Washington does not hide its willingness at every opportunity to proceed directly to an agreement with Athens for the sale of a Stealth Squadron of F-35 fighters as soon as possible.
In the fastest possible time, according to the information arriving from the USA, Washington is willing to respond to the Greek request for entry into the F-35 Stealth fighter program. With the answer being positive to the LOR sent last June from Athens and the General Directorate of Defense Equipment and Investments of the Ministry of National Defense responsible for armaments. In Greece’s desire to speed up the process, despite the fact that the response time of the Americans is determined in similar cases at around one year, the response from the USA, as everything shows, will be much shorter. The messages already arriving from the other side of the Atlantic specify the American LOA within the first quarter of 2023 and it will not be a surprise to reach Athens even in January.
Washington does not hide its willingness at every opportunity to proceed directly to an agreement with Athens for the sale of a Stealth Squadron of F-35 fighters as soon as possible. Both during the visit of the Minister of National Defense, Nikos Panagiotopoulos, and the Chief of Defense Forces, General Konstantinos Floros, to the USA last July, the Americans showed that the entry of Greece and the HAF into the closed “club” of the states they have in their arsenal is a decision made. the air superweapon. They sent the message even more strongly during the recent visit to the USA of the first “hawk” of our Air Force, Lieutenant General Themistocles Bourolias.
The American response to the Greek request effectively paves the way for final negotiations in order for the two sides to reach a definitive agreement and proceed to sign the relevant contract. In the LOR sent by Greece in the summer, it expressed interest in the acquisition in the first phase of a Squadron of 20 F-35 aircraft with an option to purchase another 20 “invisible” fighters.
Earlier, the Greek interest was verbally expressed by the Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in the meeting he had at the White House last May with the American President Joe Biden. However, an American branch of the Joint Strike Fighter PO, as revealed by Newpost, had already visited the Ministry of Defense in February and informed both the political leadership and the Air Staff about the stealth fighter F-35. The proposal at the time involved the sale of 20 latest F-35 aircraft for $3.5 billion without their armament. While at the same time he also performed an autopsy on air bases which are considered to be the “nest” of Stealth fighters in Greece.
And while the acquisition by the Air Force of 24 French Rafale fighters and the upgrading of 83 F-16 aircraft in Viper configuration has already caused enormous irritation in Ankara, the possibility of Greece entering the F-35 program with the purchase of a Squadron 20 stealth fighters after 2027 translates into the absolute nightmare for the neighbors. “Let’s tell the truth. If the US gives us the new F-16s and if we modernize the other F16s we have, we cannot balance our forces against the Greek Rafales that Greece has and the F-35s that it will receive later,” said Turkos. military analyst Ozai Sendir. “Rafale and F-35s can launch Meteor missiles while F-16s cannot. The air force of Greece will now have a firing range of 320 km. Today they have 6 Rafale, not a big force. But in 2026 they will have received all the Rafales and in 2027 all the modernized F-16s. In 2028 the deliveries of the F-35s will begin”, underlined Sendir, giving an emphatically the situation that the Turkish air force will have to face over the Aegean in the coming years.
