TORONTO — Canada has selected Lockheed Martin’s F-35 as the preferred offering in the country’s competition to buy a new fighter jet, government officials said Monday.
Canada plans to buy 88 new fighter jets to replace its CF-18s. The government has budgeted about CA$19 billion (U.S. $15 billion) for the purchase.
Nineteen billion dollars for one of the shittiest jet fighters of all time. A plane that can’t takeoff and land from rough strips, and will thus be blown up on the ground in any serious war. A plane that consumes 25,000+ lbs of fuel every single goddamn hour. A plane that is supposed to do CAS, but has no endurance, armour, or low speed maneuverability. A bomber with no range or payload, and a fighter with no speed and maneuverability. But it makes up for all that with a ludicrous “stealth,” concept that exists solely to hide how shitty the plane is from the general public.
Procurement Minister Filomena Tassi said Lockheed was deemed to be the top-ranked bidder.
Filomeni Tassi, Canadian “Procurement” Minister
I don’t know what’s worse, that this dumb broad is supposedly in charge of weapons procurement, or that she isn’t actually in charge of anything and these decisions get made in backroom deals.
Delivery of the first aircraft would be scheduled for 2025 if an agreement is reached. If an agreement is not reached, the government has the option to enter into talks with Saab, whose Gripen fighter came second to the F-35 in the competition.
Ah yes, the Gripen. The only somewhat seriously designed fighter plane in the entire NATO arsenal. Of course, in order to make use of this plane you need a military that also seriously builds the rough field airbases ahead of time. That’s a complicated and distributed system of hangars and tiny fuel depots, like the Swedish Bas 60 system built in the 70’s.
Notice the small fuel tanks here, as well as the plane being staged from a small two lane road.
Random hangar in the middle of nowhere. Plane also being staged from the road.
A10 Warthog taking off from dirt airfield.
Of course, even if we played make belief and simply assumed that our pristine, concrete airbases won’t be getting destroyed in the middle of WW3, Canada doesn’t have any AWACS planes anyway. This is essentially a gigantic radar plane that is synced up with your fighters to help them find things without having to use their tiny, shitty radars that give their positions away.
Of course, this POS would be getting destroyed on the ground as well.
Even from the perspective purely of tactics, ignoring that they will get blown up on the ground, our “fighters,” would be at a huge disadvantage in any real air combat, because their fighters would know where ours are. And if you’re wondering “but muh stealth,” that’s not relevant for the longer wave radars that AWACS use. Moreover, it’s only relevant from certain angles, making the entire concept close to worthless when there are multiple radars in the area. We’ll get to all of this in the next PSA.
Lockheed Martin is an American company, and Canada has a close relationship with the United States. The neighbors use fighter jets together to defend North American airspace.
Canada previously ruled out Boeing’s Super Hornet in the competition.
F-18 “Super” Hornet
Ah yes, the F-18 “Super” Hornet. The one and only modern fighter that might actually be worse than the F-35. A plane with less maneuverability than the already overweight F-18, but it makes up for it with “muh technology,” a vague term that means “the manufacturing cost and pricetag are utterly divorced from one another because we wanted to maximize profits.”
A former Conservative Canadian government previously announced the purchase of the F-35, but the current Liberal government delayed that purchase and opened up the bidding to competition. Tassi said Canada will get a better deal now.
The Liberal Party, and Trudeau in particular, explicitly ran on a competitive Fly-off for Canada’s next fighter plane in 2015. Then they proceeded to just… not do that and instead do a behind the scenes bribe-off instead. It was a fly-off that involved no actual flying, let alone realistic testing of each individual plane in a variety of situations.
The conservatives did exactly this, and were rightfully criticized by Trudeau back when he wasn’t PM yet. So of course the Liberal government does the exact same thing.
Before becoming prime minister, Justin Trudeau said Canada wouldn’t buy the F-35.
Before becoming PM, Trudeau also said Canada would be going to a proportional representation system. That’s the thing about Trudeau, he’s a lying piece of shit.
Defence Minister Anita Anand has said the decision to pick the F-35 was done without political interference. “We’re living in a new reality,” she said, referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Defense Minister Anita Anand
That might be the most laughable part of the whole thing. Contrary to retarded “Ghost of Kiev,” propaganda, where video game footage was used to prove that Ukrainians were outdueling Russian SU-35’s right, left, and center, there is literally no evidence for the Ukrainians downing a single Russian fighter at all.
Destroyed Ukrainian Mig-29
That’s because their entire fighter fleet got destroyed with long range missiles on day 1. They didn’t have any fighters to fly. Somehow, someway, the Ukrainians having their fighters destroyed on the ground justifies the purchase, at $19B no less, of a princess “fighter” plane that doesn’t just need pristine, concrete airfields to takeoff and land from, but specialized hangars to reapply the paint-like “stealth” coating, that needs hours, even days sometimes to dry.
Oh yeah it’s undeniably a real weapon of war. Can’t wait for Vlad the Bad to… fire a few missiles at our airbases and destroy them all.
Campaign on “no F-35,” buy the F-35. Typical.
In this day and age of vaxxed-induced-blood-clots and/or diversity hires, will the CAF even be able to find 88 pilots to fly these complicated junk piles?