[CaptainCrunch]

Israel orders another 17 F-35's to bring their fleet up to over 50. They will have their first operational squadron by years end

https://www.rt.com/news/368382-israel-orders-more-f35/

Australia seeing economic benefits from F-35 contracts

http://www.afr.com/news/special-repo...0161125-gsxu21

A look at the Super Hornet program

https://ipolitics.ca/2016/11/25/the-...ake-any-sense/

he Defence Policy Review was supposed to be released in early 2017. Surely this week’s replacement decision could have waited until then — particularly when National Defence Minster Harjit Sajjan admits that the Super Hornets will not be fully operational until the late 2020s. Meanwhile, Australia plans to phase out their Super Hornets in favour of F-35s. The U.S. Navy plans to phase out its Super Hornets by 2040, giving Canada roughly 10 years of common use before the Super Hornet becomes prohibitively expensive to maintain — and technically redundant. By the time the first Canadian Super Hornet is operational, the U.S. Air Force will have transitioned to the F-35 for NORAD operations, which will require upgrades to NORAD infrastructure. This sole-source purchase is not a logical solution, especially when there will only be 18 Super Hornets to fill the “capability gap” that, according to the minister, 77 CF-18 Hornets cannot meet today.

Economically, the decision is also suspect. The CF-18 and the Super Hornet are two distinctly different airplanes both in size and content. The Super Hornet is physically 25 per cent larger and the two aircraft have no internal avionics systems in common. So the RCAF will need to support two platforms, two training systems, and two maintenance and logistics systems during the transition. That will be hugely expensive.
Using Australian and Kuwaiti purchases as indicators, Canadians will spend roughly US$5 billion to procure a marginal capability for the 2030s that will not meet current commitments, will be technologically inferior by then and will logistically expensive.
This simply isn’t a cost-effective path to take. The economic rationale for this decision rings hollow for a government not known to concern itself with military commitments.