By Kenneth Maxwell
When I wrote in April 2012 of ‘a tale of two competitions,’ I was describing a Brazil suspended between options, still debating the merits of the Dassault Rafale, the Boeing F-18 Super Hornet, and the Saab Gripen NG while simultaneously wrestling with the politics of Embraer’s Super Tucano in the American market. Brazil had first opened its fighter competition in 2001. More than a decade later it remained unresolved. It was, as a British colleague noted at the time, a selection process that had outlasted even India’s legendary Hawk trainer downselect.
The core issues I identified then, cost, technology transfer, and local industrial participation, would ultimately prove the decisive factors. They were, in retrospect, not three separate questions but a single integrated test of whether any competitor was willing to treat Brazil as a strategic partner rather than a customer. The Rafale consortium spoke eloquently about technology transfer, and in December 2013, when I was reporting on President François Hollande’s state visit to Brasília, the French were still pressing their case aggressively, promising local production at São José dos Campos, integration of the Meteor missile, and even temporary loans of aircraft to bridge Brazil’s capability gap. But the political and institutional stars had shifted against France. President Dilma Rousseff had personally been burned by the NSA’s surveillance revelations, her emails and mobile communications monitored by American intelligence contractors, and the Boeing F-18, which had emerged as the front-runner in the two years prior to the December decision, suddenly became politically untenable. If anything, the NSA crisis helped clarify what was already a three-way contest in which the Swedish offer had particular structural advantages.
The Gripen NG was the cheapest of the three aircraft. It was single-engine, designed from the outset for high maintainability, and had been built by Saab to be interoperable with allied air forces. Most critically for Brazil, the Swedish government was itself buying more Gripens, unlike France which had cut its own Rafale procurement, and Sweden was prepared to offer access to source codes, allowing Brazil to integrate weapons of its own choosing and to develop the kind of autonomous capability that would eventually, as the Brazilian Air Force commander told the Senate committee in early 2014, position Brazil to enter the fifth-generation era on its own terms. The December 2013 announcement by President Rousseff formalized what the Brazilian Air Force had quietly preferred for years.
From the start, Embraer sat at the center of any viable combat aircraft program because no procurement on the scale Brazil was contemplating could be anchored anywhere else. In my 2014 update on the aftermath of the fighter decision, I emphasized that Embraer was already a globalized enterprise.
The contract formalized in 2014 for 36 aircraft—28 single-seat Gripen E variants and eight two-seat Gripen F trainers, at a total value of approximately $4.5 billion came with a technology transfer package that the Brazilian Air Force commander described as one of the largest ever undertaken by Brazil. Between 2,000 and 3,000 direct jobs and as many as 22,000 indirect jobs were projected to flow from the program, distributed between Embraer’s operations in the greater São Paulo region. The assembly line itself, inaugurated at Gavião Peixoto in São Paulo state in May 2023, was complemented by a Gripen Design and Development Network and a dedicated Gripen Flight Test Center, infrastructure that transformed an aircraft purchase into something closer to a national aerospace upgrade.
The two-seat F variant proved a partial exception to the local assembly model. Saab determined that it did not make economic sense to set up a separate in-country line for the smaller F-variant order, and production of the Gripen F remains at Saab’s main facility in Linköping, Sweden. But for the single-seat E variant, the air defense and multi-role workhorse, Brazil has become the only country outside Sweden where the aircraft is assembled, a status that carries both industrial and geopolitical weight.
It would be a mistake, as I noted at the time, to reduce the Brazilian decision purely to personal grievance over the surveillance revelations. When critics suggested that Rousseff’s cancellation of her state visit to Washington in October 2013 and the subsequent tilt toward Gripen reflected nothing more than presidential pique, they missed the deeper institutional logic. The question I posed then remains pertinent: why should an under-thirty-year-old defense contractor be able to read the private communications of the elected president of a G-20 nation? The failure was not merely the act of surveillance. It was the American administration’s slow and inadequate response to Brazilian concerns, and the accompanying revelation that the NSA was monitoring Brazilian energy companies at precisely the moment Brazil was developing major offshore petroleum reserves in directions that ran counter to American commercial preferences.
