Rafale (Can't ANYONE ever spell that right?) is about as good as the Eurofighter.
Some individual subsystems are better and there are dedicated two seat strike and carrier based variants the EF so far lacks.
Actually Rafale is an example what happens when a single european country develops a high tech very expensive weapons system today.
They got stuck with it, but it seems they might sell it to Ghaddafi
Also, EU countries, contrary to the US, have continued to develop usable land vehicles.
No MBTs, though. AFAIK only China, South Korea and Russia (though nobody has seen it yet) are developing new MBTs.
Germany, Finland and some others have developed new IFVs in shorter time recently than it takes the US defense industry to make a powerpoint presentation.
But the vaunted Stryker is based on a swiss design, of all things.
The FRES program sounds like the usual defence (its britain, after all
) contractor bull**** today.
They can't just say "we need a new generation of APCs, IFVs and MBTs".
No, it's the "Future Rapid Effect System"!
:rotfl:
Funny is that for the utility vehicle section the Boxer was originally a joint project of Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, but the UK dropped it for "unsuitability".
This was not because the design was not good but because the brits introduced new demands (has to fit into a C-130) in order to get BAE systems a solo contract!
This backfired because BAE systems was not able to produce a APC that fit into a C-130 either, so the Boxer was quietly reintroduced into the competition, this time as a foreign offer...
British arms procurement unfortunately starts to emulate the Pentagon.