IN Brief:
- FMV has placed a SEK2.9 billion order covering future fighter technology work from 2026 to 2028.
- Saab will develop flying and ground demonstrators alongside concepts for manned and unmanned systems.
- The programme covers autonomy, systems integration, signature adaptation, propulsion, digital development, and future production capability.
Saab has received a SEK2.9 billion order from the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration for continued future fighter development, taking Sweden’s programme further into demonstrator engineering while preserving options around the eventual combat-air architecture.
The contract covers work from 2026 to 2028, with options extending into 2029 and 2030. Saab will continue advanced studies and develop flying and ground demonstrators alongside future system concepts for both manned and unmanned aircraft.
The award follows a sequence of funded concept work rather than a new programme starting from zero. FMV placed an initial order in March 2024 covering studies, technology development, and demonstrations, followed by a SEK2.6 billion order in October 2025 that expanded the work into 2027. The latest contract adds another funded phase and shifts more of the effort towards physical demonstration.
Sweden is deliberately keeping the technical scope wider than one aircraft configuration. Saab identifies autonomy, systems integration, signature adaptation, propulsion, digital development, and future production capability among the areas being matured, allowing engineers to examine the interaction between technologies before a final system architecture is selected.
Those interactions will shape what can ultimately be built. Propulsion affects cooling, electrical generation, range, and thermal signature; low-observable shaping influences structures, access panels, antennas, and maintainability; autonomy changes communications and mission-system requirements; and digital engineering determines how quickly competing configurations can be modelled and tested before committing to expensive hardware.
Flying demonstrators provide evidence that simulation alone cannot deliver. Aerodynamic behaviour, flight-control software, propulsion integration, sensor placement, signature treatments, and human-machine interfaces can all behave differently once they are combined in a representative air vehicle. Ground demonstrators offer a parallel route for maturing avionics, power systems, mission computing, and other hardware without tying every trial to a flightworthy platform.
The inclusion of manned and unmanned concepts also reflects the direction of wider combat-air development. Sweden does not have to assume that a future replacement for Gripen will be another standalone crewed fighter. The programme can instead test how crewed aircraft, collaborative uncrewed platforms, sensors, and effectors might operate as a distributed system.
That preserves national choice while maintaining engineering momentum. Saab continues to support and develop Gripen and GlobalEye, and Sweden retains an aerospace base spanning structures, propulsion, sensors, software, mission systems, test, and production. The demonstrator programme can use those capabilities without committing the country to an evolutionary Gripen derivative or to immediate participation in another international fighter programme.
Production capability is explicitly included in the latest work. That is a significant part of the programme because future combat-air sovereignty depends on more than retaining design expertise. Manufacturing processes, tooling, qualification methods, secure software development, test infrastructure, and a workforce capable of moving from prototype to repeatable production all have to survive across development cycles measured in decades.
Demonstrators can expose production constraints while configuration choices are still flexible. A signature-control feature may deliver useful performance but prove difficult to manufacture consistently; a propulsion arrangement may create access problems during assembly or maintenance; and a structural concept that works in modelling may require expensive tooling or materials once full-scale hardware is built.
Resolving those issues before a final design decision reduces the risk of locking Sweden into technically attractive features that later become difficult or expensive to manufacture. It also creates better evidence for deciding which parts of a future system should remain under national control and which could be shared with international partners.
The programme is already structured around a wider Swedish industrial and research base. Earlier work has involved FMV, the Armed Forces, the Swedish Defence Research Agency, GKN Aerospace, and other national participants, giving the fighter studies access to expertise beyond Saab’s own airframe and mission-system operations.
That breadth will matter if Sweden later chooses an international route. Entering a multinational programme with mature demonstrators, validated technologies, and defined industrial capabilities gives the country a stronger basis for negotiating workshare and technical responsibility than entering with requirements alone.
The SEK2.9 billion award does not reveal what Sweden’s eventual fighter system will be, and the current programme remains a technology-development route rather than a production decision. Its value lies in narrowing the uncertainty around that later choice through flying hardware, ground testing, digital models, and manufacturing work.
With funded activity now running through 2028 and options into 2030, Sweden has created a longer development runway before it has to commit to one architecture. The next phase should show which technologies are mature enough to carry forward, which are too expensive or complex to industrialise, and how much of the future combat-air system Sweden can realistically retain as a sovereign capability.
