The Eurofighter is better.
What I would like to see is (except a unified EU air force of course) is to have similar road capability added to it, and the switch the entire continent to a distributed airbase model.
You see, the Gripen is perfect, for those that use a distributed airbase mode (that would be Sweden).
The idea is that instead of nice, heug, walled, concrete bunker for each aircraft having, airbases, you have hundrents of strips and parking spaces with 1 or 2 aircraft in them, all of which are connected with the main road system (so even if one is bombed the aircraft can simply taxi through the normal roads to another), with also hundrents of little vehicles ferrying fuel and missiles around. And your barracks/storage/fuel buildings can be any building in any city.
Here is something copied from another forum, although I don't know how correct his numbers are, to show how awesome this is:
...(This example is not fact, just thoughts running trough my mind just now) Take Sweden for example around 1990. In a war against Sovietunionen our 320 planes would have been spread out at around 30 airbases and 250 runways. How many attackplanes does a mission require to take out an runway with it?s surrounding basesupport? 2?4?6? I would guess on at least 4. That would mean that Sovietunionen would have had a 1000 attackplanes dedicated 24/7 just to take out the airbases, offcourse with the support of of a huge amount of fighters to protect them against our 140 JA-37 Viggen and 60 J-35 Draken fighters. And that is only to defeat our airbases...
Btw, the "airbases" he is speaking about was just a command bunker. The runways were all over the places, km apart, and everything having to do with refueling, rearming and servicing the aircraft was mobile. Today that's mobile too and the only infrastructure needed are roads & straight roads. (There are still airport like airbases around but because of larget transport aircraft and centralised training schools)
So Sweden could have tied the entire Soviet Union airforce, were it trying to bomb "runways" (the usual way to make an airbase inoperable), which of cource only need a bunch of dirt & asphalt in order to be fixed. And that guy is not even counting the whole decoy capability (think aircraft looking bunch of scrap next to the road), and all the rest of the aircraft tied dealing with radars, AA systems and army stuff. For a country with less population than London or Moscow, that's
annoying.
In comparison, Norway apparently has 7 airbases (that's a single digit number. That's bad), and 2 centralized "Control Centres" which I am not very sure what happens if you take them out. So theoretically 10 aircraft, or a single very lucky bomber, or cruise missile having sub can ground the entire Norwegian airforce, lolwut?
The problem is that the UK isn't having a distributed airbase system either. So if you had Gripens, you'd just end up operating a lighter aircraft out of RAF Airbases.
If you are going to operate out of airbases, you might as well fly Eurofighters. (Bigger, almost double, loadout for the same flight characteristics, plus other gadgets like supercruise, dual engines, fabulous interior design and can do other sexy radar things with its radar which I am not very sure what they do, but the PR leaflets make them sound awesome)
