Comment by sschueller
1 day ago
Meanwhile Switzerland is being taken to the cleaners. F35s that had a fix cost in contract with Lockheed are no longer fixed cost because the US says so.
Patriot systen permanently delayed and price going up and up. Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...
> Stop payment resulted in the US pulling from the pre payment for the F35s...
Which Switzerland then reluctantly agreed was allowed under the terms.
As you say, totally being taken to the cleaners, and it is unclear how they escape in the short term.
The more this happens though, the more deals like Italy's make senese, irrespective of the performance comparison of the two planes.
If the US is going to be an unreliable partner, that will filter through in many many ways, and the US can hardly blame anyone but themselves (well, I'm sure some fingers will get pointed internally).
It’s not just Europeans who are beginning to realize that the U.S. can’t be trusted; Australians are still waiting for a hypothetical delivery date for their AUKUS submarines.
The Gulf states find themselves with too few interceptor missiles and a war in Iran.
The Japanese and Koreans are building as many war ships as they can.
I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder. They are losing the European market just as the largest rearmament since ww2 happens.
Maybe they are and its just a lost cause with the US administration.
> I don't understand why US weapons manufactures are not lobbying harder
It doesn’t really matter if your product is better or cheaper, if the customer thinks that service and spare parts might possibly be withdrawn in the future for political (or whatever) reasons they won’t buy your product.
8 replies →
A major issue is that the US manufacturers cannot keep up with demand even as they scale up production capacity. The current order backlog of approved foreign military sales of US weapons systems is approaching $1T and growing faster than they can fill the orders.
This is creating secondary fallout as the orders from various countries get re-prioritized. It is not strictly first-come, first-served order fulfillment; you can find your order pushed back in the queue for reasons.
Don’t think of them as companies in the normal sense. There’s no meaningful competition anymore and they have rolled everything up. They are essentially national industries now.
itll be hard for US weapons manufacturers to win when a big part of the rearmament is going to be around deterring the US just as much as deterring Russia
The rearmament is mostly happening because the US has shown itself a bad unreliable partner that abuses interdependence.
No lobbying can change the risk assessment where America is the risk factor.
They're very scared of their boss and the CEOs are short sighted by virtue of their compensation packages.
You have to understand that the smartest people in the US didn’t vote for this administration and are just as horrified as everyone else with how inept and pathetic this administration is. Unfortunately we’re a minority, the senate’s design (Wyoming has the same number of senators as California even though a small city in CA may have more people than the whole state) and the US is so ridiculously gerrymandered.
Sorry everybody but we just have to wait this stupidity out.
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You can’t lobby the Trump or “America First” crowd to not be themselves.
Foreign Military Sales from USA all go under a very ugly kind of contract where you could argue you're not sure of delivery until after the gear was decommissioned and turned into razor blades. You can't (officially) negotiate it, you can't demand accountability on actual deliveries, the real delivery time is "whenever we get to it", and so on.
It's just that until recently USA at least pretended to care to not use those provisions too much.