F-35 vs Gripen: Why a Fighter That Costs Half as Much Keeps Beating the F-35 in Export Deals

Brazil chose the Gripen. So did Thailand. In April 2025, Colombia signed a contract with Saab for an undisclosed number of Gripen E fighters, becoming the latest country to pick the Swedish jet over the F-35 Lightning II, the most expensive and arguably most capable fighter ever built. Meanwhile, Canada, a founding F-35 partner nation that had committed to buying 88 F-35As, began publicly questioning the deal after Trump-era tariffs turned the aircraft's multinational supply chain from a selling point into a vulnerability. The Gripen E is not stealthier than the F-35. It is not faster, does not carry more weapons, and cannot match the F-35's sensor fusion architecture. But it keeps winning export competitions. Understanding why requires looking at fighter procurement the way the buyer does, not the way the manufacturer does.

The Export Scoreboard

The F-35 has been an extraordinary commercial success by any historical standard. More than 3,600 aircraft are on order across 18 partner and customer nations, and the production line at Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth plant delivers roughly 150 aircraft per year. By sheer numbers, no Western fighter program since the F-16 has achieved this scale.

But the Gripen keeps appearing in competitions where the F-35 should dominate, and winning. Brazil selected the Gripen E in 2014 over the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and the Dassault Rafale (the F-35 was not offered but was considered a benchmark). Brazil ordered 36 aircraft with options for more. Thailand selected the Gripen C/D in 2008 and has been operating it since. Colombia's April 2025 Gripen selection was notable because the country had also been offered the F-16V and the KAI FA-50, the Gripen won against a field that included an American option backed by U.S. foreign military sales support.

The pattern is consistent: countries that cannot afford, or do not want, the political entanglements, maintenance infrastructure, and lifecycle costs of the F-35 keep finding that the Gripen offers enough capability at a price they can sustain. These are not irrational decisions. They are rational calculations by governments that define "best fighter" differently than the Pentagon does.

The Cost Comparison Nobody Wants to Have

The F-35A's unit cost has dropped significantly over the life of the program, from over $200 million per aircraft in early low-rate production lots to approximately $80 to $82 million in recent contracts. Lockheed Martin has worked aggressively to bring the cost down, and by the standards of 5th-generation fighter programs, the F-35A is competitively priced.

But unit cost is the wrong number to focus on. What matters to a buying nation is lifecycle cost, the total cost of purchasing, operating, maintaining, and upgrading the aircraft over 30 to 40 years of service. And on lifecycle cost, the gap between the F-35 and the Gripen E is enormous.

The F-35A's cost per flight hour, according to the U.S. Air Force's own figures, is approximately $33,300. That number has been a source of persistent concern within the Pentagon, which has set repeated targets to bring it below $25,000 per flight hour, targets that have not been met. The $33,300 figure includes fuel, maintenance labor, spare parts, depot overhauls, and support equipment. For a fleet of 100 aircraft flying 200 hours per year each, that translates to $666 million per year in operating costs alone.

Saab claims the Gripen E's operating cost is approximately $4,700 per flight hour. Independent estimates from defense analysts and export customers place the figure somewhat higher, in the range of $6,000 to $8,000 per flight hour, but even at the high end, the Gripen costs less than a quarter of what the F-35 costs to fly. Over a 30-year service life, that difference compounds into billions of dollars. For the same fleet of 100 aircraft flying 200 hours per year, the Gripen's annual operating cost would be between $94 million and $160 million, roughly one-quarter to one-fifth of the F-35's operating bill.

For countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Thailand, those numbers are not marginal, they are decisive. A nation with a defense budget of $20 to $30 billion cannot allocate $600 million per year to operating a single fighter fleet. The Gripen's cost structure lets smaller air forces fly more hours, train more pilots, and maintain higher readiness rates than they could with a more expensive aircraft.

Road Basing: The Capability Nobody Else Has

The Gripen was designed from the outset to operate from dispersed highway strips, not as an emergency fallback, but as a primary operating concept. Sweden's Cold War defense doctrine assumed that Soviet strikes would destroy its main air bases in the opening hours of a conflict. The Swedish Air Force needed a fighter that could scatter across the country, land on pre-surveyed stretches of public highway, and continue fighting from improvised forward positions.

The result is an aircraft with capabilities that no other modern fighter can match in austere operations. The Gripen requires only 500 meters of straight, flat road, roughly one-third of a mile, to land and take off. Its landing gear is designed to handle unimproved surfaces and to sit high enough that jet intake ingestion of road debris is minimized. The aircraft carries an auxiliary power unit that allows it to start its engine without external ground power equipment.

The turnaround procedure is the most striking part. A Gripen can land on a road strip, taxi to a concealed parking position, be refueled, rearmed, and inspected in approximately 10 minutes by a ground crew of six people, one trained technician and five conscripts. Compare that to the F-35, which requires specialized maintenance equipment, encrypted diagnostic systems, a climate-controlled logistics information system (ALIS, now ODIN), and maintenance personnel with months of specialized training. The F-35 cannot operate from a highway. It was never designed to.

This capability has taken on new relevance in the era of precision strike. China's DF-21D and DF-26 ballistic missiles, combined with land-attack cruise missiles, can target fixed air bases across the Western Pacific with devastating accuracy. The U.S. Air Force has begun experimenting with Agile Combat Employment, dispersing aircraft to austere forward locations, precisely because fixed bases are increasingly vulnerable. The Gripen was built for this concept 40 years ago. The F-35 is trying to adapt to it now.

