VIDEO: Which is better for Canada: F-35 or Gripen?

Stealth Wins the First Fight. Toughness Wins the Second.

A reader recently asked me to do a comparison, so I made a video for You Tube and put the transcript here for easy reading! (But trust me, the video is better)

For penetrating a modern, heavily defended airspace, the F-35 is simply the better aircraft; stealth, sensor fusion, and a massive allied support network give it a real edge no amount of clever electronics can fully offset.

But for surviving a war where the enemy hits your air bases first, Sweden’s Gripen E was purpose-built to disperse onto short roads and keep flying with a skeleton maintenance crew, which matters enormously for a country defending Canada’s enormous, sparsely populated Arctic.

I break down both aircraft’s real capabilities, why Canada’s own 2023 decision to buy 88 F-35s is still under active review, and why this comparison doesn’t have one clean winner.

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Rough Video Transcript:

Note: the first 3-minute dating show introduction, where Canada must choose between two eligible bachelors, is not reflected in the transcript since I added it at the last minute. You should watch it in the video. I’m quite proud of it.

[Dating show intro]

A viewer recently asked me a question that looks simple until you actually try to answer it. Which is the better fighter, America’s F-35 or Sweden’s Gripen E?

If you told me tomorrow I had to penetrate an air-defense network filled with modern Russian surface-to-air missiles, find the target, share the battlespace picture with everyone around me, drop weapons, and hopefully come home without the enemy ever getting a clean track on me, give me the F-35. That part isn’t especially controversial.

Now change the problem. The runway has been cratered. The aircraft has to operate from a short piece of highway. You have a tiny maintenance team, limited ground equipment, and you need the jet refueled, rearmed, and back in the air fifteen minutes later. Now the Swedish fighter suddenly becomes extremely interesting.

Canada needs versions of both problems solved, which is why this comparison isn’t nearly as simple as “fifth generation beats fourth generation.” One aircraft was designed around surviving inside the enemy’s air-defense network. The other was designed around surviving after the enemy attacked the air force on the ground.

Both are extremely clever answers to different questions, and Canada is still deciding which question matters most.

Hey friends, Wes O’Donnell here. Defense journalist, Army and Air Force veteran and I hope you feel the need for speed. [Top Gun Gong Sound]

This one came from a viewer request, and I’ve wanted to do it for a while, because Canada has somehow kept the F-35 versus Gripen debate alive years after officially selecting the F-35. And I think Trump has something to do with it… Welcome to the danger zone baby.

[Danger Zone song with Canadian flag]

Canada announced in January 2023 it would acquire 88 F-35As to replace the CF-18. Prime Minister Mark Carney ordered a review of that decision in March 2025, and as of the latest official update, that review remains underway. Canada is still proceeding with existing F-35 commitments while Ottawa considers whether the complete 88-aircraft plan still represents the right mix of capability, industrial benefit, and sovereignty. Saab clearly thinks the door remains open too, in July, Saab and Canadian company CAE signed a new agreement covering pilot training and support if Canada adds Gripen E to its future fleet.

So today: if you strip away national preference and procurement politics, which is actually the more capable fighter? Where does Gripen beat F-35? How does the geography of Canada’s Arctic change the calculation? And which aircraft actually better fits Canada’s real requirements?

Start with the mission neither pilot particularly wants. A Russian-style defensive network, long-range radars, S-400 batteries, fighters, electronic warfare, everything sharing information, and your job is to penetrate it and hit something important. This is where the F-35 earns its entire reason for existing.

The F-35A was built around very low observability. Its shape reduces radar returns, weapons ride internally instead of hanging beneath the wings, and radar-absorbent materials plus careful treatment of panel edges and engine signatures make it significantly harder for enemy radar to build the kind of track needed to engage it effectively. Stealth doesn’t make it invisible, physics still applies, low-frequency radars may know something’s out there, and once you hang weapons externally the signature increases.

The advantage is that the enemy faces a much harder detection, classification, and targeting problem, and every second added to that chain matters.

Then there’s the sensor suite.