These were not trivial considerations for a state seeking a place at the major power table. Brazil had emerged by 2014 as the sixth largest economy in the world. Its armed forces were the largest in South America. It was spending over thirty billion dollars annually on defense. In this context, the fighter decision was not simply a procurement choice—it was a signal about the kind of sovereignty Brazil intended to exercise. Choosing an aircraft whose source codes it could access and whose weapons it could integrate without American export-control permission was precisely the kind of strategic autonomy Brazil’s political class, across parties, had sought for decades.
The March 2026 unveiling of the first Brazilian-assembled F-39E at Gavião Peixoto marks the moment when the arguments of the early 2010s became metal, software, and trained crews. The aircraft unit 4109 emerged from Embraer’s line as the first of 15 single-seat Gripen Es to be built in-country, drawing on components from both Brazilian and international suppliers, including aerostructure elements from Saab’s facility in São Bernardo do Campo. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attended the ceremony, underscoring the program’s continuity across the full spectrum of Brazilian democratic politics, from the Lula government that first championed the Rafale, through Rousseff’s pivot to Gripen, to the present administration that is presiding over the delivery of the hardware.
Before joining the operational fleet, the aircraft will undergo functional and production flight tests and will then deploy to the 1st Grupo de Defesa Aérea at Anápolis Air Force Base, where Swedish-built F-39Es have already been standing Quick Reaction Alert since early 2026, protecting the airspace over the federal capital district. The industrial pattern is now clear: Sweden delivers some aircraft from Linköping, while Brazil assumes responsibility for final assembly of the single-seat variant and, critically, for life-cycle support and potential future modifications to the fleet as a whole.
The access to source codes that the Brazilian Air Force commander emphasized to the Senate in 2014 is now operationalized in software-defined mission systems that can accommodate Brazilian-developed munitions alongside European weapons such as the Meteor beyond-visual-range missile. This was precisely the future I described as Brazil’s aspiration in the immediate aftermath of the contract: not merely to be a buyer of aircraft, but to become a center of excellence for Gripen production, maintenance, and operational concepts, a node in a Western-standard aerospace network rather than a passive recipient of finished hardware.
Colombia’s November 2025 order for 15 Gripen Es and two Gripen Fs adds a further dimension to Brazil’s potential role. Whether those aircraft will ultimately be assembled in Brazil, Sweden, or both remains to be confirmed, but the prospect of Gavião Peixoto serving as a regional hub for Gripen production and support is now a realistic rather than aspirational proposition. Peru is also reported to be considering future fighter requirements, in a regional environment where affordability, technology access, and Western interoperability are all at a premium.
The trajectory that I described in 2014, Embraer as a globally integrated enterprise anchored in Western aerospace standards while retaining strategic flexibility, has deepened rather than changed direction in the intervening years. In commercial aviation, Embraer’s E-Jet E2 family has maintained a strong competitive position against China’s COMAC regional jets across a dispersed customer base that spans Europe, Latin America, and parts of Asia. Where COMAC’s ARJ21 and C919 have largely remained tied to Chinese domestic carriers and politically facilitated export arrangements, Embraer’s customer list reflects a more open market orientation, with aircraft in service across dozens of countries.
In defense, the Saab partnership is rooted in Sweden’s Western integration but also in its tradition of pragmatic non-alignment giving Brazil access to NATO-compatible capabilities without complete dependence on Washington or Paris. The technology-transfer arrangements have created Brazilian design, flight-test, and final-assembly infrastructure that constitutes a distinctly Western industrial ecosystem in terms of standards, software architecture, and weapon compatibility, while preserving Brazilian latitude for customization and regional outreach. The result is an enterprise that hedges intelligently: commercially exposed to global competition, defensively anchored in Western systems, diplomatically available to multiple partners.
For the broader question of Brazil’s position between China and the West, the 2026 Gripen milestones arrive at a particularly revealing moment. Beijing is pushing hard to internationalize its own aerospace sector, deepening defense ties with Russia and seeking strategic footholds among Latin American partners, while simultaneously using state-backed financing and political leverage to advance COMAC’s commercial ambitions at Embraer’s direct expense.
The pattern that was only emerging in 2014 is now legible in its full outlines. In commercial aerospace, Embraer and COMAC are direct competitors for the 100-to-150-seat segment that both regard as strategically central to their long-term market positions. In defense, Brazilian-assembled Gripens are poised to serve not only the Força Aérea Brasileira but potentially a broader regional customer base that China has not penetrated with comparable terms, technology transfer, local industrial content, and a networked Western-standard weapon system that smaller air forces can trust to interoperate with American and European partners.
