It is the whole Eurofighter story all over again. I’m glad, there is GCAP around the corner.
…or Boxer …or APACHE (the most rediculous one actually)
…and probably MGCS after that.
Isn’t the Boxer made by three different flavours of Rheinmetal?
Boxer is produced by Artec which is a cooperation of Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei-Wegmann (now KNDS). Or the drive module is… as modularity was the main goal the mission module part also has a lot of third party producers.
But it started as a German/British/French coproduction… up to the point when orders for the production of several different prototypes fitting the requirements were given to several different European companies and they dared to not pick the French contender. Whch then later became VBCI.
That one gave us a cooler eurofighter, I’m ready for a cooler tempest now. If it’s not outrageously french I don’t want it
Probably best to have multiple options. Being reliant on one large provider hasn’t worked out so well.
So cringe … grown companies acting childish
It is about a lot of money. Dassault basically wants the other partners to pay for their research. It is not childish but cocky.
A LOT of money. Those three countries alone have some 550 planes that could eventually be the FCAS (depending on versions, but it’s likely to be the full number, minus a few dozen if it isn’t nuclear capable), and that’s not counting all the planes they would probably end up selling to the rest of Europe that doesn’t have a native fighter industry.
It reminds me of RCA’s bitter, exceptionally childish, and unsolicited open letter to the trade press after they failed to win the 33⅓ vs 45 format war and decided to press LPs once again. As British youtuber Techmoan notes, ‘All the points they made on here could be prefixed with “Well, actually I think you’ll find that…” and suffixed with “…so there.”’
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Dassault has been threatening to bail on the FCAS and do an enhanced Rafale for a while. Recently Germany, which had been pretty passive about this, started drawing some lines in the sand.
In my own book, it’s principally France being unreasonable, as France has gotten an awful lot of concessions on the FCAS from Germany and Spain and made few herself (unless France has made concessions that we can’t see).
But setting aside that, this has been going on for a while, and you can find coverage of the friction from many media sources if you don’t like this one. It’s not some new, out-of-the-blue thing. The only way I think it isn’t an issue is if you think that Dassault has been bluffing and is just hoping to issue all these threats in the hopes of getting the very best deal possible, while not actually being willing (or having France not be willing to let Dassault) walk away.
