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.