Is Sweden's Gripen fighter jet the answer to Europe's F-35 fears?
Micael Johansson, the CEO of Swedish company Saab, confirmed to Swedish media that Portugal and Canada are studying whether to buy the JAS 39 Gripen E/F fighter jet.
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Looking at the Ukraine and Armenia war I am getting curious about "cheap" drones or drone version of light aircraft. For the price of a Grippen, you can get 100 VL3 (even counting the modification for a drone version). Sure a cool ultra light plane isn't barely as cool as fighter jet.
However, With a swarm of 100, I doubt air defence will intercept all of them even in modern countries. Let alone operations in countries with no air defences
Drones have without a doubt changed warfare a ton, but there's still no fighter jet equivalent on speed and impact power. Situation in Ukraine is a bit different as Ukraine doesn't have much hardware to spare and Russians seem to be afraid of modern defences and neither of them have real infrastructure in place for fighter jet maintenance close enough to the front lines.
Drones work now because they are $1000 (random number in the right range), while a patriot missile is $4 billion dollars each. Sure you could shoot a drone down with one, but if you do the enemy will just send more and bankrupt you.
Ukraine has already seen some success using WWII air defense rifles, or hunting shotguns to take out drones, there the cost is around $1 each. It will need more effort, but there is no reason we cannot automate building such things, and from there mass production means drones are no longer cost effective because they get shot down. (note that shotguns have a range of about 50 meters, and the rifles maybe 10km - we need a lot of this on the lines to make a difference, but that means large amounts of mass production and so the cost should be maybe $5-10k each)
Drones work now because they are $1000 (random number in the right range), while a patriot missile is $4 billion dollars each. Sure you could shoot a drone down with one, but if you do the enemy will just send more and bankrupt you.
I agree with the point but these numbers are some orders of magnitude off. A patriot missile is typically 4 million dollars (so not billion). Drones vary widely depending on the type. Man-portable scouting drones can go as low as a few hundred dollars. I don't think a patriot missile would ever target something that small flying that low though. The Iranian Shahed is estimated to cost around $30-50k. Russia produces its own upgraded version (better navigation systems, bigger warheads, etc.) that costs around $80k.
Even then, you can make 50 drones for the cost of a single patriot. The economics are not favourable.
The source I found for patriot cost was billion, but agree that looks unreasonably high. Maybe a typo on the source's part? I don't remember which source I found yesterday.