Four years ago, Canada’s government knew exactly why it wanted to buy the Lockheed Martin F-35.
“You must have more than one viable supplier to have a competition, and there is only one fifth-generation fighter available,” Dan Ross, assistant deputy minister of materiel in Canada’s Department of National Defense, told Parliament in 2010. The F-35, Ross said, “is the only aircraft in the Western world that meets the operational requirements of the Canadian Forces.”
Ross added that Canada could not buy the JSF through a competition because it was already a partner in the program. Two years later, Denmark decided to do exactly that, and the F-35 program office cooperated fully.
It emerged later that the requirements that, according to Ross, could only be met by the F-35 comprised an arbitrary set of radar cross-section (RCS) numbers (rather than a requirement to survive a given mission against a stipulated threat) and an infrared all-round vision system feeding imagery to the pilot’s helmet.
Ross was talking rubbish but following orders. The government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper (see photo) had a dilemma in 2010: Canada was a JSF partner, but Canadian law still required a competition before the aircraft was procured for the military.
One exception to that law was a case where only one contractor could meet the requirement. Awkwardly, a 2008 defense department study had shown that at least two other fighters would meet Canada’s operational needs. The department hastily ginned up a new, amateurish requirements document that included an RCS standard and stipulated an infrared vision system.
After Canada’s auditor-general torpedoed the government’s plan in 2012, Harper transferred the entire project from the tainted defense department to a special secretariat in the public works department.

The secretariat has just published its most complete report to date, including an evaluation of alternatives. In an operational assessment—which, according to the secretariat, comprised a ground-up capability review in different mission scenarios—the biggest gap between any of the aircraft assessed was a two-point difference in risk (from medium to high) in state-on-state warfighting after 2030. That’s important, but it’s not at all what Ross was saying in 2010.
The report is far from perfect. A bowdlerized threat assessment implies that the future fighter threat will comprise either minimally upgraded older aircraft or all-new aircraft like the Sukhoi T-50 or Chengdu J-20. But many future adversary fighters will be like Su-35s or J-10Bs, with fully modernized avionics and signature reduction. Another rocky assumption seems to be that counter-stealth technologies will not proliferate widely, at least before 2030. Neither does the threat assessment mention the Russian tactic of probing North American air defenses with MiG-31BM long-range fighters.
But the most interesting conclusion is that the differences in operational capability among the candidate aircraft—including stealth—are less important than the outlook for production, support and upgrade beyond 2030. The report covers these considerations under the heading of “critical enabling factors” and notes that these had a bigger impact on its final integrated assessment.
On paper, this emphasis still favors the F-35. If you look out as far as 2055—the last Canadian delivery would be in 2025 with a nominal 30-year service life—the current plan to keep the F-35 in production past 2035 is important. The only other fighter with firm production plans to 2025 and beyond is the Gripen, which the secretariat did not review. (Saab told Ottawa to call back when they wanted to have a real competition.)
Canada should look at history. Just before the F-22 entered service, the U.S. Air Force road map for F-22 development included a Block 40 model with high-bandwidth satcoms, wide-field-of-view radar and the ability to hit time-critical targets. It was supposed to be in service around now, but the Air Force is still struggling to get something as basic as Link 16 transmit on the aircraft.
One reason for the delay is that building anything that needs a new radio-frequency or electro-optical aperture into a stealth airplane is expensive. But the biggest drag on F-22 upgrades is that other demands have been made on the U.S. Air Force budget: the F-35 and its overruns and a large fleet of MQ-9 Reapers, for example.
Likewise, once the F-35 completes its initial development, its upgrades will compete for U.S. Air Force money with the Long Range Strike Bomber, two new nuclear missiles, new unmanned systems and even the next air combat fighter.
The path of spiral development is paved with good intentions , but that is not a universal problem. France has stayed close to the Rafale upgrade program that was defined in the early 2000s. Nobody is talking about any future manned fighters in France for a long time, so Dassault’s claim that Rafale will be around until 2050 is not to be dismissed. 
One way or another, it seems Canada’s fighter procurement is headed for the competition that Ross and others maintained in 2010 would be a waste of time. If the Harper government had started a competition then, it would have a decision by now, and that does raise an interesting question. If Harper and his colleagues thought the F-35 was so great, why didn’t they want to prove it through an open contest?