Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to Operate as a Joint Air Force | Hacker News Reader

Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to Operate as a Joint Air Force

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72 pointsoidar14 comments

Interesting because Sweden is running a LOT of Gripens, but the rest are going for F-35. Most of the benefit of this sort of thing outside of actual joint-shooting-at-enemies is buying in bulk at a discount, and price of access to spare parts for maintenace, so it'll be interesting how this affects Sweden and their seeming desire to run with their own fleet of planes. Will the others buy a bunch of Gripens, or convince Sweden to buy American?

Can Gripens & F-35s share munitions?

I would guess so. It would have been nuts for the Swedes to build custom ammo that nobody else uses just for the Grippen, especially given they aimed the jet at the export market as well.

Stuff like missiles and bombs seem to be easily fitted to basically any jet with hard mounts: see the Ukrainian airforce using western missiles on Soviet era aircrafts.

I don't follow this in detail, but from what I have read the Gripen has a strong dogfighting ability and older versions have done well against the F-16 and F-15. The latest E-version is probably much better. As someone who has just read some news articles and do not have any military experience, it seems to me that it could be filling in some capacities that the F-35 is not designed for.

The E-version of Gripen was designed with NATO operability in mind, so it is probably not hard to integrate.

Yes, there is an international version called Gripen C/D and it uses

Jakt (Hunt): Robot 74 Sidewinder, Robot 99 AMRAAM , Robot 98 IRIS-T, Auto-cannon Mauser 27 mm

Attack: Bomb GBU-49 Paveway II, Bomb GBU-12 Paveway II, Robot 75 Maverick, Robot 15F , Auto-cannon Mauser 27 mm.

In fact JAS 39 Gripen is a very attractive plane for many NATO countries, as it has a lower cost of flight hours at 7800 USD per hour compared to 43000 USD per hour for the F35. Cost per unit is lower as well at 45 million USD per flight package compared to 180 Million. its STOL feature is highly sought after by NATO as it is designed to land and take off from normal highways and paved roads. All it needs is 500m to take off and 600m to land. Sure the F35 can do the same on 182eters or just do a VTOL, but at a cost that gives you 4 Gripen.

Not all countries can afford to buy or even fly F35.

NATO countries already using SAAb JAS Gripen 39: - Hungary - UK - Iceland (via Czech Republic) - Czech Republic

NATO Country that want it: - Türkiye (In fact, since the US denied F35 and F16 upgrade packages, and Sweden wanted to join NATO, this desire to buy planes has been used in the negotiations to let Sweden join NATO by Erdogan)

https://ac.nato.int/search?q=Gripen https://www.saab.com/newsroom/stories/2020/august/why-gripen... https://aviatia.net/saab-gripen-vs-f-35-lightning-ii/

So is JAS better than F35? No, not just looking at the specs on paper. But it is competitive at a price point that is very attractive.

Translation: https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11zwlyy/air_force_h...

Next thing you know, they'll start putting barcodes on their military vessels...

It's curious why Iceland and Greenland were left out of this Nordic alliance.

Is their lutefisk not good enough?

Isn't Greenland already included in "Denmark"?

And Iceland doesn't even have a military, AFAIR. The country's total population is <400k

There's an ongoing and popular desire to become independent.

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

"Cosmetics Billionaire Convinced Trump That the U.S. Should Buy Greenland" (Denmark said "no" and Conan O'Brien visited to find out what went wrong.)

https://visitgreenland.com/articles/conan-obrien-in-greenlan...

Iceland relies on cooperation with the US military for defense:

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

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

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

As a Dane this appears true on the surface but not when diving deeper. Some in Greenland might desire independence but it has neither the economy nor the willingness to adapt to actually move forward with it.

Greenland has a militarised coastguard as part of their self-governance, but the general defence of Greenland (and the Faroe Islands) is done by the Danish military. More specifically by the Joint Arctic Command

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

Wouldn't it be a geographic thing? Can fighter jets even fly from Greenland/Iceland to Norway without refueling?

I bet they'll use Finland's old Air force logo, since it's so well known in the region.

Another tax on the people of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Over reaction to Russia? Will Nato fail and this is a reaction to that prediction?

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