Belgium to replace F-16s with F-35s

[citanon]

Workshare's only Italian program. France or Germany won't get squat for any F-35 buys. A new program provides work for all 3.

France and Germany are dead enders for the NGF, but that makes them the only ones.

[weasel1962]

The best part about being in the EU is that the French and Germans are more than happy to increase the budget spend for the Italians so long as its spent on the French and Germans....

[spazsinbad]

Posted already elsewhere some F-35 System of Systems INFO: http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2016Test/OT&EPanel.pdf

To save posting again go here: viewtopic.php?f=58&t=12237&p=346175&hilit=OT%26EPanel#p346175

PDF download: download/file.php?id=23219 F-35 Redmond OT&EPanel.pdf (3.1Mb)

GO HERE for man of SPUDS info SCROLL DOWN: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=53475&p=377274&hilit=OT%26EPanel#p377274

download/file.php?id=23220


_________________________________________________________________________

download/file.php?id=23221

[nutshell]

What's this babbling about Italy joining the NGF?
We went balls-to-the-walls with the Alpha35, we got no more debt to spare with low tier frog-wurstel nth gen fighter!

[duplex]

If they felt that the Rafale was the better choice then they should have competed fairly instead of trying to win via backroom deals. Has France not learned anything from all the bad press about bribes?

Easy explanation - declare that the competition is rigged. Le Monde is the only french newspaper that I know, their report is quite brief:

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... _3214.html

They do not fail to mention that defence minister is "flemish nationalist" Vandeput, their previous articles go on about how good a French proposition would have been for industrial participation and force cooperation... had it not been derailedby flemish nationalists!

As far as I know he is not going to stay in that office for much longer, so while F-35 officially won, major shake-up of the government might still entail cancellation or postponement of plans. I guess we'll have to wait until 2019 election dust settles until F-35's purchase is truly secure. With introduction in 2023, there is still room for the next government to pull a Trudeau.

Well , thats a very good point.. There is a real hatred between Dutch speaking Belgium and Walloons in the South WHO speak French and consider themselves as part of France ..If Wallons win the next election, they will certainly try to cancel this and order the Rafale instead.( remember the F-104 Starfighter replacement competition back in 1976 when the Mirage F-1 competed against the new F-16 ,it was a real struggle , a hard fought battle despite the fact that F-16 was considered by all except the French of course massively superior to Mirage )
Mrs Parly has been describing the F-35 as a disaster massively inferior to Rafale and an aircraft that will never be fully operational .On the other hand the Group AIRBUS WHO were fighting for the Eurofighter says ' if Belgium choses the F-35, there wont be any 5'th generation European fighter in the future..The question remains can Belgium withstand the pressure from Germany and France ? wait and see ..

[duplex]

Yep, its confirmed now. Belgium has officially selected the F-35 today. Glad that my country made the right choice and that our air force will get the most advanced fighter on the market (while being well under budget on top of that!). There were many calls over here to favor an European "solution" since we are a core EU country and i was a bit worried that we might end up with the Eurofighter or Rafale for strictly political reasons, regardless of performances or price, but fortunately common sense prevailed. I have nothing against the EF and Rafale, they are fine planes for today but they arent the best fit for the next 40 years. Especially when you see that their replacements are already on the drawing board... If the Dassault FCAS and BAE Tempest projects had been launched 10-15 years earlier, they could have been a potentially attractive alternative to the F-35 but those projects just started and wont become a reality before the 2030s at the very least. Too little, too late.

On a separate note, the government also confirmed today the acquisition of General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper UAVs (potentially armed) so all in all, this a great day for the BAF.

Yes it was a good decision mate ..Sometime ago I was very sceptical about the F-35 because of endless delays and never ending technical problems .. Today I changed my mind, I think F-35 has more room and potential for improvements in the future than any other fighter on the market .. I like to see an F-35 firing Meteor, AIM-120D and Sidewinders..