The F-35 carries the APG-81 AESA radar, six infrared cameras forming the Distributed Aperture System, an Electro-Optical Targeting System, electronic-warfare sensors, and the aircraft automatically fuses all of it into one picture for the pilot. He isn’t independently comparing five different sensor screens like someone watching security cameras at a Walmart.

Radar sees something, electronic support measures detect an emitter, another F-35 sees another piece, a ship or ground station contributes more, and the software turns it into one coherent understanding of who’s where. That makes the F-35 less a fighter with an unusually good radar and more a flying intelligence node that happens to carry missiles.

But here’s where the GRIPEN FIGHTS BACK.

Gripen E approaches survivability differently. It isn’t a stealth aircraft in the F-35 sense, weapons ride externally, and the airframe doesn’t have the same degree of very-low-observable shaping. If both jets fly the same route toward the same modern radar network, the F-35 begins with a major detection advantage.

Gripen compensates with an extremely sophisticated electronic-warfare system: AESA radar, infrared search-and-track, passive detection, electronic attack, and powerful inter-aircraft networking, letting one Gripen radiate while others stay passive, sharing the resulting picture across the formation.

It also carries Meteor, a European beyond-visual-range missile powered by a throttleable ramjet instead of relying solely on a diminishing rocket motor, which preserves energy late in the engagement and gives it an unusually large no-escape zone against maneuvering targets.

Saab lists Gripen E as capable of carrying up to SEVEN Meteors alongside short-range IRIS-T missiles.

Picture the engagement. Gripen’s infrared sensor passively detects something, another aircraft contributes radar data, the formation shares the track without every fighter announcing itself electronically, Meteor launches from long range.

That’s a serious air-to-air threat, and anyone dismissing Gripen as simply an inexpensive fourth-generation jet is missing how advanced its sensors, electronic warfare, and networking actually are. Still, if the job is deliberately penetrating modern surface-to-air defenses, my assessment doesn’t change. The F-35 has the stronger toolset for that specific mission. Round one goes to F-35.

Now move the fight to Sweden, or more importantly for this video, northern Canada.

Sweden built Gripen around a specific nightmare: the Soviet Union attacks, Swedish airbases get hit first, runways crater, hangars burn, and the air force still has to fight. So Sweden built an aviation system around dispersion. Gripens operate from ordinary road sections and austere airfields, Saab says Gripen E can take off from roughly 500 meters of road and land in around 600, requiring relatively little ground-support equipment, with an air-to-air turnaround taking roughly fifteen minutes with a small crew. That’s not a party trick. It’s doctrine built into the airplane, move it, hide it, land on a road, refuel, reload, leave before the enemy’s reconnaissance-strike complex figures out where you went. Ukraine has spent four years demonstrating exactly why that matters. Large airbases become missile magnets. Anything that can disperse is harder to destroy.

Canada has a geography problem Sweden would recognize immediately. The Canadian Arctic is enormous, Canada maintains forward operating locations at Inuvik, Yellowknife, and Iqaluit, plus Goose Bay farther east, and Ottawa is investing tens of billions upgrading those sites specifically to strengthen NORAD operations.

The Gripen philosophy, smaller footprint, easy field maintenance, short runway requirements, rapid turnaround, is deeply attractive here. If the enemy knows exactly which two giant fighter bases your entire air force depends on, you’ve given them a manageable targeting problem. Spread aircraft across multiple austere locations and that problem gets considerably uglier. Round two goes to Gripen.

Gripen E reaches around Mach 2, the F-35A tops out around Mach 1.6, so Gripen wins the pub argument. Maximum speed tells us remarkably little about which aircraft wins an actual fight, though, a loaded aircraft may not reproduce its clean-airframe brochure number, and sustained speed, fuel consumption, and mission profile all matter more than the top-line figure.

The F-35 trades raw top speed for stealth, internal fuel, and internal weapons carriage, Lockheed lists the F-35A’s combat radius on internal fuel above 590 nautical miles, with unrefueled range above 1,200. Saab’s Canadian material has advertised substantially longer mission ranges under its own assumptions, especially with external tanks, though these aren’t clean apples-to-apples comparisons.

