2w ago

Europe and Canada Are Finally Saying No to the U.S. F-35 Stealth Fighter, Motivated By a Desire For “Strategic Autonomy”

nationalsecurityjournal.org

Europe and Canada Are Finally Saying No to the F-35 Stealth Fighter

Archived link

European nations and Canada are “pushing away” from the F-35, motivated by a desire for “strategic autonomy” and political friction with the Trump administration
Spain officially canceled its F-35 purchase in August 2025, opting for European-built alternatives. Switzerland is now also reviewing its 36-jet deal after being hit with a “shocking” $1.3 billion price hike and new 39% U.S. tariffs, and recent reports suggest that Portugal has not opted to purchase the U.S. jets
Instead of the F-35, they are increasingly looking to European alternatives, such as the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Future Combat Air System (FCAS).
Canada’s 88-jet deal is also in “limbo,” as PM Mark Carney, angered by Trump’s “51st state” comments and trade disputes, ordered a review of the 72 un-committed jets
Technological and industrial sovereignty are significant reasons why some countries are opting not to purchase the F-35. Some European nations prioritize developing their own defense industries and technological bases. Buying American-made F-35s would make them dependent on US supply chains and could suppress the development of their own next-generation aircraft programs. ...

Europe @feddit.org

Scotty @scribe.disroot.org

2w ago

Europe and Canada Are Finally Saying No to the U.S. F-35 Stealth Fighter, Motivated By a Desire For “Strategic Autonomy”

nationalsecurityjournal.org /europe-and-canada-are-finally-saying-no-to-the-f-35-stealth-fighter/

73 comments

- I find it wild that we are still considering buying military planes from a country that is threatening our sovereignty lol. I'm sure it's more complex but ..... also, it doesn't have to be. Just buy from somewhere else.
- I think as of now RCAF still wants them and the deal isn't off yet. I imagine it's also a card that's used in the negotiations with the US. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up staying with the F35s.
  
  I imagine they will stall as long as they can to see if MAGA loses their grip. 0% chance of agreeing to the rest of the F-35s if MAGA is still in power.
  
  I imagine it's also a card that's used in the negotiations with the US.
  I have no doubt that it is.
  A smart negotiator doesn't play all their cards at the start. They gradually bring out their various pressure points over time when it is strategic to do so. And they hold back the "nuclear option" until it becomes necessary.
  
  It's understandable that the RCAF still wants it; There's literally no other option with the same capabilities. The Gripen is an excellent plane, but it's not a fifth gen fighter. Unless we want to start buying planes from China, we're SOL if we want another fifth gen option. I'm not personally advocating to continue with the purchase, I think we should go ahead and build the Gripen here in Canada and use that as a stopgap while we get on board with one of the European sixth gen fighter programs. But I can absolutely see why the RCAF doesn't feel the same way. They're a small air force and they need every advantage they can get. Based on its performance against F-16s I have no doubt the Gripen could shoot down Russian fighters at a ten to one rate, but I also have no doubt that the F-35 would be closer to a hundred to one rate (in Fermi approximation terms), and one could certainly argue that we need that if we end up on the front lines of a war with Russia.
  I still lean towards the Gripen, but I'll admit I go back and forth on this. It's not a cut and dry decision either way.
I won’t trust Carney to fully scrap the deal after his embarrassing apology for the Ford ad last week. Keeping it in the maybe pile is more helpful for negotiation even though we would be better off with Typhoons or Gripens.
- Ideally we would want a couple F-35s anyways, to dissect
  
  Why spend the money? Just wait for a leak on the War Thunder forums.
  
  I have an idea how Gripens could help with that.
  
