One NATO Ally Might Regret Buying Expensive F-35 Stealth Fighters, nationalinterest.org

David Axe, Defense Editor of the National Interest

Denmark had a small air force. And then they bought the F-35.

The U.S. ambassador to Denmark wants the Nordic country to buy more American-designed F-35 stealth fighters.  Ambassador Carla Sands’s advocacy for a “made-in-America” warplane should come as no surprise. But leaving aside the benefit to U.S. industry, Sands has a point. Denmark has too few fighters. […]

On May 11, 2016, the government of Denmark recommended that lawmakers approve the purchase of just 27 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters from U.S. firm Lockheed Martin in order to replace the Scandinavian country’s F-16s.[…]

The Danes believed they could acquire and operate 27 F-35s — a number adequate to deploy four jets to a war zone for a year at a time every three years — for just $300 million per plane over the fleet’s whole lifetime.

But that was a hopelessly optimistic number. The Pentagon’s own internal assessment in 2016 estimated that the life-cycle cost for a single F-35 was $460 million. Läs artikel