I was kinda bummed when the Brazilian Air Force decided to go with the Gripen instead of the Rafale for their new fighters. The Swedes' technology transfer offer was too good to pass up, I guess.
There's talk right now of France forward deploying these to Germany, what with the United States on track to no longer be the guarantor of european security it has been since WWII
Thank GOD France has always been *just a tiny bit* distrustful of American security guarantees over the decades and developed their own wholly independent nuclear capability.
Mostly independent arms and defence industry also ! Most of the gear the French use is designed and made in France or alternatively in Europe there’s very little US made gear there compared to almost every other NATO member. When it comes to Aircraft the US tried to get them on board with the F-18 back in the day they also tried to market the F-35 to many European countries and France said no. With the current events that was probably the wise choices.
The F-35 is one of the scariest parts of this whole nonsense.
The plane is basically just a vehicle for software. And that software is made and maintained in the US.
All these partners who bought in, who knows how long that support will last.... This was supposed to be a plane that helped to BIND the alliance (though you're right France was clearly wise to skip out) but now it can be used to break it apart.
I always wondered that if any of the countries who purchased it end up doing something that the US does not like at all if they (The US) can somehow cut all support for not only the hardware but the software which would essentially "brick" the aircraft and render it useless. And unlike Iran and their F14's I doubt anyone would be able to reverse engineer any of the tech in the F35 especially on the software side to make it work without US support.
Yeah, it's more complicated than people make it out to be. As far as we know, the US does not have a way to actually "brick" the aircraft itself, but the way ODIN etc. are set up, it would be fairly difficult to keep high availability figures up for any useful amount of time once the US has cut you off completely. And god forbid anything complicated breaks.
Yep, I have also often wondered about that, long before this. I figure the US has the capability to more or less cause any f-35 to fall out of the sky or at least be rendered useless. And if they don't have such a capability, I bet fox news secdef will be trying to get on it.
There is one country with indigenous F-35 software capacity besides the US.... But it's Israel and I trust the current leadership there as little as I trust the current leadership here.
That's because nobody ever considered the scenario of a NATO member nation going rogue.
Let alone the primary provider of military R&D for the whole alliance.
Yeah there was a significant failure of imagination wrt to the entire global right turn.
I think people really thought liberalism (in the academic sense) would just keep making progress. That we had sufficiently strengthened our democracies.
> When it comes to Aircraft the US tried to get them on board with the F-18 back in the day
Well, it's a little complicated. The French Navy did fly US-made F-8 Crusader fighters in the air-to-air role from their carriers during the Cold War. When the time came to replace them, French naval aviators very much would have liked to get F-18s, because making a naval variant of the Rafale would be time-consuming and expensive for the small number of aircraft that they'd be getting. Nevertheless, political lobbying by Dassault ultimately led to the government vetoing the F-18.
Mind you, the French Navy does still fly a very valuable, very niche US-made aircraft from its sole carrier, namely the E-2 Hawkeye early airborne warning radar airplane. It would have been prohibitively expensive to build another dedicated CATOBAR AEW aircraft for a single carrier
I must say the E2 is such an unusual aircraft a carrier based turboprop AEW platform is such a niche thing. I assume that the replacement for such a niche machine will probably be a Drone (probably cheaper too)
Well, the Brits did build and operate another carrier based AEW turboprop, the [Fairey Gannet AEW.3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairey_Gannet_AEW.3), and the French could have tried to build something similar out of their [Breguet Alizé](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%A9guet_1050_Aliz%C3%A9), but common sense and/or aesthetic sensitivities prevailed.
Yeah and that distrust earned us so much shit talk. My ears are still ringing from the insults heard on TV when we refused to join the 2nd Iraq War back in the time, or our arrogance for not aligning automatically on atlantist policies, but rather case by case.
I guess French pragmatism and having foreign armies on our territory two to three times per century shaped the mindset.
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The fact that the UK didn't keep their distrust of the Americans after world war two was the biggest mistake. The UK should've followed the French example
Yep. It really only occurred to me in the last day or so that their nuclear capability, while ostensibly independent, really is not. It's heavily reliant on our tech to be maintained.
