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Comment by sorokod | Hacker News Reader

The Danish air force is likely experiencing a buyers remorse about their batch of F35s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Danish_Air_Force

"27 in total ordered; 17 delivered as of January 2025; 11 in Denmark and 6 in Luke Air Force Base for training purposes as of January 2025"

Project is so far along that Denmark is probably stuck with them.

If, and that is a big if, the US would allow Denmark or any other of their "allies" to suspend their commitments to the US arms industry.

"The weak are meat the strong do eat."

They can probably sell them to Russia or China a few years down the road at the current trajectory.

Russia wouldn't know what to do with them, given that they effectively do not develop weapon systems after the collapse of the Soviet Union. China probably has decent enough espionage they don't really need them, although it might make a nice political overture.

And to clarify, this was a bit of a tongue in cheek comment implying that the US will become friendly enough with the two big autocracies of the world so they will officially buy arms from US defense companies (in which case Denmark can pass those F-35s to them).

For the record, I dearly hope it doesn't come to this, but right now I'm not sure.

Russia can just ask US at this point.

Czech people also discuss it (F35s ordered in 2024, delivery estimated in 2031-2035).

Yes I'm sure the Danes are wishing they had purchased their fifth generation fighters from China or Russia instead.

The Chinese and Russian would certainly have provided continued support if they were on the other end of a conflict, differently from the Evil Bad American Empire.

Alternatively they could have went with not 5 generation, but still extremely good Gripen.

It's electronic warfare capabilities have reportedly surprised Nato pilots in exercises before.

Gripen has an American engine and uses American licensed missiles.

Presumably you can't brick an engine. The F-35 can be.

Can probably also use other missiles but I agree we need to get rid of all US dependencies and I guess a lot of effort is going on now to see what can be done to get rid of the American engine.

Maybe a cooperation with French (Safran) or British (Rolls Royce) industry could remove their reliance on the Americans? (Not suggesting overnight but over the next 2 - 7 years.)

Snecma Gripen would be pretty sick.

The best medium range missile usable from a Gripen is the Meteor, which is a European product. Of course the issue is that production isn’t high enough.

Good point I forgot about the meteor.

Extremely good is getting a bit over the top. The Gripen was designed in the 80's and it shows. It cannot really compare with something like the F-22 or 35 on anything substantial except cost. And if you're optimizing for cost, it becomes a question of how many pilots you're willing to lose to make it fulfill realistic roles.

Which jet will they prefer if they need to defend Greenland? A dated and affordable gripen, or an F35 that the Americans will just beam a kill -9 command to via a backdoor?

That money could have been used on drones or other weapons rather than buying expensive paper weights.

There's zero chance the F35s will even be able to take off when the US attacks Greenland, while the chance of Chinese planes defending Denmark from the US is non-zero.

Also, they could have bought European planes (Rafale).

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