Canada Eyes 160 Fighter Jets: Why Ottawa's F-35-Gripen Split Could Reshape Defense Procurement

The Royal Canadian Air Force currently operates 76 CF-18s, most of which have been in service since the mid-1980s. By the original plan, signed in early 2023, Canada would replace them with 88 Lockheed Martin F-35s at a headline cost of roughly $19 billion. That would have been the largest fighter procurement in Canadian history. It now looks like it might not even be the largest fighter procurement of 2026.

Sources indicate Ottawa is evaluating a supplemental buy of 72 Swedish-made Saab Gripen E fighters, which would bring the total fleet to over 160 aircraft. That's more than double the number of jets Canada has flown at any point since the 1960s. If the deal goes through, it represents a fundamental shift in how Canada thinks about defense procurement, not just in scale but in structure.

The force-mass problem

Canada has the second-largest landmass in the world and a defense posture that requires simultaneous coverage of NORAD obligations in the Arctic, NATO commitments in Europe, and the ability to surge airframes for crisis response. The 88-jet baseline was calculated to maintain operational readiness, but the calculation assumed peacetime tempo and a predictable maintenance cycle. Neither assumption holds anymore.

Recent geopolitical pressure has exposed what analysts call the "high-low coverage gap." The F-35 is a 5th-generation stealth platform designed for contested airspace, the kind of aircraft you send into Russian or Chinese integrated air defense systems. It is not the aircraft you send on routine Arctic sovereignty patrols, where the mission is presence, not penetration. Flying the F-35 on low-threat patrols burns flight hours on a $90 million jet with complex maintenance requirements and a logistics chain entirely reliant on Lockheed Martin's global sustainment network.

The Gripen E, by contrast, was designed for dispersed operations in austere environments. It can land on stretches of highway, operate with minimal ground crew, and costs roughly half what an F-35 costs to fly per hour. For Canada, which has hundreds of kilometers of Arctic coastline and infrastructure that barely qualifies as "austere," that operational flexibility matters.

The industrial sovereignty bet

The Gripen deal is projected to generate up to 9,000 Canadian jobs, making it one of the largest industrial projects in the country's history. Saab has a track record of aggressive industrial participation agreements, the kind that include technology transfer, domestic assembly, and long-term IP-sharing arrangements. Lockheed Martin's F-35 deal includes industrial benefits, but those benefits flow through the Joint Strike Fighter program's global supply chain, which disperses Canadian content across hundreds of subcontractors in multiple countries.

The structural question is whether Canada wants to be a participant in a U.S.-led program or an anchor customer in a partnership that gives it leverage. The Gripen buy is a hedge toward the latter. It keeps aerospace engineering capacity onshore and gives the RCAF operational independence if the F-35 supply chain becomes a political or logistical constraint.

Where the model breaks

Operating two distinct fighter platforms is expensive in ways that don't show up on the procurement spreadsheet. Pilot training splits into two tracks. Spare parts inventories double. Base infrastructure, hangars, secure storage, software integration, gets duplicated. Cold Lake and Bagotville are already mid-renovation specifically for F-35 requirements. Integrating the Gripen means either new facilities or costly retrofits.

There's also the fleet-grounding risk. A mixed fleet protects against single-point failure, if a software flaw grounds all F-35s, Canada still has operational jets, but it also means maintaining readiness across two separate logistics chains during the same budget cycle.

The real cost isn't the sticker price. It's whether the federal government is willing to fund a defense budget that can sustain 160 jets when it struggled to justify 88.