April 5, 2012 – Since the release of the Auditor General’s report earlier this week, there has been a lot of debate surrounding the F-35 fighter jet. One prominent voice in this discussion has been MLI’s Senior Fellow Alex Wilner. In an article for the latest issue issue of the Canadian Military Journal, Wilner and his colleague, Marco Wyss, write that although “the (F-35) program has proven to be an exorbitantly expensive, imperfect and risky endeavour,” the F-35 is Canada’s only choice. “If Canadians are set on equipping their military with the most advanced arms available, political considerations and market demands all but guarantee that their only choice of aircraft is the F-35.”
Wilner and Wyss have also been quoted this week in a CBC News article and an editorial in the Calgary Herald:
“F-35’s exorbitant cost clouds its future”, CBC News, April 2, 2012
“Editorial: F-35 fiasco raises questions about Tories’ fiscal oversight”, Calgary Herald, April 4, 2012
Past columns by Wilner and Wyss include:
“A case for the Joint Strike Fighter”, Vanguard Magazine, December 2011/January 2012 issue
“There are no alternatives to the F-35”, National Post, May 16, 2011
Dr. Marco Wyss and Dr. Alex Wilner are Senior Researchers with the Center for Security Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.