China has made substantial inroads into Brazilian trade and investment. It is Brazil’s largest trading partner by a considerable margin. BRICS coordination has given Beijing and Brasília common platforms for challenging Western-dominated international financial institutions. In this context, Brazil’s consistent choice of Western-aligned aerospace partners—from the Gripen NG contract through to the operational F-39E on the ramp at Gavião Peixoto—represents a structural fact about where Brazil has decided to anchor its highest-technology industrial capabilities. The skies over Brazil are guarded by Western-linked fighters even as its trade flows run increasingly through Chinese ports.
This asymmetry is not accidental. It reflects a Brazilian strategic calculation that sovereignty in advanced technology, the ability to modify software, integrate weapons independently, train engineers who understand the architecture of modern combat systems, matters more than the short-term cost savings or political alignment benefits that might accrue from a Chinese or Russian alternative. No Chinese fighter aircraft is assembled in Brazil. No Chinese aerospace partner has transferred source codes or design authority to a Brazilian institution on comparable terms. The Gripen program has done precisely that.
The first Brazilian-built Gripen can be read as the material emblem of a Brazil that seeks competitive coexistence, engagement with both China and the West on terms that preserve Brazilian leverage and autonomy, but that has found its high-technology anchor in Western and quasi-Western industrial partnerships.
My early insight was that Brazil wanted more than imported hardware. It sought a pathway into the command of its own aerospace destiny, the capacity to understand, modify, and ultimately export advanced systems rather than simply purchase and operate them. The rollout at Gavião Peixoto vindicates that reading in the most concrete terms. The transition from aging Mirage 2000s and upgraded F-5s to an indigenous Gripen assembly capability, supported by a design and test infrastructure that exists nowhere outside Sweden, is the operational expression of a strategic vision that was articulated clearly even when the competition seemed interminable.
By hosting the only Gripen production line outside Sweden and building an ecosystem of engineers, technicians, test pilots, and software specialists, Brazil has become a gatekeeper for advanced yet affordable Western-standard combat airpower in South America. That status has value in multiple directions: with the United States as a signal that Brazil is a serious security contributor in its own neighborhood; with prospective regional customers as evidence that the industrial infrastructure to support Gripen operations and upgrades exists close at hand; and with China as a reminder that Latin America’s most capable aerospace power has embedded itself in a Western-aligned industrial network that Beijing cannot easily displace.
What was, in 2012, a tale of two competitions, one for fighters, one for light attack aircraft in the American market, has resolved itself into something more consequential: a Brazilian industrial and strategic position that is Western-anchored in its most technologically sensitive domains while remaining deliberately plural in its economic and diplomatic relationships. That is precisely the kind of competitive coexistence that middle powers with genuine industrial capacity can achieve when they invest the political will to see long-term strategic programs through to completion. The airframe on the ramp at Gavião Peixoto is the proof.
Bibliography
Bailey, Charlotte. “First Supersonic Fighter Built in Brazil Unveiled.” Aviation International News, March 26, 2026. https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2026-03-26/first-supersonic-fighter-built-brazil-unveiled.
Maxwell, Kenneth. “The Plane Truth: Brazil and A Tale of Two Competitions.” Second Line of Defense, April 5, 2012. https://sldinfo.com/2012/04/the-plane-truth-brazil-and-a-tale-of-two-competitions/.
Maxwell, Kenneth. “France and Brazil: The Rafale in Play.” Second Line of Defense, December 13, 2013. https://sldinfo.com/2013/12/france-and-brazil-the-rafale-in-play/.
Maxwell, Kenneth. “The Brazilian Fighter Decision and Its Impact.” Second Line of Defense, January 2, 2014. https://sldinfo.com/2014/01/the-brazilian-fighter-decision-and-its-impact/.
Maxwell, Kenneth. “After the Brazilian Fighter Deal: An Update on the Evolution of Brazilian Aviation.” Second Line of Defense, March 14, 2014. https://sldinfo.com/2014/03/after-the-brazilian-fighter-deal-an-update-on-the-evolution-of-brazilian-aviation/.
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