Cant they just get along for the sake of european unity.
Depends on all players and even politicians are involved 🤷♂️
Sad state of affairs.
Business as usual. Take a look at a Eurofighter summary of events. France bailed two times.
My American take is that this is really on France. Like, I don’t have the ability to see all the horse-trading that happens behind the scenes, so maybe France is making tons of concessions on other things that we just can’t see, but France bailed on the Eurofighter, and got a lot of concessions on the FCAS that I probably wouldn’t have made from the standpoint of the other parties involved.
France wants the FCAS to be a CATOBAR carrier-based fighter. No other European partners want a CATOBAR fighter, and there is almost no international market for this, since few countries plan to operate CATOBAR carriers, and most of those already have their own fighters. Maybe India. There are maybe two other routes for France I could have imagined if they are determined to do a carrier fighter: (a) accept STOBAR carriers for compatibility with other European parties operating carriers, (b) get a bunch of other EU members to fund a CATOBAR carrier fleet. But neither of those have happened. Otherwise, I’d say either drop the carrier fighters or use F-35Cs. CATOBAR just makes a bunch of tradeoffs that don’t make sense for anyone else in order to stock the hanger on a single ship, and it makes the aircraft less-competitive from an export standpoint. France pushed on Germany to make the FCAS more-exportable, extracting a requirement that no one sole FCAS member could deny export to a customer (the concern being that an export customer might be worried about buying FCAS if Germany might block export of parts or aircraft). But making the thing for CATOBAR does no favors for export.
I also don’t see a huge benefit here for France. France avoids F-35Cs, likes to not use US planes…okay, fine. But they’re already relying on US hardware — the catapult that they’re using is going to be a US one, because they don’t have the funds to go develop their own. Is France going to do sea control with a sole CATOBAR carrier? That’d be a rationale for using a nuclear powerplant, having high, sustained speed. But it can’t be operational all the time, which is a large drawback. It’s a single point of failure for French naval aviation, unlike, say, the Brits, which decided to do two less-expensive carriers.
France’s claimed alternative to the FCAS — at least what Dassault keeps saying they will do, though I have no idea if they really speak for France — is to just go do an updated Rafale. That’s going to put France significantly behind the curve in terms of having a competitive manned fighter. My understanding, from past reading, is that the reason that France might do this is because France is just going to bet really heavily on large UAVs and will rely on such a UAV coming out, being technically-successful, and not slipping schedule. Then France would worry about doing a manned fighter sometime down the road, with fewer time constraints. That’s got some considerable risk.
France wants Dassault to have lead on the project and a lot of control over it and work. One concession that France made was to give Germany lead on a (much smaller) Franco-German tank project, the MGCS. Spain, as far as I understand, hasn’t gotten anything comparable. And France is only contributing a third of the capital for the project.
My understanding is that France wants to maintain an independent French capability to do a full aircraft in the future, without requiring any other EU partners. But if the argument is that FCAS is a European project and represents European defense-industrial integration, then that should be something that France is willing to put on the table.
My impression from past reading is that both Germany and Italy had had some interest in trying to get FCAS/Tempest efforts merged. That is, both have considered that to be an option.
https://www.aviacionline.com/fcas-and-tempest-programs-to-eventually-merge
FCAS and Tempest programs to eventually merge
At least that is what the head of the Italian Air Force, General Luca Gorett, thinks, as he expressed it last Tuesday before the parliamentary defense committees.
Goretti also noted that since the two programs are currently in their «conceptual phase,» it is normal that, in this initial period, each country evaluates options in terms of technology.
«But it is natural that these two realities merge into one, because investing huge financial resources in two equivalent programs is unthinkable,» Goretti told members of the parliamentary defense committees.
Both are years away from a flight-ready demonstrator aircraft. In the meantime, the German Air Force chief of staff said he has spoken to his Italian and British counterparts about possibly combining efforts.
“It can be that we go on different tracks. Hopefully we will merge eventually,” Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz said in an exclusive interview with Defense news en route to Berlin, Germany, from Mihail Kogălniceanu International Airport outside of Constanta, Romania.
I’ve read statements in the past out of France that they would certainly not consider such a merger of efforts acceptable.
If France actually lines up a European fighter project and then winds up being the odd man out after Germany and maybe Spain wind up with Italy, the UK, and Japan doing Tempest instead…that just seems bonkers to me.
From what I’ve read, one problem with Germany joining Tempest is that Japan has the short pole on timeline — they have some internal hard timeline constraints to have Tempest out. Germany’s timeline is less-constrained, and may not want to push the aircraft out so soon. But in general, Germany’s got more flexibility than France does. Playing hardball with Germany seems kinda nuts.
If France bails, then they’ve got an older airframe for naval aviation for some time. They’re preserving their independent aircraft production capacity, but for what? Do they plan to need to operate independently from the rest of Europe’s military-industrial capability? Like, let’s say that France wants to do a seventh-gen fighter. Great, they can do all of the aircraft themselves. But they are unlikely to be in a position to do a competitive one, because they won’t have a defense budget on par with the US or China or whoever for it.
And if they bail and withdraw their offer of Germany’s leadership on the MGCS, then they’ve got another mess to fix there, since now they’re out their next-gen tank.
Naval aviation lets you reach out and touch something a long ways away. But it sounds like The Italian-British-Japanese coalition is likely going to be focusing hard on range with Tempest:
The U.K. Royal Air Force officer in charge of defining requirements for the Tempest future fighter says the program’s top priority is a large payload — roughly twice that of the F-35A stealth fighter. The same officer says the service is eyeing “really extreme range” for the new aircraft, with potentially enough internal fuel to fly across the Atlantic without refueling.
Using a land base further away doesn’t mean that you can have as-high a sortie frequency. But point is, that does at least offset some of the benefit of using naval aviation. If you have a lot of long-range, land-based fighters, that can provide some of the benefits of naval aviation.
I mean, I’m sure that everyone involved has their reasons. But to me, it seems like France gets surprisingly little out of what it’s fighting for. An independent industry that is likely to have a hard time producing competitive fighters while hedging against risk of…what, influence from other countries in Europe? Those countries probably have other levers of influence. A non-US-originating fighter on a carrier that’s US-originating hardware? A carrier aimed at sea control, but only a lone one, which makes for a very limited inventory to control the seas? None of those seem to buy a huge amount. And for that, trading off scale, export potential, utility in the probably-more-important terrestrial capacity?
It just seems like that France has a lot of FCAS asks, and that some of those asks are not buying France a lot relative to the tradeoffs that they’d probably have to make to get them.
Can Canada join plz?
I mean… they also speak french, so “we” wouldn’t recognize the differences…
