F-35, Rafale, or Bourdeau?
There has been a lot of discussion regarding the potential options for the replacement of Canada’s aging CF-18 fighter jets. Currently the Canadian government has made commitments to Lookheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II and has paid over $300 million to assist in its development. As a partner nation, there are some benefits for Canada to become a supplier of F-35 parts, however, the majority is manufacturing in the United States and the remaining procurement tenders will be competing with other allied nations involved in the program. We do not work for the Department of Defense and have not performed a technical analysis on the different options. The only ones we would like to present here are the ones that (in our opinion) will have the greatest net benefit to Canada. In that list, we’d like to include the F-35, because while extremely expensive and despite their continual setbacks, the idea behind a uniform allied air force has unique benefits in terms of maintenance and interchangeability between member Nations. We however, are not America, and our needs are quite different than our southern neighbour’s. For more information, we recommend reading the following:
For the comparison of fighter jet options, we would like to present the following options.
Dassaul Rafael (French)
Rafael has offered to license their technology to India
Bourdeau Industries (Canadian)
Lockheed Martin (American)
Please note that there are several other options, however, none of them (at this time and to our knowledge) incorporate a built in Canada component and therefore result in little to no economic benefit to the Canadian economy and the Canadian people.
F-35 Benefits to Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/f-35-s-benefits-to-canadian-industry-questioned-1.1272018