Now that we’ve made a commitment to the Saab Global Eye surveillance aircraft, perhaps we ought to take a moment and examine a different alternative to the Girpen fighter - no, not the F-35.
We should arrange to borrow two Global Eye aircraft from Sweden for a month. We should also borrow 4 current generation Gripen fighters for the month. The Global Eye aircraft should be crewed by experienced Swedish operators, and the Gripens piloted by experienced Swedish pilots.
We should fly them to South Korea and arrange to have a head to head in a winner take all of Canada’s business Red Flag exercise utilising the new Korean KF-21 Boramae fighter as the adversary.
Canadian and South Korean command and control specialists should be on the GlobalEye aircraft as well.
Given that the US is flying F-35’s in Korea, we’d also have real-world visibility, or not, of airborne F-35’s using the GlobalEye at the same time as the ‘Red Flag’ exercise. This too would be very helpful to informing our choice of aircraft.
The KF-21 currently is a 4.5 Gen aircraft, as is the Saab Gripen.
The distinctive difference is that the KF-21 has two GE F414 engines, which would probably be of benefit for arctic patrol, it has a longer range than the Gripen, and the Block 3 version of the KF-21 is scheduled to be full stealth.
Hanwa is the manufacturer of the KF-21, and I’m pretty certain that they could be convinced to set up an assembly facility here in Canada if we were to buy say 60 of the Block 3 models. All of this would be dependent on how the KF-21 performed versus the Gripen in both air superiority and ground attack modes.
The other consideration is that South Korea has a full license from General Electric to manufacture the F414 engines totally in South Korea, whereas SAAB/Volvo does not have the same licensing arrangement. So Saab/Volvo must purchase parts from GE in the USA in order to complete the engines. So it’s possible that Korean-made F414’s will evade ITAR - placing the engines beyond US sanctions.
In terms of interoperability with US, aircraft, the US basically treat South Korea as a land aircraft carrier, and any South Korean aircraft can work inter-operably with US aircraft. That said now that Sweden is a member of NATO, the Griffin would also work inter-operably with US aircraft.
The Griffin has longer manufacturing/flight history than the South Korean KF-21, but by all appearances the KF 21 seems to have a significant advantage over the Gripen in some areas, at least as far as Canada’s needs are concerned.