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Deleted member 457759
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^It's not that simple. Smaller but strategically important American allies like Canada, Australia, Turkey (until now) etc. simply don't have the industrial capacity to self sufficiently develop their own high end military hardware nor the raw wealth to do so in a viable way. Moreover, certain technologies (the F35 being one of them) were designed to be "export friendly" with significant anti-tamper tech built in to make them extremely difficult to "reverse engineer" or otherwise gleen sensitive information from. That said, the way Erdogan has been behaving of late is a massive red flag. As a citizen of a country that is poised to be a leading F35 operator, I am not at all enthusiastic about a guy like him having F35's at his disposal. I doubt it would be a big leap for a leader like that to hand a working airframe over to the Russians etc for "inspection". That's to say nothing of how troublesome an F35 equipped Turkish airforce might be if the country really went to crap (seems more possible by the day).
Canada has more than enough wealth to develop our own fighter jet program. We use to do it and we could do it today, just like Sweden.
The problem is Canadian apathy and lack of patriotism. Many Canadians are socialist and live in an alternate reality where defense isnt needed because we're so nice. Plus we can just ride on the back of American security. The problem is, and I've been telling my fellow Canadians this, is that we often smugly criticize the United states as war mongering. It's a conflict for me personally because if we're going to benefit from American defense spending we shouldn't undermine it at the same time.