The Independence Factor

For many export customers, the most important advantage the Gripen offers has nothing to do with performance or cost, it is sovereignty. When a nation buys the F-35, it enters into a deep, long-term dependency on the United States. F-35 maintenance requires access to the ODIN logistics system, which is controlled by the F-35 Joint Program Office. Software updates are delivered by Lockheed Martin on a schedule determined by the Joint Program Office. Depot-level maintenance for critical components, including the F135 engine, can only be performed at authorized facilities. If the United States decides to restrict access to any of these systems, the buying nation's F-35 fleet can be effectively grounded.

This is not a theoretical risk. Turkey was ejected from the F-35 program in 2019 after purchasing the Russian S-400 air defense system. Turkey had invested heavily in F-35 industrial participation and had planned to operate 100 aircraft. The U.S. response was immediate and total: Turkey's jets were reassigned to other customers, its pilots were sent home, and its industrial contracts were cancelled. Whether the decision was justified is beside the point, it demonstrated that F-35 ownership comes with political conditions that the seller can enforce at any time.

The Gripen operates under a fundamentally different model. Saab offers technology transfer agreements that allow buying nations to perform maintenance, produce spare parts, and even assemble aircraft domestically. Brazil's Gripen program includes extensive technology transfer, Brazilian engineers participate in development, and final assembly takes place in Brazil. The aircraft's avionics architecture is designed with open standards that allow customer nations to integrate their own weapons, sensors, and electronic warfare systems without depending on Saab for every modification.

Sweden, as a historically neutral (now NATO-allied) small country, does not have the geopolitical leverage to weaponize its fighter exports the way the United States can. For nations that value strategic autonomy, or that have reason to worry about future political friction with Washington, that is a feature, not a limitation.

What the F-35 Does That the Gripen Cannot

None of this means the Gripen is the better aircraft. The F-35 is, by almost every measurable performance parameter, a more capable platform, and the gap in some areas is not close.

Stealth is the most fundamental difference. The F-35 was designed from the outset as a low-observable aircraft. Its radar cross-section is classified but estimated at roughly the size of a golf ball when viewed from the front aspect. The Gripen E has a reduced radar signature compared to earlier fighters, it uses radar-absorbent materials and has a relatively clean aerodynamic shape, but it is not a stealth aircraft. Against a modern integrated air defense system, the F-35 can operate in threat environments where the Gripen would be detected and engaged at long range.

Sensor fusion is the other transformational advantage. The F-35's AN/APG-81 AESA radar, Distributed Aperture System (six infrared cameras providing 360-degree coverage), Electro-Optical Targeting System, and electronic warfare suite all feed into a central processor that builds a single, fused picture of the battlespace. The pilot does not need to manually correlate data from different sensors, the aircraft does it automatically. No other fighter in production offers this level of integrated situational awareness.

The F-35 also benefits from an ecosystem that the Gripen cannot replicate. More than 3,600 aircraft ordered across 18 nations means a massive support infrastructure, continuous software upgrades funded by the largest defense budget in the world, and interoperability with every major Western ally. A Gripen operator flying alongside F-35s in a coalition operation will not have access to the same data links, the same sensor fusion, or the same integrated picture. The F-35's network effect, the more nations that operate it, the more valuable it becomes, is a genuine strategic advantage.

The Geopolitical Angle

The most recent factor driving Gripen interest has nothing to do with the aircraft themselves. In March 2025, the Trump administration's aggressive tariff policies raised questions about the reliability of the United States as a long-term defense partner. Canada, which had committed to purchasing 88 F-35As, began publicly questioning whether the deal should proceed as planned. Canadian defense officials noted that the F-35's supply chain spans dozens of countries, and that tariff disruptions or political friction could affect parts availability, maintenance schedules, and upgrade timelines.

This is a new dynamic. For decades, buying American was the default for allied nations, not just because American weapons were the best, but because the alliance relationship made the supply chain reliable. When that reliability comes into question, the calculus shifts. A nation that might have accepted the F-35's higher costs and deeper dependencies in exchange for the security of the U.S. alliance now has to ask: what if the supply chain becomes a lever used against us?

The Gripen benefits from this uncertainty not because it is a better aircraft, but because it is a safer bet. Sweden does not impose tariffs on allies. Sweden does not use fighter jet spare parts as geopolitical leverage. Sweden does not cancel industrial participation agreements over unrelated diplomatic disputes. For nations that have watched Turkey's ejection from the F-35 program and Canada's tariff-related hesitation, the Gripen's "good enough" capability at low cost and low political risk starts to look like the rational choice.

Who's Right?

Both choices are rational, for different buyers in different strategic situations. The F-35 is the right aircraft for nations that expect to fight high-end conflicts against peer adversaries with advanced air defenses. The United States, Japan, Australia, and the major European NATO allies need the F-35's stealth and sensor fusion because they may need to operate in contested airspace against Russian or Chinese integrated air defense systems. For these nations, the Gripen's cost advantage is irrelevant if the aircraft cannot survive the threat environment.

The Gripen is the right aircraft for nations whose primary threats do not include penetrating a modern IADS. Brazil does not need to defeat S-400 batteries. Colombia does not need to suppress Chinese air defenses. Thailand does not need to operate in an A2/AD environment. These nations need a competent multirole fighter that can patrol airspace, intercept intruders, deliver precision munitions, and do so affordably enough that the air force can actually fly it regularly. The Gripen does all of these things exceptionally well.

The mistake that defense commentators often make is treating this as a performance comparison, as if the "better" aircraft is the one with the larger radar cross-section reduction or the more advanced sensor suite. But fighter procurement is not an engineering competition. It is a strategic decision that balances capability, cost, industrial participation, political risk, and sovereignty. The Gripen keeps winning export deals not because it outperforms the F-35, but because it outperforms the F-35 on the variables that matter most to the buyers who choose it.

The F-35 is the most advanced fighter ever built. The Gripen E may be the most intelligently designed one. The difference between those two things explains the entire export competition, and why both aircraft will continue to find buyers for decades to come.