  We already have 12. The question is whether we take shipment of the rest.
  That does further complicate things, because the RCAF won't want to operate two different platforms. If we don't bother taking the rest of the order then those twelve jets, fully paid for, basically sit in a junkyard somewhere. Or, as you say, get dissected or used for training. Not a total waste, but definitely something the Conservatives will gleefully point to as an example of mismanagement.
The F-35s have been the kid in a toxic custody trial for fucking ever, already costing billions more than expected. The same shit happened over the F-22 and we're still using goddamn F-18s.
In the year 2125 we'll finally welcome in a new fleet of F-69's to retire a squadron of Hornets being held together by spit and glue.
News about the kill switch hidden in Chinese built electric buses must've been a wake-up call.
- US military sales, by law, all have to have US controlled kill switches. This has been true since the 80s.
I would trust a Chinese made fighter jet before I would trust an American one.
And that's saying something.
Definitely didn’t have that on my bingo card. “Trump kills military industrial complex”
c'mon Canada, you can do better than "a review"
I’m curious what countries like Spain, Italy, and the UK will do. They all have smaller aircraft carriers that require short takeoff / vertical landing planes, a role currently being filled by the F-35B. I’m unaware of anything similar from other western aircraft manufacturers.
- Well, there's the very real possibility of having to fight the americans, who install kill switches and make everything proprietary so you can't make your own parts.
  So, go without planes, or pay your most likely military enemy for the privilege of going without planes?
  
  No credible expert believes that the US has any kind of "kill switch" in the F-35, for the record. Such a system would be almost impossible to completely conceal from the engineers who would have to maintain these planes in service and the risk of that being discovered and instantly tanking the entire project would far exceed any benefit. Remember, the point of the F-35 was to arm the whole of NATO with a single attack fighter. The US benefited plenty from the project as it was, they didn't need to install kill switches, and back under Bush and Obama there was zero motivation for them to do so. People forget how long projects like the F-35 take. They didn't just start building this thing yesterday. The plane first entered production in 2006, and that was after a lengthy design and development phase stretching back well into the nineties.
  The concern is not that there might be a "kill switch", but that the US insists on controlling the supply of firmware updates, which would represent a serious risk in its own right, not in a "planes falling out of the sky" way but definitely in a "We can continue to upgrade our planes while locking you out of upgrades" way. It's the sort of thing that, if applied over a decade, could create a serious capability gap between the US and anyone else with the F-35.
  NB: To clear up another point of confusion, it is very specifically the firmware that the US controls. Everyone can make their own parts, but they have to load US firmware onto those parts. This another reason why it would be basically impossible to conceal a kill-switch; everyone has the full technical package, they know what's in this thing. Even a tripwire hidden in the firmware would still need some means to be remotely activated, which would be very obvious. This is a stealth plane, all forms of communication in and out are very, very tightly controlled. You can't just slap an extra radio in there.
- The Saab Gripen has had some studies around whether it would be possible to adapt to carrier operation. Several countries seem to have expressed interest, but no commitments have been made yet. From wikipedia:
  Saab studied a variant of the Gripen capable of operating from aircraft carriers in the 1990s. In 2009, it launched the Sea Gripen project in response to India's request for information on a carrier-based aircraft. Brazil may also require new carrier aircraft.[74][75] Following a meeting with Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials in May 2011, Saab agreed to establish a development center in the UK to expand on the Sea Gripen concept.[76]... ; further development of optionally manned and carrier versions would require customer commitment.[77][78] On 6 November 2014, the Brazilian Navy expressed interest in a carrier-based Gripen.[79]
- There's nothing similar stealth-wise, either, at least for that kind of aircraft.
  It's a really really good plane, like you'd expect from however many trillions spent in project money. It's just that the Americans control the software running on it.
  
  It's a huge problem. There is no other fifth gen option available to NATO. The Gripen is one of the best choices out there, and it does have a lot of stealth and EWAR capabilities that other fighters lack, as well as really impressive radar, but that's not the same thing as the kind of stealth that the F-35 and F-22 have.
  On the other hand, I can absolutely see how the F-35 now presents an unacceptable security risk.
  The good news is that Russia has nothing even close to the F-35, and its honestly unlikely that most of their stuff can even stand up to the Gripen. Their purported fifth gen fighter just isn't. It has a radar cross section over a thousand times larger than that of any US fifth gen, that's according to Russia's bullshit propaganda numbers. And they've only made about 6 of those. The rest of their fleet is slightly upgraded cold war surplus, maybe at the level of the F-16 if you're being really generous, and the Gripen wipes the floor with the F-16 in combat testing (Gripen pilots shoot down F-16s at a ten to one ratio IIRC).
  If we assume that Russia is the main threat, then the Gripen will serve very well for now (at least for Canada, with no need for a carrier launch capability) until we can get a sixth gen fighter; Europe has two such projects in the works. If we assume the main threat is the US, then the F-35 would still be a bad idea, since even putting aside any issues with supply of firmware, they would know its capabilities and weaknesses intimately. China is the wildcard and we just don't know what the capabilities of their craft are. OTOH its extremely unlikely that there would be a conflict with China that didn't involve the US as the primary combatant, so I think that's less of a concern for the rest of NATO.
  
