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.