Yes. Long story short: imagine that in 1985 WWIII NATO, Germany and the USA failed to stop the Soviet juggernaut. Now it has a big bridgehead on the Rhine, and is ready to invade France. France conventional army can't reduce the bridgehead, nobody can except with tactical nuclear weapons. By some miracle until now WWIII hasn't gone nuclear.
So now the question is: can France asks NATO, USA or Great Britain to nuke the Soviet bridgehead and stop the coming invasion of France ? Which means they will open nuclear fire... and the Soviet will retaliate, and escalation ensure the end of the world in a nuclear holocaust.
Blowing the world just to save France from invasion ? honestly, I can see why they would refuse.
That's the reason why De Gaulle, who had lived a somewhat similar situation in May 1940 (replace "Rhine" by "Meuse" and "USSR" by "nazi Germany) built the Force de Frappe, including AN-52 tactical nukes on Jaguars and Mirage IIIE, plus the Pluton ballistic missiles.
IF they ever reached the Rhine and prepared a french invasion from there, the Soviets
a) would know they would invade a nuclear country, and think about it
or
b) try to invade and get their bridgehead nuked, as a last warning.
I really think France is America's greatest friend and ally.
You're prepared to defend our values even as we are apparently not.
Now I know the French would say, you came up with those values before we did. And that's true. But in 2024 I think of them mostly as simply shared values and the fact that France is still standing for freedom when my president is no, it gives me some sense of pride and hope
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I rely on open source material. The rest is speculation. I can't see France sending Rafale, if it was the case, we would have seen pictures of them in Ukraine. If anu countries sent nukes, Putin would be very vocal about it, even if it was unofficial
Indeed. The French were right though, from nuclear energy to their triad of nukes to domestically produced aircrafts.
Given recent event with Russia invasion and the US being an unreliable ally, they should arm themselves to the teeth.
> The French were right
More like "De Gaule". It's impressive how much one guy can influence decades of a country direction. Nuclear energy, own nuclear weapon, out of NATO council for so long etc ...
All these because this one guy had his own world point of view and was popular enough to apply them.
From [this quotes website](https://libertas.co/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle)
>« La vérité, c’est que les Américains finiront par se faire détester par tout le monde**.** Même par leurs alliés les plus inconditionnels. \[...\] Tous les trucages qu’imaginent les Américains sont démentis par les événements. »
Which would translate to :
>Truth is, the Americans will end up being hated by everyone. Even by their most unconditional allies \[…\] Each trick the Americans made up are contradicted by facts.
Thing is the US flip between democrats and GOP every 2-4 years.
There's still a lot of fight in us and we can still come back. You really can't count the US out yet.
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Just be careful right now because those euro defense stocks are SOARING at this moment to levels that are clearly driven by speculation and not financials.
As one reporter put it, the rise is so rapid that if we didn't know better we'd assume they just got a cash infusion from the mob. But no actual cash has traded hands yet, no european security deal is signed, so these companies are soaring on pure speculation at this moment.
It's still a space to watch carefully, a space money can surely be made by shrewd investors, but it all depends precisely how you execute.
You also might want to look into ETFs
I bought a broad based defense ETF a few weeks ago basically to involve myself in the events but without too much risk.
For you, you might wanna let it ride unless you want/need the cash. Or maybe cash out some if it'll make you feel better.
I mostly think now (like right now, today, things are changing rapidly) is the wrong time to buy because things feel over-inflated, feels like these stocks will fall back down to an extent before beginning a steadier, more healthy rise - IF a strong european secutiy deal is signed
>I'm sure they could have made a deal with EU to make their own Typhoons domestically
The Eurofighter wasn't an EU project, it was a multilateral project between the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain. France was part of the programme initially but walked away because they wanted something carrier capable
And they wanted a plane that is smaller and thus more affordable, which was seen as a better fit for the export market. That this allowed Dassault to go with a smaller and lighter, but also significantly less powerful, engine from France's domestic engine manufacturer Snecma (now Safran) was an added bonus. Britain and Germany really couldn't go along with a less ambitious concept, because they needed an intercetor that had the engine performance and climb rate required for the QRF mission.