Canada is enormous enough that neither fighter magically solves geography. Both need tankers, forward bases, and early warning to get airborne in time. That’s why Ottawa is spending heavily on northern radar, airborne early warning, and tankers alongside the fighter program itself, the fighter is only one piece of a kill chain.

Incidentally, Canada has now selected Saab as its preferred partner for GlobalEye airborne early warning discussions, meaning we may eventually get Canadian-built Bombardier aircraft carrying Swedish radars telling American-built F-35s where to go. Modern alliances are weird.

Gripen was deliberately designed to be easy to maintain. Access panels sit where technicians can reach them, line-replaceable components come out quickly, the ground crew requirement is small, and engine changes happen unusually fast. Sweden’s entire concept assumes these aircraft get maintained away from a climate-controlled hangar.

The F-35 is a more complicated machine, its low-observable surface has real maintenance requirements, its sensor and software architecture demands specialized support, and its global sustainment system is correspondingly massive. The readiness numbers back that up uncomfortably.

A June 2026 US Government Accountability Office report found mission-capable rates across the American F-35 fleet declined from 67 percent in 2021 to 44 percent in 2025, with full-mission-capable rates falling from 38 to 25 percent, pointing to spare-part shortages, maintenance problems, industry capacity, and software issues.

That’s a serious criticism.

It doesn’t prove Gripen would produce some magical 95-percent Canadian readiness rate either, we simply don’t have comparable fleet-scale independent data for Gripen E, since there are nowhere near as many in service. F-35 has more than 1,300 aircraft delivered globally. Gripen E-series orders currently total 117. Scale creates problems, and it also creates resilience, an F-35 component failure taps into a global enterprise with thousands of aircraft and nineteen other customer nations. A Gripen failure draws on a far smaller user base. Gripen offers simplicity. F-35 offers scale.

You’ll often hear this reduced to F-35 means dependency, Gripen means sovereignty. Reality is messier.

There’s no secret American kill switch, the Canadian government has publicly stated the US cannot remotely shut down Canada’s aircraft, that particular internet argument needs to die. The real dependency sits in software, mission-data support, spare parts, upgrades, weapons integration, and the enormous multinational support architecture around the platform.

Canada owns and operates its F-35s inside a global program whose center of gravity remains American, which creates extraordinary interoperability and means Canada doesn’t independently control every layer of the aircraft’s evolution.

Gripen gives the customer more room. Saab has historically offered domestic assembly, maintenance, software integration, and technology transfer, and its July agreement with CAE specifically proposes Canadian-operated training and support if Ottawa buys in. Brazil is the proof of concept, it now produces Gripen E domestically, with hundreds of Brazilian engineers participating in development and production.

That’s real sovereignty value.

There’s a complication though, Gripen E’s engine is American, the F414G comes from General Electric, so Canada doesn’t escape American technology entirely by buying Swedish. The difference is degree, not absolute independence.

And F-35 isn’t devoid of Canadian industrial participation either. Canada has been part of the Joint Strike Fighter program since 1997, more than 110 Canadian companies have received over C$5.2 billion in related contracts, and the government says every F-35 leaving the production line now contains more than C$3.3 million in Canadian-made components.

This isn’t buy-American versus buy-Canadian. One model puts Canadian companies inside the world’s largest fighter program. The other offers much deeper domestic control over Canada’s specific aircraft.

Different industrial strategies.

Forget Sweden, forget the United States for a moment, what does the Royal Canadian Air Force actually need this fighter to do?

NORAD comes first. A Canadian fighter shares tracks, tankers, and mission planning with American aircraft constantly, and F-35 has an obvious advantage since the US, Norway, Denmark, and soon Finland all fly it, meaning shared training, shared maintenance knowledge, and collective tactics development across a huge user community.

That commonality carries value no spec sheet captures. Gripen isn’t incompatible with NORAD though, that correction matters, Saab’s Gripen passed Canada’s interoperability requirements in the original competition, Sweden is now a NATO member, and Gripen routinely operates alongside NATO aircraft.

