The coming $26 billion windfall for the Canadian Armed Forces. What to buy?

Admiral Beez said:

If we want twin engines and an aircraft from outside of the US, we have only the Eurofighter and Rafale. But is that false reassurance anyway? IIRC, today's jet engined are very reliable, and if a failure damages critical systems (hydraulics, fuel lines, avionics), both engines might be intact, but the aircraft is still doomed.

SAAB will need to update its website. They were smart to leave it up.

https://www.saab.com/markets/canada/gripen-for-canada

Click to expand...

I tend to agree. Also, looking at loss rates would be useful: how do, say, the F-16 and F-18 compare? Neglecting a couple of early F-18s where one engine performed partial self-disassembly and fodded the other, there have been several F-18s operating from land lost after a single engine failure. I don't know whether the loss was due to some sort of cascading failure, operating at too great a weight or flaws in training, but it does little good for the argument in favor of twin engine safety.

As a somewhat irrelevant aside, when I was active in the helicopter industry, twin-turbine helicopters' loss rate was driven by a common failure mode: the transmission. Twin helicopters had a significantly higher rate of transmission failure than did singles.

z42 said:

The 2->5% bump is quite huge, and I would expect that NATO members would try to weasel all kinds of expenses into the target, in order to make it easier to achieve.

Not sure what the criterias are for what can be counted as defense related spending and what cannot, but it would make sense to have some common standards for this, to avoid needless strife due to some members counting expense X and others not.

Click to expand...

One of the problems groups like SIPRI have comparing defense budgets is what different countries throw into the mix. In the US, defense costs include chunks of the Dept of Energy budget, arguably the entire VA budget, and chunks of the budget for the NRO, Coast Guard, and NSA. How does one count the French Gendarmes and Italian Carabinieri, which are largely police forces but are under the defense budgets of those countries?