[bumtish]

Where is the Mirage F.1 today? Where is the F-16?

How would a mere €4B from Belgium stop Germany/France and the UK from prosecuting their projects, when in reality they will need €'s in the 100 billions for their projects. Will they really dole up this kind of money? Or will it be half the number of platforms with half the intended capability for twice the cost in the best tradition of the EF programme? A system of systems, that's a lot of platforms and technologies that needs to be developed.

Show me the money and the commitment. Swallow the pride about workshare and make it an affordable programme producing machines of defence, not a jobs creation programme.

If Europe wants to compete with US projects like the F-35, a lot more money and commitment has to be shown. Also, the endless workshare fights would have end.

[ricnunes]

I suspect aasm's gripe over the software is not having access to all the source code, not the fact that the SDK is available. That's his Open vs Closed argument. It's been a complaint raised by many a critic of the program who isn't American, especially as the British were to have access originally but were then denied. Or at least that was one of points of being a Tier-1 partner.

No, he explicitly mentioned "open-architecture" as a means of being able to communicate with any other platforms (which he claimed the F-35 couldn't do). Just look at his last post.
But even if that was to be the case than it would be a faulty argument since there's a snowball's chance in hell that if the NGF comes into fruition that the French and Germans would be giving their source code to any potential customer.

However I definitely note that you're talking about program partners and not "simple customers". But then again the origins/genesis of both the F-35 and the NGF are quite different. For example, for the NGF to even have a chance to at least exist it needs both France and Germany onboard and if one of the nations ditches/abandons the program (NGF) than it will never exist (And even if they don't abandon it there's also a chance that it might never exist).
The case with the JSF/F-35 and Britain was different. The JSF project would always exist independently if Britain was "onboard" or not. Or more precisely, the JSF was/is an American program where nation partners were joining down the JSF "development road".

As for ADA vs C++, good luck hiring ADA programmers, and seeing the problems holding back the deployment of Block 3F, I can't imagine how difficult it'd be doing it all in ADA.

You're absolutely right!

Moreover, and while I admit I'm not familiar at all with ADA except that I know that ADA is based on Pascal (and also having been familiar with Pascal on what now seems to be "another age") but being myself well familiar with C/C++ (and with some of its derived languages such as Java or C#) I fail to realize the advantages of using a Pascal based language over C++. Well, this is not to say that there aren't advantages of ADA over C++ but these certainly are offset by the advantages of C++ over ADA, namely like you said C++ being a much widespread language which means it's much, much easier to to hire C++ programmers over ADA ones.
If someone wants to use a more modern language than C++ than I guess that C# would be a better choice. But this last point is my 2 cents...

[ricnunes]

Thank you for links Spaz. Interesting. However, seen the number of different datalinks, VOIP etc. To manage? All those are why i said F-35 is a premise for 6th gen more than a gen in itself : it is extremely connected. (as will i guess be F-22 MLU, RAfale F4, Typhoon2, F18 "NG" etc.).
However, its connectivity did not define its requirements aside of other interconnected platforms. F-35 was built and US are trying to build a network around it.

Jezz, what the heck are you talking about?? First you claim that the F-35 is an "enclosed system" that can only communicate with other F-35's. Then you were proven wrong (that image from Spaz is very interesting indeed) and then you came here claiming that since it has different datalinks you still try to continue to hint that the F-35 is not a "system of systems". LoL Hilarious!

So how do you expect an aircraft (which includes your NGF wannabe) to communicate with different platforms that have so different networks without having different equipment to demodulate comms from those different networks which by the way are all secure/encrypted?
If you're claiming that an aircraft will have a single data-link which is able to communicate equally with all different types of data-links than I don't think that will happen even because the objective of a data-link is precisely not being able to somehow be accessed by other kinds of data-links/networks and this for reasons, you see: of Security.
The only alternative that I see is having a common data-link for all platforms (being them air, ground or sea based) but having to secure funds to develop an aircraft that should be relevant enough in 20 or more years from now (plus 30 to 40
servicing years from then) plus at the same developing a data-link which should fit and replace older ones for each Tank, Joint-Terminal, Warships, Satellites, SAM's, etc... Yeah, good luck with that!