  It’s a really really good plane
  it's not?
  https://www.navylookout.com/us-watchdog-warns-of-growing-risks-to-f-35-programme/
  "The U.S. Navy has faced numerous problems with the F-35, including significant issues with its high operating and maintenance costs, software and hardware deficiencies like overheating and landing gear problems, and complex supply chain challenges that impact readiness and delivery schedules. The F-35's stealth capabilities require costly upkeep, its internal weapons can limit payload, and its reliance on software creates vulnerability to cyber threats. Additionally, some naval variants have experienced issues like structural damage from supersonic flight and difficulties with the helmet-mounted display during carrier landings."
  It's a fucking lemon. We are better off with older gen planes we can independently maintain, because even the fucking US NAVY can't get these planes to fly reliably.
- No other aircraft can do it as of now. A potential VSTOL derivative of the Tempest?
  The royal navy doesn't even have the aircrafts for its 2 carriers. The entire UK military is notoriously underfunded even in critical aspects like SSBN. Not likely to fund a new aircraft.
  Italy and Japan both already have their F-35Bs for their carriers. It's hard to see them ditch multi billion investments.
  Korea might get a STVOL Carrier eventually but they are involved with lockeed on other projects, and operate F-35A already. so they are likely to get F-35B as well.
  I mean outside of Spain I don't see who needs an F-35B alternative. Spain lacks a proper aviation industry but maybe they could keep on getting upgrade packages for their Harrier II for a few more decades. Who knows? Maybe in 20 years strategic alliances will have shifted and Chinese airframes will be on the table.
  
  People who criticize lack of military spending don't get math.
  You want a well funded military? Easy, drive the country into $38T debt and take all the tax money for it while letting people starve or die from lack of health care. So you end up defending a sick shit hole country.
Can you blame them? When the country that produces it elected someone so profoundly dumb, you need to be able to trust at that level.
If only we hadn't shit-canned the Arrow half a century ago.
- The Arrow was just the 60s version of the F35. It was proper to cancel it. Tories killed off Avro because the US told them to. Then Mulroney killed off a lot of CDN industry, again, because the US told him to. Then Stephen Harper...you get the point.
- I'm no expert, but I've heard that the reputation of the Arrow has been pumped up over the years. But we would have had our own military aeronautics industry in some way shape or form.
  Really it's a moot point though. Drones do a lot of what jets used to do. We should take the money that would have been spent on those and use it to develop a homegrown drone industry right now.
  
  I understand that, but the point is we could have had a home-grown aerospace industry a bit more robust than now. Some Arrow engineers ended up at NASA after all. And the engines!
  
  No expert, but I'm sure it wasn't the best of all generations, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was not the best of that generation, but correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it a damned good option at the time*?
  ^{? Which would have contributed more to the ærospace program than just scrapping it entirely?}
Smart. Those planes come with so many strings attached they may as well be fly-by-wire.
- Fly by subscription.
Just to give you an idea of how FUCKED our national priorities are: If we actually buy these lemons, it will cost more to just keep them unused in hangars per year than all the biomedical research in all diseases supported by federal grants.
The fact that we are wasting tens of billions on fighter jets with foreign controlled kill switches is just proof CAF spending has nothing to do with actual defence of Canada.
Finally Europe is waking up. Although, this can be a slippery slope. Military industrial complex in USA get out of hand and we have to learn from USA mistakes in that field. Let's have strong military for deference, but in a way that do not promote arms racing, or being overrun by our own companies.

73 comments