Gripen vs. Viggen and the Rising Cost of Fighter Aircraft

Recently writing about the Gripen I found myself thinking again about the lengthy, rapid rise in the cost of fighter aircraft, and from the start how it constrained the country's ambitions in this area from the start.

As I observed in the prior post, the Swedish program for a fourth-generation fighter aimed only for a light fighter, and was content to produce an aircraft delivered only fairly late in that cycle (the Swedish air force taking its Gripens in the '90s, when the U.S. was already flight-testing the Raptor, and the Eurofighter Typhoon was similarly being tested).

The country had been more ambitious when procuring the earlier, third-generation Viggens. They went for a medium fighter, not a light fighter, one reflection of which is that the later jet actually had a lighter maximum payload than the earlier plane (5300 kg to the Viggen's 7000 kg). It might be acknowledged that with its first deliveries made only in 1971 the jet can look like a relative latecomer compared with the F-4 Phantom (1960), but still came into service just behind the MiG-23 (1970) and a little ahead of the better-known Mirage F-1 (1973). Moreover, if there were earlier third generation type jets the Viggen was still in many ways a cutting-edge fighter, incorporating many relatively novel features, including the terrain-following radar and integrated circuit-based airborne computer just starting to appear in tactical aircraft at the time, a then ground-breaking canard design and thrust reverser, and in its afterburning turbofan engine, look down/shoot down capability and multi-function displays, technologies we associate with fourth-generation jets. (In fact, it does not seem unreasonable to think of the Viggen as a generation 3+ or 3.5 plane rather than just a gen-3.)

None of that, of course, detracts from the quality of the Gripen aircraft, which was a well-regarded aircraft at the time of its introduction, and has notably been upgraded in a number of respects, with the latest "E" version having a supercruise-capable engine and an AESA (active electronically scanned array) radar, turning generation 4 into generation 4+, while some impressive claims have also been made for its electronic warfare systems (with the most bullish arguing for them as an acceptable substitute for full-blown stealth capability). Still, the shift in strategy does reflect the way even affluent, highly industrialized nations with good access to the world market in the required inputs have been pinched by the mounting cost of this kind of program--which has already seen the biggest air powers in the world, with fifth-gen jets in service, buying up upgraded fourth-generation to fill out the ranks--while raising additional question marks about just how really "sixth generation" the next sixth generation of jets will actually be.

How Could Sweden Afford the Saab-39 Gripen Fighter Program? A Postscript

In the end the answer to the question, "How Could Sweden Afford the Saab-39 Gripen Fighter Program?"--how a small (if rich and industrially advanced) country could afford its own fourth-generation fighter--is that there is a significant extent to which it did not afford it. The country's government ultimately counted on others to develop most of the requisite technology, which it accessed via licensing and outsourcing; and then where the final product was concerned, on others to share the cost by buying their own copies. Additionally, even that required a willingness to settle for an aircraft that, while very good, did not represent the outer limit of its generation's capability or the cutting edge of fighter design when it appeared (generation 5 was just beginning to come online when the first deliveries were made), while the country committed a disproportionate share of its defense resources to the program, as it could only do because of its specific geopolitical situation. (Had Sweden been obliged to fund a bigger navy, the competition for resources might have been too much.)

That there was a considerable gamble ought not to be overlooked, with the planes a very long-term investment that could easily have suffered were technological change more aggressive (even now the plan is to have them flying into the 2040s), or if the export market were less open. (It is worth remembering that the Cold War was heating up during the program's early days--that the preceding Saab-37 Viggen completely failed to line up foreign orders--and that by the '90s the export market was very uncertain.) Still, in the end it seems to have been a success.

How Could Sweden Afford the Saab-39 Gripen Fighter Program?

The exploding cost of fighter aircraft has made programs to build domestically an up-to-date fighter decreasingly affordable for even the largest and richest countries, with even G-7 states increasingly forgoing that course. They find that given the resources at their disposal, the diseconomies of scale of producing an aircraft they alone might end up using, it just does not pay to go it alone.

Naturally I have found myself wondering how Sweden--a nation which, however affluent and technologically advanced, was still of a mere 10 million people, and did not commit a drastic proportion of its national income to defense spending during the relevant time period--managed to successfully produce a well-regarded fourth-generation fighter, the Saab-39 "Gripen," and to do that in apparently quite cost effective fashion (with Gripen Cs recently marketed for as little as $30 million).

Four factors seem to have made the difference.

1. Sweden Spent Less Than Other States, but Also Differently--Giving it Room for One Fighter Program if it Prioritzed it (and it Did)
For comparison purposes, let us use Britain. That country had a GDP six times Sweden's, and a defense budget eight times as big in 1979.1 Yet Britain had already given up on building its own current-generation fighters all by itself, relying on partnerships with other European countries to build its next generation of such planes--notably Germany and Italy in the Panavia Tornado program.

However, it has to be remembered that Britain also had numerous expenditures Sweden did not--on a nuclear arsenal and large navy it constructed domestically, and on a global network of bases and overseas garrisons (not least the big one in West Germany), all bound up with a complex array of international commitments.