Anyway, and even if I'm mistaken above (which I admit there's a chance of it) what prevents the F-35 to be equipped with such a single system that could handle different types of data-link?? For the F-35 the "hardest part" is already done which is the Software that manipulates data coming from different data-links and handling the comms between those same different data-links which is already present and working.

All those are why i said F-35 is a premise for 6th gen more than a gen in itself : it is extremely connected. (as will i guess be F-22 MLU, RAfale F4, Typhoon2, F18 "NG" etc.).

While the above was already quoted I feel that this should be addressed apart.
Look, there's no such thing as a 6th gen, period!
6th gen basically started as a SAABs PR now extended to the French and all of this PR are attempts to try to have some competing leverage against LM and the F-35.
Yes, there will be a 6th gen fighter aircraft but the only thing for sure that it's know about it is that NO-ONE knows for sure how it will be!
As someone already mentioned here, the 6th gen might even be the introduction of Hypersonic flight or directed-energy weaponry, or something else we aren't expecting. It depends on how technology evolves which is something very hard to predict.

Resuming, connectivity, open-architecture and system of systems are all 5th gen premises (and not some imaginary 6th gen).

I said rigged about belgiup compettition , i should have said oriented. Maybe not really consciously. You can have in mind a result and build the requirements from this result because they therefore seem to you obvious.

Pal, the "only" thing oriented about the Belgium Competition was that the new fighter aircraft must be able to handle and survive emerging threats such as the S-400 or even new fighter aircraft such as the J-20 or Su-57, among other threats (read the goddamn Belgium fighter aircraft requirements) which is a more than logical requirement and the F-35 IS BY FAR the best aircraft to deal with these emerging threats/requirements, period! And suck it up, jezz...

[SpudmanWP]

REcent poll showed 55% opposition

Which is driven by information delivered by the media.

This is how we I the US ended up with the Electoral College and being a Representative Republic as pure democracies are not a good thing.

[steve2267]

A country issues an RFP for a new fighter purchase. A Sopwith Camel, Nieuport, and SPAD are all bid, along with a Spitfire.

If you want to argue that the resulting competition is biased towards the Spitfire, well...

[ricnunes]

A country issues an RFP for a new fighter purchase. A Sopwith Camel, Nieuport, and SPAD are all bid, along with a Spitfire.

If you want to argue that the resulting competition is biased towards the Spitfire, well...

Ditto steve!
I probably couldn't have said it better with so few words

[marauder2048]

Japan is an assembly.

Not strictly. There are radar component and engine component production contracts out there as well.

As to production, the production shares are already confirmed between the partners + logistics and supply chains are all firmed already.

Then someone failed to inform Lockheed Martin hiring!

[SpudmanWP]

LM can give contracts to whomever they want if that workshare comes from LM's portion. They have done this with Japan and Israel.

[marsavian]

Macron still not happy with this non-protectionist choice.

https://www.shephardmedia.com/news/defe ... ropean-in/

.Belgium's decision to buy US-made F-35 fighter jets instead of a rival European aircraft "strategically goes against European interests," French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday.

Belgium announced on Thursday it will purchase Lockheed Martin's stealth jets in a multi-billion-euro deal to replace its ageing fleet of F-16s in a blow to rival French aircraft maker Rafale.

'I regret this choice. This wasn't just the Rafale offer, it was also the Eurofighter, a real European offer,' Macron told reporters in Bratislava.

'The decision is linked to a Belgian procedure, to the political constraints of the country, but strategically goes against European interests.'

He said: 'Europe must develop a real capacity for a European defence industry, in all the countries that believe in this venture.'