The Liberal government announced in early 2023, that it would purchase 88 F-35s in a project costing $19 billion. DND officials also confirmed the full life-cycle cost for the F-35 project would eventually tally $70 billion.
The first of Canada’s F-35s will be first delivered to a U.S. military base in 2026 and then into Canada in 2028. Canada plans to operate the aircraft until 2060.
In recent days, some Canadians have voiced concerns online that the U.S. has installed a specialized kill switch that could disable the Royal Canadian Air Force’s F-35 fleet.
DND spokesperson Kened Sadiku said no such switch exists on the aircraft, but he did acknowledge that the U.S. is in charge of both software and hardware upgrades for the planes.
Europe isn’t using modern fighter jets, they’re flying fourth generation fighters while America, China, and Russia are starting to fly sixth generation jets.
But yeah it would make more sense to buy from China if you’re trying to put pressure on America. America does not see Russia as a near-peer adversary, and Europe is even less threatening.
Russian fighter jets are only 5th generation on paper.
I don’t know Russian fighter jets actual performance specs, and unless you work for the Russian military, you don’t know that either.
What we can say is that Su-57s have been used in Ukraine to strike targets behind enemy lines and they haven’t been shot down by F-16s or Patriots so it looks like it does the job it was designed to do.
If you do work for the Russian military, I hear Warthunder isn’t correctly modeling your plane’s performance, you should post the Su-57 flight manual on the forums.
We have intelligence from Ukraine. For one the SU-57 stealth capability sucks, second they are not fully equipped.
Third Russia can only make about 3 per year, and have only very few of them.
The reasons they are not shot down by Ukraine is that Russia keeps them within Russia, out of range and behind air defenses, second that Ukraine does not use F-16 offensively, but exclusively defensively.
Sure, just like our intelligence from Ukraine told us 1 Ukrainian shot down 50 Russian jets. Until the jets are actually being shot down, we can’t say that the stealth doesn’t work with any level of confidence. The fact that they’ve sunk so many resources into it suggests that at least Russia believes it can do things their 4th gen fighters can’t.