Double French success in Switzerland
7th export victory for the Rafale!
Announcements
The Swiss authorities will reveal tomorrow the winners of the Air 2030 tender to modernize their air defense capabilities. From the outset of the competition, the Swiss have suggested that interoperability between fighter aircraft and ground/air defense systems would be an undeniable plus. While the Rafale was pitted against the Typhoon, F/18 and JSF, the SAMP/T long-range ground/air defense system from the Eurosam JV (Thales, MBDA) was competing with the American Patriot.
The Rafale
According to several industry sources, tomorrow Bern will announce the seventh export victory for the Rafale, which, after beating out the F-16 Block 70/72 in Croatia and Indonesia in a competitive bidding process, will beat the F-35A and F-18 E/F. As Greece and Croatia did before it, the Swiss acquisition of the Rafale is as much a political choice as a military one. The new U.S. strategic posture has given France a leadership role in the European concert, and Bern now finds itself in the imperative need to re-engage with the EU. But France also represents the first operational military power of the community. A power that offers the Swiss Confederation and its borders the strategic depth it lacks, as well as an alliance that can withstand all the hard knocks in the event of terrorist attacks, massive intrusion into its airspace, etc.
If Paris was able to reassure Bern in the context of this contract on the chapter of offsets and data protection, the Americans discovered that the Swiss had a tenacious grudge. After the acquisition of its 34 F-18s in 1997, the Confederation had to incur astronomical costs to enlarge its famous shelters hidden under its mountains, because the aircraft's size had been deliberately minimized. In addition, its flight envelope proved to be totally unsuitable for the air policing tasks that are the main focus of Swiss airmen's missions. But above all, the F-18 as well as the F-35 have proven to be much too expensive compared to the 6 billion SF acquisition budget, agreed by the population during the vote of last September 27.
The international management of the major French groups is talking about overruns of more than 15% for the Boeing aircraft. While Lockheed has been more pragmatic with its F-35 in order to stay within the budget, the Swiss are more reserved about the aircraft's reliability, as recent events have shown. Finally, let us not forget that since the beginning of the 2000s, the US Air Force has remained the owner of the systems of all exported American aircraft, thus creating a dependence that Berne considers unacceptable, insofar as at no time was Switzerland the owner of its data and had to tolerate the presence of sealed equipment on its aircraft.
The SAMP/T
Finally, on Wednesday 23 June, Switzerland will announce the victory of Eurosam's SAMP/T ground/air defence system. The victory in early April of Thales' Skyview system to upgrade the Florako and correlate civilian and military air surveillance data was a harbinger of things to come because of its interoperability with the SAMP/T. If the "black box" issue is also present in the Patriot system, Swiss operators also feared that if they were to acquire the system, they would have to rethink their entire air defense system due to a lack of compatibility, and therefore incur additional costs. Moreover, the system proposed by the Americans was not the most recent in the range. The excellent communication campaign of the French Embassy and the French Air Force on the spot, and the image of impotence of the Saudi Patriot following the attacks of Houthi drones on the civilian population precipitated the victory of Eurosam. Eurosam also has the advantage of being a bit French, a bit German, and a bit Italian ... just like Switzerland. "
