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Comment by aerostable_slug | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the weapons.

Certainly France is competitive when it comes to ships and many expendable munitions, but they aren't selling F-35s and the US is, and so far it seems that the juice is worth the substantial squeeze when it comes to that jet. The race is largely for second, because first place (the Lightning) is so far in front of the pack.

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European countries like Germany have been purchasing F-35 for the main reason that it's the only plane which can carry US nuclear weapons, which is mandatory for Germany to carry its obligations to participate to NATO nuclear defense [1]

They will hopefully purchase Eurofighter or Rafale or whatever else in the future.

[1] (fr) https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/03/15/la-d...

We have ITAR-free Rafale. And for better or worse, we don't "vendor lock-in" our planes.

That juice is poisonous. The plane may be alright, but it is no longer a wise strategy to build security using US equipment, unless you are the US.

The F-35 is an expensive, very criticised (even inside the US) plane and the US notoriously have some kind of backdoor to it. It makes no sense to me that the EU would buy F-35 other than as a way to give money to the US ("buying protection").

F-35 is cheaper than the f14 converting, so not a good argument, the high selling numbers of it help drive the price down

My point was that the F-35 is more expensive than European planes which don't have a US backdoor.

In fact I think it was the US army that complained about the F-35 being way too expensive.

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