It simply wouldn’t match the US relationship as closely.

Canada’s actual threat environment matters too. It isn’t primarily preparing to dogfight Russian Su-57s over Toronto, the northern mission is detecting and intercepting aircraft and cruise-missile carriers approaching North American airspace, increasingly as part of an enormous sensor network, over-the-horizon radar, satellites, GlobalEye-type aircraft, American sensors, tankers, other fighters. That’s exactly where F-35’s fusion and networking become powerful. If the air war of the future is about which aircraft turns harder, Gripen is extraordinary. If it’s about which aircraft understands the battlespace first and feeds a networked kill chain most effectively, F-35 is difficult to beat.

But Canada defends the second-largest country on Earth with relatively few fighters, and availability matters enormously, an aircraft with fantastic combat capability defends nothing while waiting for a spare part.

Gripen’s lower maintenance burden is unusually relevant here. And the obvious compromise, buy both, keep the committed F-35s and add Gripens for dispersed Arctic work, sounds great on paper and creates a real problem in an air force Canada’s size: two training pipelines, two maintainer workforces, two engines, two spare-parts inventories, two software ecosystems, all overhead spread across a small total fleet.

The Auditor General has already warned Canada faces shortages of qualified fighter pilots and technicians during the existing F-35 transition. A mixed fleet buys resilience through diversity. It also buys bureaucracy through diversity, and for Canada specifically, every duplicate pipeline consumes people the RCAF already struggles to recruit.

So here’s the actual answer. For the highest-end conventional fight, penetrating and surviving modern integrated air defenses, F-35 has the stronger overall package: stealth, sensor fusion, passive sensing, networking, internal weapons, and a gigantic allied ecosystem. Gripen cannot reproduce that low observability through clever electronic warfare alone. That’s physics.

Ask which fighter survives better when your bases are under missile attack and your maintenance footprint has to move constantly, and the answer is Gripen, that’s precisely what Sweden designed it to do. Ask which gives Canada more control over domestic maintenance and industrial participation, Gripen again. Ask which plugs most seamlessly into existing NORAD architecture, F-35. Ask which has the more flexible weapons-integration philosophy, Gripen. Ask which brings the mature global supply network, F-35.

This comparison doesn’t end with one airplane humiliating the other, because these are two completely different philosophies of survival.

America built F-35 around the idea that the aircraft survives because the enemy struggles to see, target, and understand it.

Sweden built Gripen around the idea that the air force survives because the enemy struggles to find the aircraft on the ground, destroy its infrastructure, or stop a small crew from putting it back in the air.

Canada sits directly between those two worlds, sharing continental defense with the largest F-35 operator on Earth while also holding an enormous, sparsely populated Arctic where dispersion and national control keep gaining value.

Canada’s formal competition already selected F-35 as the winner, and the military case behind that decision remains substantial. What’s changed isn’t the airplane, it’s the strategic environment around it, how much of Canada’s defense architecture it wants concentrated inside one foreign relationship, at exactly the moment Ottawa is spending billions deepening NORAD and protecting the Arctic. That’s an unresolved political question, not a settled technical one, and nothing in this analysis should be read as predicting which way Ottawa lands.

Canada isn’t simply choosing between an American fighter and a Swedish fighter. It’s choosing between two different ways of building an air force, one maximizing integration with the largest combat-air ecosystem in the Western world, the other emphasizing dispersion, adaptability, and national control.

The best aircraft depends entirely on which problem you’re trying to solve. Canada has the mildly inconvenient problem of needing to solve both at once.

[Wes salutes the Canadian flag to “Oh Canada” playing in background]

That’s it for today, my friends. This was a viewer-requested video, so keep those questions coming.

If this kind of military technology analysis is useful, hit the thumbs up and subscribe. I cover NATO, Canada, Ukraine, and apparently enough Swedish military hardware that Saab should probably send me a Christmas card.

And as always, glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes, Crimea is Ukraine.

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