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Comment by pmart123 | Hacker News Reader

Norway is way too small of a country to develop its own weapons and airplanes. It has 2% of the GDP that the United States has. The cost of the F-35 project would deplete the entire Norweigan sovereign wealth fund. Secondly, what is the likelihood that Norway gets into a war with the United States versus Russia?

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If Sweden can develop fighter airplanes, why can’t Norway?

Sweden can't develop a fifth generation fighter airplane. It's just too expensive.

It will be interesting to see if France tries next time. The UK, Germany and Italy certainly can't.

The plan seems to be to do it in common with Germany and Spain: https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2019/06/franco-g...

The UK is already in early stages of design for a potential replacement to Eurofighter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BAE_Systems_Tempest

We will be working with Sweden on it as well.

The Gripen first flew 31 years ago, even at the time was considered an outrageously expensive project given the market size (Wikipedia tells me only 247 were ever built!), and frankly there's significant disagreement as to whether it even represents an improvement over the F-16's everyone else was buying at the time.

It was a stretch, and they made it work. But I don't think you'd call this a success. The Viggen was closer to that, and it was a 1960's design.

Actually we can. The US is a big customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kongsberg_Defence_Systems

I'm not saying Norway doesn't have technical or defense capabilities. I'm merely noting that Norway doesn't have the budget to develop state of the art fighter jets solely to provide the Norweigan government. In the case that it did develop one, it would still need to sell the plane to other countries like the US, and then the original OP's question comes back into play of why would the US do that given it has the leverage? International trade can help breed specialization alongside monetary and strategic alliances. I gather Norway would rather have the state of the art weaponry to defend itself from Russia and the US would want that as well.

You said above:

> to develop its own weapons and airplanes.

This can be read in two different ways I guess, and ccsalvesens reply is a valid reply to the way I'd read your post, -namely that "Norway can neither make their own weapons nor their own planes".

You seem to have meant that Norway cannot develop both weapons && planes, true?

Just trying to clear out the source of the misunderstanding here.

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