Or Canada responds when an ally activates article 5 of the NATO treaty. Then an air force will be needed

It is strategic for Canada to invest in its air force because:

1. Hmm, what happened in that far northern area? We should go check it out. Oh wait, we don't have planes to do that.
2. Russia attacks Finland. Finland calls for help from its NATO allies. Canada sends its air force.
3. Every single flight from Europe to the US west coast flies over Canada. Even flights from Europe to Mexico City pass over Atlantic Canada. One of those flights stops responding and there's a fear it was hijacked. Oh well, I guess the USAF can check it out once it crosses the border... if it crosses the border.

You can see some of the absurdities of not having a proper air force in Switzerland. They used to have an Air Force that only operated during daytime business hours. In 2014 an Ethiopian Airlines pilot hijacked his own plane and landed it in Geneva. Italy and France scrambled to escort the plane through their airspaces. Switzerland had to just let it do what it wanted because their Air Force didn't operate 24 hours a day.

In fact, for a huge and nearly empty country like Canada, the air force is arguably the most important military branch. Since prehistoric times, the size of a country / kingdom / empire was defined by the region in which it had a monopoly on the use of force. If Canada wants to claim sovereignty over the entire North, and not just the Montreal to Toronto corridor, it needs to be able to notice an invasion in the north, attack anybody there tying to claim its territory, and transport soldiers up there if necessary. That's all Air Force stuff.

A modern Air Force might not mean fighter pilots in supersonic planes. As things in Ukraine have shown, it might instead be mostly drones.

It will do just fine against anything Russia has

Against anything it has left.

It was designed very intentionally around the challenges of defending Sweden during the Cold War.

and it comes flat packed with simple instruction and free allen wrenches.

That's because they don't have a choice.

The Gripen is a good 4.5 generation platform, but we're almost at the dawn of 6th generation fighters.

Building your modern first air force around 4th generation platforms is generally a bad idea, which is why Canada abandoned that idea previously.

But understandably, when your only option for 5th gen fighters is now openly antagonistic towards you, that changes the calculations.

What I should have said, is that buying the Gripen is an admission that they are voluntarily forfeiting their ability to fight a modern war.

And i'm not saying that's a bad thing. What I am saying is that an acquisition program for a 4th generation fighter in the year 2026 is an incredible waste of resources.

Might as well hold out and wait to acquire a 6th gen European platform, which should be available in the early 2040s.

Being stuck with the F35s sucks but good on Canada for standing up to their deals and not wriggling out of them.

turns out you don't need to formally invade to control another country, you just have to install a traitor friend into power.... which the US definitely did in Venezuela, btw

Sure, how about from the folks who shot it down. That wasn’t parts from a different plane, or AI generated.

They said they did. Still no proof

You're getting downvoted by simps who don't know the history of this turd, they keep quoting design stats as if they are true.

F-35s were stuck over a year at Lockheed on software glitches, and they can't fix it. Pentagon report.

US Navy even rejected them and refused to accept delivery.

This is a fucking Edsel.

Respectfully, I don't think you really even understand this field. Has the leadership fucked things up to a huge extent? Yes.

Does that destroy all of the massive R&D investments in military tech over the last 2 decades (since 9/11 specifically)? Of course not.