In particular, Britain needed a **large** interceptor with long endurance for North Sea patrols.
Also, in Tornado, Britain, Germany, and Italy had a then still-recent fighter-bomber that was particularly capable for the air-to-ground support, but...er...not so good in air combat. And Spain had just taken delivery of a bunch of F/A-18s, but didn't mind getting something more of an interceptor.
Nope, the Rafale is fully navalized -- the naval variant of the Typhoon never got built, so they're not carrier-ready.
(This is why the UK is stuck buying F-35s right now, which looks -- since January 20th -- like a distinctly bad political choice.)
Thing is, The F-35 is the only stealth platform the EU can buy right now. So until you guys have your own 6th gen stealth platform, it is a decent short term plan.
It's the only *crewed* stealth platform: there are combat drones undergoing evaluation for procurement and deployment which may bridge the gap to some extent before a 6g fighter arrives.
Godspeed. Self-sufficient is the name of the game. It's time for the EU to be the superpower it's meant to be. It cannot be just the US forever, given how the Russian and the Chinese are surging as threats.
Besides what others have pointed out, it might also have been a case of too many cooks in the kitchen. All of these countries, and the French not the last (I'm French myself), probably had very strong opinions on objectives and design choices, not to mention who gets to build which systems (all of them would want their nation's companies to build as many of them as possible).
And this is probably why we haven't seen many co-developped military projects - besides the A400M, every tank, plane, helicopter, ship or artillery seems to come from national programs I believe.
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I've heard that the Rafale's development cost was lower than what it would have cost the French for their part of the Typhoon's development cost (I don't know how true this really is, but military development projects with the Germans seems to be very expensive and often unsuccessful). Developing the Rafale was the right choice, it is a very capable multirole fighter that is doing great on the export market.
The perfect complement to the M51 submarines. More visible, more flexible, and with a pilot in the loop. Plus it really doesn't cost much. As, unlike the Mirage IVA a while back, or the 2000N, it is not a specialized nuclear delivery system. But just a matter of "roll an ASMP-A below any Rafale, Armée de l'Air or Aéronavale" - all 192 of them are wired for it.
So there are plenty of interesting combinations.
\-AdA Rafale + ASMP-A + aerial refueling from an A330 tanker
\-Aéronavale Rafale, out of CdG + ASMP-A + aerial refueling from a buddy-buddy Rafale
\-Aéronavale Rafale, out of CdG + ASMP-A + aerial refueling from an A330 tanker
And that scum just had to take his anime from him, if they’d just let him surrender he’d have surrendered his ship and crew to live the rest of his days watching his favorite old lady.
As a proud British aviation enthusiast, I have to say. God dam the Rafele is sexier than Euro fighter. It's those air intakes. Not the stupid cigarette packet they stuck on the bottom of EF
It’s amazing (and scary) how far we have come in terms of nuclear weapon yield. It took a B-29 to drop <25kiloton weapons at start and now this little guy can carry 300kt.
I know H-bomb took yield to another level, but still scared to process that this little guy could obliterate any city in the world in a blink.
u/jedieric dude, i was banging your wife last night, she said it sure beats your *"300 Kt of diplomacy"*, whatever that means 🤷🏻.
The world needs peace not the MIC selling us on finding Jesus through St. Javelin and other weapons.
\#warisaracket #suckmytrucknuts #friendlyskies
I hate that kind of irony. That's not diplomacy. That's mutual suicide. That kind of irony minimizes the horror that shit would unleash on every living thing.
Agreed.
Appreciating aviation and engineering is one thing, but glorifying weapons designed for mass destruction is another. There’s nothing “cool” about the devastation these systems can unleash, and framing them as anything other than instruments of unimaginable violence minimizes their true horror.
I know if this configuration was used in a real world scenario it would, more than likely, be because of a terrible World War. However, in my mind, this is humanity’s last ditch effort to destroy an Alien mothership determined to destroy us.
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