It’s hilarious that after the profound ignorance you’ve repeatedly displayed about Portugal whilst not being Portuguese and still claiming that you know better than the Portuguese, you still expect that anybody out there, no matter how stupid, will believe that having a genuine concern for the Portuguese (not wanting them to waste money) is in any way form or shape what drives your repeated attempts at convincing others that Portugal shouldn’t have fighter jets.

Thanks for the entertainment!

They’ve entered the Find Out stage.

You claimed that Portugal not having been involved in major wars for almost a century (which was a false claim) was a reason for the country to not need jets, an argument which literally links the need for jets to being involved in major wars.

Now you’ve moved the goalposts and it’s only “some” major wars that justify having jets, not “other” major wars, and which are the “jet requiring wars and which aren’t” being entirelly up to you to define.

(FYI, Portugal used fighter jets in its Colonial Wars)

In summary, you’ve literally talked yourself into a “it’s so because i say it’s so argumentative corner”.

The feeling that your discourse in all your posts here leaves is that you do not want Portugal to have jets, for reasons that have nothing at all to do with the geostrategical and defense needs and objectives of Portugal and is in fact related to the imperialistic objectives of certain, completelly different and non-friendly, countries being better served by a less well armed Europe, only you can’t just outright come out and say it because that would severely damage the “opinion making” ability of your comments, hence the half-arsed circular argumentation balanced on top of nothing more than misinformation and unfundamented opinion.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong, so I’ll leave it to others in this thread to make up their own minds about it.

First

Portugal hasn’t seen conflict for almost a hundred years.

then

I said “continental” for a reason

So you’re simply lying.

I’ll absolutelly talk down to people outright lying about things I know better because I was born in the bloody place, members of my family were involved in it and I grew up hearing about it: shameless liars coming here to parrot propaganda do not deserve respect.

I’m sorry but you’re just talking of your ass there.

Portuguese Air-force assets, including fighter jets, are constantly deployed to the Portuguese Economic Area for missions such following the naval assets of hostile nations passing through or near it or even investigating possible criminal activity. The maritime EEA of Portugal is way larger than the actual country and at times the only vehicles that can reach further out enough fast enough are fighter jets.

Furter, fighter jets are literally the only kind of significant help Portugal would be able to send within to its Eastern European partners in the EU and NATO if Russia invaded them (certainly neither the Leopard tanks or regular infantry would get there for a while).

By pointing out that the land territory of Portugal is at low risk of invasion you’re actually making the point in favor of fighter jets since those assets make a lot more sense than ground-based assets for a country whose main military demands are on a huge sea area off its territority including far-away parts (around Madeira and Azores) and its military obligations in the two large military alliances the country is part of.

Nukes, long-range cruise missiles, drones, guerrila training, electronic warfare and the main vehicles to deploy many of those things: planes.

As demonstrated again and again (for example in Vietname and Afghanistan), wars against the US aren’t won by crushing the US military, they’re won by making it too costly for America in lives and equipment - a nuked carrier group or the caskets of hundreds or thousands of american military personnel thrown again and again into conquering a piece of land that gets lost again to guerrilla tactics within a month or trying to hold a meaningless piece of territory is how American invasions get turned around.

In your ignorance you’re forgetting the “Colonial Wars” until 74 that were bad enough that directly caused the fall of the Fascist Regime in Portugal.

Portugal has a massive maritime Exclusive Economic Area for the size of the country both because it mainly stands alone at the westermost tip of Europe (bar a small piece of Spain to the north of Portugal and then, way further North and more to the East, the Republic Of Ireland), and because of the Azores archipelago (which adds a massive circle in the middle of the Atlantic to Portugal’s maritime EEA) and the Madeira archipelago (which adds a semi-circle off the West coast of Africa).

Further, Portugal is expected to militarily cooperate with the rest of the EU in case of an attack on any EU country (the most likely of which would be Russia attacking an Eastern European member) and ditto for NATO, which is especially important for exactly fighter planes because they’re the most mobile military assets around.

It makes sense for the Portuguese Military to focus more on the Air Force, Navy, the local equivalent of Marines (Fuzileiros) and air-transported commandos and less on Armor, Artillery and Regular Infantry exactly because it’s land territory is far less likely to be directly invaded but it both has a massive sea “territory” and it belongs to very large military alliances or alliances with military treaty obligations containing far away members which have a real risk of being invaded.

Even business-wise and strictily obbeying the contract conditions, paying 500 million for nothing still makes more business sense that paying billions for what will become inactive-plane-shaped pieces of metal if Canada ever needs to defend itself against the only country that geographically is in a position of actually invading it.

Which in turn will probably also help with economies of scale, making the ex-subsidy cost of that equipment go down.

Worry not: Trump can pardon him if he’s ever convicted!

Interestingly the areas were the US still mostly dominates such as Europe, Canada and Mexico, are the ones that Trump is pissing of the most.