working on this for their upcoming sixth gen fighter, which I'd very much like to see us collaborate on developing.