The F-35 and the Gripen: a comparative analysis, and a Ukrainian context

By Matthew Parish, Associate Editor

Monday 9 February 2026

The F-35 and the Gripen are often compared as though they are answers to the same question. In reality, each is a carefully shaped response to a different national anxiety. The F-35 is designed for the problem of surviving inside a modern, layered air-defence envelope long enough to find, fix and strike targets that do not wish to be found. The Gripen is designed for the problem of fighting when your airfields are being hunted, your logistics are fragile and your budget is finite. Both can fire the same missiles and drop many of the same bombs. They differ most sharply in the conditions under which they can do so reliably, repeatedly and under fire.

Affordability, in this context, is not a single number. Headline acquisition costs obscure the more important question of how many aircraft can be kept operational, how often, and for how long, once a war begins. The F-35A’s unit price has fallen substantially over the life of the programme, to the point where it now competes with advanced fourth-generation fighters on paper. Yet the aircraft’s true cost is expressed in sustainment — in maintenance hours, software management, spares pipelines and the political and industrial dependencies that accompany them. When serviceable, the aircraft delivers extraordinary capability. When grounded, it delivers none at all. Availability therefore becomes a strategic variable rather than a technical detail.

The Gripen’s philosophy is explicitly different. It is designed to be affordable in the currency that matters most to a small or medium-sized air force — sorties. Quick turnaround times, small ground crews and tolerance for imperfect conditions are not secondary considerations but core design assumptions. The aircraft is meant to keep flying while infrastructure is degraded and while the air force itself is under attack. In that sense, affordability is less about the balance sheet and more about endurance.

Payload comparisons between the two aircraft are often misleading. The F-35 can carry a very substantial maximum load, but its defining limitation is not weight — it is geometry. Its internal weapon bays impose strict constraints on what can be carried if low observability is to be preserved. In stealth configuration the aircraft typically carries fewer weapons, but with a far higher probability of reaching the target area intact. If stealth is sacrificed, external pylons can be used — at which point the aircraft begins to resemble a highly advanced conventional fighter rather than a fifth-generation one.

The Gripen is built around external carriage as its normal state. Multiple hardpoints allow for a wide range of mission configurations — air defence, strike, electronic warfare and reconnaissance — without the sense that the aircraft is operating in a compromised mode. For air forces that value flexibility, predictability and ease of reconfiguration, this matters more than absolute maximum payload figures.

Stealth is often misunderstood as invisibility. In practice it is about initiative — controlling when and how the aircraft is detected, and at what quality of track. The F-35’s shaping, materials, sensor fusion and electronic warfare are intended to delay detection, degrade engagement solutions and compress the enemy’s decision-making cycle. That can be decisive in the opening phases of a conflict, when air defences are intact and the cost of loss is highest.

The Gripen does not compete in this domain in the same way. Its survivability model is layered rather than intrinsic — electronic warfare, tactics, dispersion and constant movement. Instead of trying to remain unseen, it seeks to remain elusive as a system. That distinction becomes most vivid when basing is considered.

Take-off and landing characteristics are not glamorous, but in modern warfare they are decisive. Airfields are no longer rear areas. They are amongst the first targets struck, precisely because destroying a runway is often cheaper than defeating an aircraft in the air. The Gripen is explicitly designed for dispersed operations — including short take-off distances, road basing and rapid re-arming away from fixed infrastructure. The aim is not novelty, but survivability through unpredictability.

The F-35A, by contrast, is a conventional take-off and landing aircraft optimised for established runways and sophisticated support facilities. The existence of the short take-off and vertical landing F-35B does not eliminate this trade-off — it merely relocates it, substituting basing flexibility for reductions in range and payload. If dispersed basing is central to the operational concept, the choice is not simply between aircraft, but between which compromises a state is willing to accept.

Sensors and networking are where the F-35’s advocates are most persuasive. The aircraft is not merely a strike platform, but a sensor node — gathering, fusing and distributing information across a wider battlespace. Its value is often realised indirectly, by enabling other platforms to act more effectively. For coalition warfare, where interoperability and shared situational awareness are themselves force multipliers, this is a powerful argument.

The Gripen E also fields modern sensors and electronic warfare, but the strategic asymmetry remains. The F-35 is the aircraft around which much of the West’s future air combat architecture is being organised. That has implications not only for combat performance, but for training pipelines, munitions integration and long-term doctrine.

Nowhere does this comparison sharpen more starkly than in Ukraine. Since 2022 Russian strategy has treated Ukrainian air bases, fuel depots and maintenance facilities as persistent targets. Missiles and drones have been used not primarily to win air superiority in the classical sense, but to deny Ukraine the ability to generate predictable air operations at all. In that environment, the key question is not simply whether an aircraft can survive contested airspace, but whether an air force can survive sustained pressure as an institution.

The F-35’s principal advantage in Ukraine would lie in the air rather than on the ground. Its low observability and sensor fusion would make it exceptionally effective in carefully selected missions against high-value targets protected by layered defences. A small number of sorties could have disproportionate strategic impact. Yet that advantage is conditional. It assumes access to hardened bases, secure logistics and specialised maintenance facilities — precisely the assets Russia has sought to disrupt.

Ukraine’s air war has also been defined by volume. Intercepting drones, cruise missiles and glide bombs is often a matter of persistence rather than penetration — flying often, reacting quickly and absorbing attrition without paralysis. In such circumstances, cost asymmetry becomes politically and militarily salient. An aircraft optimised for exquisite effects risks being consumed by routine tasks.

The Gripen’s relevance to Ukraine lies in its alignment with the war as it has actually been fought. Dispersal, rapid turnaround and tolerance for austere conditions are not theoretical virtues — they are existing Ukrainian practices, improvised under fire. The aircraft’s design assumptions mirror a battlefield in which runways are cratered, bases are temporary and survivability depends on movement.

There is also a transition question. Ukraine has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to absorb Western systems; but the F-35 represents not merely a new aircraft, but an entire network — software management, data security regimes and tightly controlled upgrade pathways. The Gripen, while still complex, has historically been marketed with greater national autonomy in mind, including the ability to adapt under wartime conditions.

None of this renders the F-35 irrelevant to Ukraine. In a post-war or frozen-conflict environment, where deterrence depends on the ability to threaten high-value targets from the outset, its strengths would align powerfully with strategic logic. But during an active, attritional conflict, the aircraft that matters most may be the one that can be kept flying when the enemy’s aim is not to win the air battle, but to exhaust the air force itself.

The comparison therefore resolves into a more honest question. The F-35 concentrates advantage in the aircraft — in stealth, sensors and early-war dominance. The Gripen concentrates advantage in the way the air force is operated — in dispersion, endurance and survivability under sustained attack. Neither approach is universally superior. Each reflects a different judgement about how wars are actually fought — and about which risks are worth carrying when the runway itself is already part of the battlefield.