Stealth F-35 Lightning II will change the way Canada fights in the air

Good. They can beat the shit of anybody who threatens them with superior fire power and death from above.

You won't win against the Chinese by talking.

Fear Card

Some people with limited vision seem to think that you have to go to war to 'win' and that negotiations over the arctic have to be some crazy-ass cold-war Zero-Sum game.

In reality once you start fighting you've already lost, one would think that the right would have learned that from trying to bring 'freedom' to Iraq and Afghanisan.

And at 245,000,000 tax-payer dollars per copy in reality if we go ahead with this, we've already. lost

So what portion of Canada's arctic should be given to China?

So what portion of Canada's arctic should be given to China?
By HyperionThe Evil's position China can take whatever it wants as the Canadians wouldn't want to offend the Chinese by exerting sovereignty over their territory. The Chinese are perfectly willing to play the game of give and take: Canada will give and the Chinese will take. The UN would be happy.

What's there to negotiate, exactly? The Canadian Arctic is Canadian. The American portion is American, the Russian portion is Russian. It's not Chinese, or Indian, or Australian, or Egyptian, or anybody else.

Negotiating away Canadian sovereignty is silly.

Yet that's precisely what Hyptard is proposing.

I cannot understand anyone thinking these jets are a bad purchase. When do we need to replace our aging F-18s, when they start dropping out of the sky and killing pilots or when they are scambled and cannot meet the threat due to being outdated and old.

Air superiority fighters are, without question, needed by the CF. But what galls me is the insistence of the defense industries that the only fighters they'll make have to be these massively expensive fighters. I also don't care for the insistence of command that they have to have these platforms exclusively. If there's a war, there's no substitute for these fighters. But for patrolling the Arctic and for showing the flag you need something that has range and endurance and that can hang some deadly hardware off the wings. You just don't need to spend $200m for that.