Isn't the title here on HN a little misleading considering it's: "F-35A is HX – The Winner Takes It All" on the site itself? Or that the article never really delves too hard into the Finnish procurement process, outside of a few anecdotes about cost and the Finnish competition being "too honest".

As someone who spent quite a long time working in the Danish public sector, often on the higher levels of public procurement, I think it's sort of fun but ultimately fruitless to talk about these processes in the public. Denmark also went with the F-35A, and we too had a lot of discussion about whether or not that was a good idea (especially when Trump then won the election and started alienating Europe). Anyway, in our procurement processens there is thousand upon thousand worth of pages detailing all the different things that goes into these decade long procurement processes, spanning the length of different governments, and it's really hard to sum things up as "this is why we chose how we chose" because it's always a bunch of different things.

Part of it is the technology, which is well described in this article. The F35 is better than it's competition. Part of it is cost. You could willingly buy the "deprecated" F18 Super Hornet which I believe was the most serious competition here in Denmark and hope that was "good enough". Or you could go with the more geo-political route of betting on more local industry to hopefully build up an European (or Swedish/Finnish) alternative in time while getting an inferior product until that succeeded. And a range of other things, but at the end of the day, in many Scandinavian countries the F-35 is going to replace the F-16, and with decades worth of co-operating with the American Airforce for training on top of the F-35 being the better project, and our countries tending to look more to American than to Europe (we speak English as our first second language, not French/German/Spanish/Itallian after all) it was likely always going to be the F-35. Even so, the process was very serious and produced a lot of documentation, and so far, it seems like one of the most successful and least corrupt public procurement processes at that scale in Denmarks history. So while it's easy to think this and that on the choice, I think it's also good to keep in mind the kind of serious work that seem to have gone into these processes in every Scandinavian country.

I guess you can now even say that it was a good choice, and it probably was. Maybe the competition, like the Eurofighter would also have seen huge improvements if it had been given the same amount of money the F-35 project did, maybe it wouldn't have.

My personal take-away from it, was how huge of a public discussion we hade about it here in Denmark when it was 18 Billion Danish Kroner. Yes, it's become a much more expensive process, but while 18 billion dkr is a lot of money. You can run a city with 60.000 citizens 6 full years for those money here in Denmark, we ended up paying the mink-farmers 19 billion dkr in "sorry we killed your mink sort of illegally because they might mutate covid". With that perspective in mind, I feel sort of silly about the public second guessing, my own included, about whether pouring 18, or even 35, billion dkr into the F-35 was better than going with it's cheaper alternatives because, well, I'd frankly rather have a bunch of F-35 than a bunch of dead mink. This last part is obviously a bit of a jest, but I think you can follow my meaning.