"Canadian defense officials have strongly made the case that Ottawa should stick to a plan to buy 88 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter jets rather than splitting the order, two sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
"The review stops short of making a formal recommendation, one of the sources said.
“The final decision rests with the Liberal government of Prime Minister Mark Carney, said the sources, who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation.”
Yeah, no shit we should buy them. We desperately needed to replace the F-18s 10 years ago. Now, we have waffled on this purchase for so long that we are out of time for choosing another vendor. We don’t have a functional air force that can meet our NATO and NORAD committments right now, and it’s not like we can fix that by just going down to Fighters R Us and picking up a few Gripens either. Procurements take years to iron out the details, and years more for the manufacturer to build.
This is a terrible time to be without a military. Russia has already started acting on its territorial claims, and China is building up to be able to go after theirs. We need a functional airforce now, not in another 5 to 10 years. It has been often suggested that we only take the first batch delivered to use as a stop gap while we shop for something else for the bulk of the fleet, but I really don’t think we’re up for the logistical capacity required to run two different fighters yet. Maybe of the CAF grows considerably, that would be possible. I think purely from an operational standpoint we are stuck with the F-35, so to make it more appealing from a political view, Canada should play hardball with Lockheed-Martin and get the Israeli deal, where they do their own depot-level maintenance and have some parts manufacturing in country.
I don’t know that we’re necessarily need to “run” two fighters, but it’s clear that there is no single platform that meets all sovereignty requirements. I don’t know what the split should be, but we can neither have zero air force, nor one that is completely ineffective against 1 of our top 3 threats. Buy some planes that come with technology transfer, and start looking at the next 30 year window.
Or quickly hop on board one of the Future Combat Air System / Global Combat Air Program.