Canada

Radar transmitters and receivers don’t have to be one in the same, and indeed often aren’t in a military context. Your stealth plane is not sending out radar pulses except when it’s on its own in an extreme emergency, but rather is listening to the radar echos from your AWACS and ground air defense trucks. By contrast if the enemy has a stealth plane, those active radars have to get much, much closer to the front lines and often will be in easy range of anti-radar missiles before their accompanying SAM batteries can even see the enemy, much less shoot it down to protect their air-search radar.

Hmm. I would have assumed external receivers would be important too, since they can be in multiple places or just bigger, but I guess I don't know that for sure.

These are all part of the reason why when the F-22 first started coming to joint exercises it was considered seal clubbing for them to use it, and why subsequently everyone with the resources to do so,(and some like Russia who didn’t), began pooring absurd amounts of money into trying to produce their own stealth fighters.

TIL.

I also question your assertion that they won’t have many air defense systems, as in practice unless you are the USAF fighting a much, much weaker country they have proven pretty survivable and easy to replace. There is also the fact they can be in neighboring allied but not at war countries, which makes them basically invulnerable.

There is no such country in consideration here; I somehow doubt Denmark will want to play.

Yeah, if they can get their own air defences rolled into Canada with impunity the game is pretty much over. I assume the strategy would be to have a bunch infrastructure laid out in advance to slow them down, and not worry about deep strikes into their territory so much.

It’s also worth noting that while the Gripen is indeed very good flying out of very short mountain roads and very rough fields, basically any fighter jet is capable of flying off roads and dirt tracks, they just need longer and flatter ones while suffering a bit more maintenance cost while doing so.

I've never heard someone suggest you could run an F-35 out of the bush. Actually, I've heard the supply chains are involved by airfield standards, even. I'm sure if you just needed to land and take off once somewhere lightly prepared you could get away with it, especially with the VTOL models, although I do wonder how bad the rock ingestion problem is exactly.