Sweden did not have these expenses, instead being oriented to a fully conventional defense of its limited national territory, while it might be added that Sweden placed a very high priority on its air force. While, as noted before, Sweden was a much smaller country than Britain in the relevant ways, it operated almost as big a fleet of combat aircraft (still 400+ jets in the late Cold War, compared with the 500 or so Britain was generally operating at the time, as the RAND Facing the Future study on the Swedish air force remarked at the time).

It might also be added that even where procurement was concerned Britain insisted on an array of different combat aircraft, pursuing besides the Tornado, which was coming in fighter and strike versions, the Anglo-French Jaguar and the idiosyncratic VTOL Harrier (while operating a sizable fleet of F-4 Phantoms incorporating British engines and other components, and already thinking about what was to become the Eurofighter Typhoon). Had Britain not pursued so many types it would have had an easier time affording its own design. And that was what Sweden did, going with just the Gripen.

2. Sweden Was Content to Let Others Go First, and Settle for Less Than the Maximum Possible Capability
It is worth noting that besides going for just one fighter program instead of many such projects at once, Sweden did not strive for the ultimate. The Gripen is, as the exclusive focus on it required for justification's sake, a multirole aircraft. However, unlike the twin-engined, swing-wing Tornado with its low-level deep penetration capability and high payload, the Gripen was a single-engined, multi-role fighter of shorter range and lighter armament. To put it into U.S. Air Force terms it was more F-16 than F-15, with all that implied with regard to price.

Of course, even if the jet is more F-16 than F-15, the Gripen is still a fourth-generation jet, and again, a well-regarded one. Yet, consider the timing of its appearance. The U.S. Air Force received the delivery of its first true fourth-generation jet, the F-15, in 1974. As indicated above the Gripen program did not even begin until five years later, and the Swedish Air Force did not receive its first production copy of the aircraft until 1993, fourteen years after that--by which time the U.S. Air Force was already flight-testing the fifth-generation F-22. In a less dramatic way it is the same story with the British and their partners, who had their Tornado going into production just as the Gripen was emerging as a concept, while the Typhoon was to make its first flight as the Swedish Air Force formed its first Gripen squadrons.

In short, the Swedish government was ready to wait fifteen to twenty years longer than others to get even a light fourth-generation jet, and in the meantime make do with third-generation Saab-37 Viggens. Saving money, after all, was a necessity for even the Swedes at this stage in the history of fighter development, and walking a beaten path does that--not least because of one thing that did much to bring down costs, namely that

3. Sweden Outsourced and Licensed the Necessary Technology Where Feasible Rather Than Making Everything From Scratch
While the Gripen is Swedish-made, it is not all-Swedish, with crucial components developed jointly, or derived from other, established products, for the sake of cost (as much as a third of the aircraft sourced from the U.S. alone). The Gripen's first engine is an obvious example. While constructed by Volvo, it is a licensed derivative of the engine that General Electric made for the F-18. (It may also be worth noting that Saab had prior experience developing fighters in such a fashion, key systems on the prior Viggen being similarly sourced--and that the stress on minimizing cost can be contrasted with Japan's emphasis on developing technical know-how in the F-2 program, which produced a very advanced but also very costly F-16 derivative.)

4. Sweden Banked Big on Exports
Finally, in addition to its readiness to focus its resources on this one program, its moderation in its demands, and its willingness to use technology developed by others, Sweden counted heavily on the prospect of foreign sales did help make the Gripen project more plausible financially. Of course, in contrast with members of the globally active, NATO-affiliated, military aid-providing powers like Britain, or France, let alone the U.S.. And the Gripen's successes there are, at least thus far, a far cry from those of other fourth-gen single-engine jets like the French Mirage 2000 (almost 270 sold to eight different foreign customers) or the generation's most popular fighter, the F-16 (with nearly two thousand jets serving in some twenty-five air forces alongside the vast American fleet). Still, the fighter has already found a number of customers (Hungary, Czechia, South Africa, Thailand, Brazil, the last by itself looking to buy 108 aircraft), with as many as two dozen reportedly ongoing bids holding out the hope of still more (two of them to Canada and India, which could by themselves take another 200 aircraft, and make the Gripen a bestseller yet).

The gamble, in short, looks as if it is paying off. Still, it is worth noting that Sweden, like most countries, sat out the pursuit of a fifth generation of fighters, making do with upgraded Gripens--while in apparently taking an interest in the sixth generation it is not going it alone, joining the British-led "Tempest" program. I admit to not being bullish on that program, just as I have not been bullish on the sixth generation fighter given the technological claims made for it (initially, at least). However, it does seem safe to say that by this point the strategy that let Sweden build a fourth-generation fighter has long since run up against its limits.

1. As measured by the UN in 2015 U.S. dollars in its current National Accounts data set, Britain had a GDP of $1.33 trillion to Sweden's $232 billion, while spending a higher proportion of its GDP on defense--4.2 percent versus 3.1 percent--giving it a budget of $55 billion to Sweden's $7 billion.