MILAN — Amid a rush inside NATO to rally around next-generation combat aircraft, latest alliance member Sweden is taking a pause to evaluate what’s next for its lineage as a warplane-producing country.
The Nordic state in 2022 suspended its flirtation with one in all Europe’s two marquee airpower efforts, the Global Combat Air Programme, an initiative led by the U.K., Italy and Japan that seeks to deliver a sixth-generation fighter capability by 2035.
Fast forward to today, and Sweden’s industrial champion Saab is freshly under contract with the Ministry of Defense’s equipment branch, dubbed FMV, to conduct “conceptual studies” on future fighter systems — military jargon for starting at square one.
Saab has managed to secure a share of the worldwide warplane market with the Gripen family of aircraft. The decades-long work has spawned an industrial ecosystem in aerospace engineering that political leaders hope to bring to bear within the NATO alliance.
Next-generation air power concepts on either side of the Atlantic envision a move away from traditional fighter jets steered by humans because the central pillar of future air forces. As a substitute, nations are fine-tuning ideas for a networked hodgepodge of flying objects at various altitudes that could be synchronized on the push of a button to overwhelm enemy forces.
A key consider those considerations is forging a multinational industrial base that could make it occur. For Europeans, which means consolidating workshare around critical aviation technologies while attempting to preserve enough national know-how as a hedge against crises to come back, a difficulty certain to be on the minds of decision-makers in Stockholm.
“It has been a successful story to this point [for Sweden’s jet-manufacturing chain] and we’re looking forward to the longer term,” Maj. Gen. Jonas Wikman, chief of the Swedish Air Force, told Defense News. He referred to the newly contracted warplane studies as a “journey to determine what the following steps are for us.”
“What the concept studies are allowing us to do is to have the liberty to come to a decision what suits us best and the liberty to speculate in capabilities that make sense to us,” Wikman said.
Yet one more program?
Sweden’s decision to take a pause to find out its own requirements has led to a guessing game across the defense industry regarding what the country’s next move may be.
Will Stockholm attempt to rejoin GCAP through Saab in the longer term? Could it team up with the rival program, the Future Combat Air System led by France, Germany and Spain? Or will it opt to construct and develop its own fighter with other partners? Might it simply acquire an existing fighter when the time comes?
“Nothing has been decided yet and won’t be decided until on the very least the start of the following decade,” Wikman said. “Regardless of the direction we opt to go in, Swedish industry will all the time be involved.”
In the combination of options, the emergence of yet one more fighter program in Europe is unlikely due to the enormous investment involved, Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow for military aerospace on the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Defense News.
“Saab and the FMV are all possible options, but I wouldn’t put the emergence of a 3rd European crewed combat aircraft project particularly high when it comes to outcomes,” he said. As a substitute, Stockholm could seek to tack onto a collaboration in an effort to spread the research and development costs, he added.
Affordability is a serious challenge to programs like FCAS and GCAP, with high-tech ambitions driving the life-cycle costs into the tens of billions of dollars or more.
To place the amounts required into perspective, as of last yr, the U.K. pledged to spend around $2.5 billion on GCAP’s initial research and remark stage alone, an amount such as roughly one-fourth of Sweden’s planned 2024 defense budget.
Whichever path leaders in Stockholm resolve to take, there may be such a thing as a uniquely Swedish approach to combat airplanes that officials will likely need to retain, based on Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow on the London-based RUSI think tank.
“Sweden is more likely to keep on with its traditional areas of design and technology strength within the combat air design space during any next-gen program,” he said. Its features include “designing comparatively small, and subsequently, efficient aerodynamic airframes; electronic warfare suites; rapid software iteration; and ease of maintenance.”
Gripen DNA
Considering the Gripen fighter will probably be the backbone of the Swedish Air Force for many years to come back, with plans to operate the most recent variant, the Gripen E, until 2060, a few of its design tenets are expected to bleed into any future Swedish fighter ideas.
“The straightforward upgradability, robustness allowing for disperse operations from highways, and flight hour costs – these are all characteristics which can be a terrific foundation for a place to begin when looking into the following fighter system,” Peter Nilsson, head of Saab’s business unit for advanced programs, told Defense News.
Sweden’s national emergency plans dictate fighter aircraft must give you the option to make use of roads as makeshift runways within the event of a crisis.
At a media briefing through the Singapore Airshow in February, Saab’s chief marketing officer, Mikael Franzén, said attributable to the present threat level in Sweden, the country would operate the Gripen C/D variant for longer than anticipated.
“The C/D versions are to be retired between 2035 and 2040, or beyond, in order that the Air Force doesn’t have a dip in readiness and retains full capability during this re-armament period,” Franzén told reporters.
There are actually greater than 21 operational Gripen E models globally, including test models, and 35 aircraft in production, based on the corporate.
Franzén also said the Swedish company had improved every system in older C/D models under the Gripen E program, including an upgraded electronic warfare suite and the flexibility to hold thrice more armaments.
With regards to a future fighter system, Sweden doesn’t plan to go it alone.
“We now have a protracted heritage of international collaboration and can proceed working in that way — the Gripen is really a global fighter, but in-built Sweden,” said Saab’s Nilsson. “We’ll proceed working with partners from other countries.”
At this point, the studies under contract with the defense ministry are supposed to illuminate the trade space during which Swedish leaders will make decisions afterward. Focus areas include technology evaluation, partnership opportunities, logistics and industrial implications, in addition to digital and physical testing of capabilities, according Nilsson
Some high-tech areas of interest Saab plans to explore are a combination “between manned and unmanned systems in addition to disruptive technologies,” he said.
A singular aspect of Saab’s vision of fighter jets is the corporate’s specialization on counter-stealth technology, which is the discipline of detecting aerial objects designed to be concealed from radar.
At an air warfare conference organized in March by the RUSI think tank, Jonas Grönberg, Saab’s director of strategy for fighter aircraft, said that given the fast-paced development of software and hardware systems for signals processing, stealth fighters are sure to increasingly be more discoverable by radars.
“Some military trends we’re seeing influence electronic warfare are radar threats regaining importance and the re-emergence of surveillance radars at low-frequency bands,” he added.
Some older radars function at much lower frequency ranges, which suggests their wavelengths are considerably longer and able to effectively spotting most stealth aircraft.
An unmanned companion
Sweden, like other countries, is considering the addition of a drone to accompany Gripen fighters even before plans for a next-gen fighter are hatched. The concept is conceptually known amongst air forces as “loyal wingman,” a reference to an unmanned helper which pilots can task mid-flight to attack targets, collect intelligence or act as a decoy.
In 2022, Saab’s concept for a supersonic loyal wingman broke cover as a part of an instructional paper presented by an organization worker on the International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences in Stockholm.
While little is thought regarding the status of the technology today, the document states it was initially developed under Saab’s participation within the U.K.-led program now generally known as GCAP. The wingman was designed for combat with a low radar signature profile, to fly at high speeds and to conduct long-range air-to-air battles.
Saab, for its part, is readying its workforce for the pivotal next-gen study. For one, the corporate has equipped the unit tasked with the project to have “full fighter system capability,” and hiring is underway to beef up the engineer ranks, Nilsson said.
Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a big selection of topics related to military procurement and international security, and focuses on reporting on the aviation sector. She relies in Milan, Italy.