The F-35 is losing the trade war
96 comments
·August 23, 2025jfernandezr
randunel
The US also stated that they "tone them down 10%" when selling them to other countries.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Cite a source please.
potatolicious
You can literally just Google this, there are many sources. Literally the top of the Google results:
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/21/trump-boeing-stealt...
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2025-03-2...
The exact transcript is here:
[3] https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...
All of these are in the top-10 first results when you search for this.
msgodel
This kind of software is really unacceptable in consumer electronics but with weapons it entirely defeats the point of the thing.
It's surprising any were sold outside the US at all.
7jjjjjjj
Even if there isn't a literal kill switch, there might as well be. Without a constant stream of maintenence and operations support from the USA there things are no good.
cpursley
And the F-35 is very very high maintenance. Requires much more ground maintenance time that it's predecessors or competitors. That's a real problem in an active combat situation because it means less plans in the sky.
fooblaster
It actually requires substantially less maintenance time if you look at the equivalent force it replaces, for example the associated awacs capability needed for a sortie for previous gen fighters.
Honestly, it's just absurd to think that any jet fighter is somehow low maintenance. The issue here isn't the f35, it's the host country becoming a unreliable/hostile partner.
spwa4
Apparently one aspect has to do with the inevitable result of a what a stealth fighter is: it can deploy weapons far further than it can see. So without comlinks with intelligence from a specific satellite system, it loses half its features.
Second for the on-board radars to evade detection they need to be reprogrammed with the latest updates regularly. Not so much because the programming has a kill switch but because otherwise "adversaries" could still turn out to have rockets that can home in on an F-35.
And even in the case of the US, you don't have to shoot down that many F-35s to get them all.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Exactly. I doubt there are literal kill switches but if the US stops supporting you there doesn't need to be.
scott_w
Yep, I think people arguing “there is no kill switch” miss this point. There doesn’t need to be if the lack of updates makes an F-35 an expensive, inferior version of a jet they could buy elsewhere!
antonymoose
Sure, but in any case the nations buying the F-35 are so tied at the hip to the United States it would be fantasy to expect them to break off in any meaningful timeframe relative to the lifespan of the plane.
Beyond that, is there a viable competitor available for an US allied nation to purchase?
burnt-resistor
This is an oft repeated conspiracy theory. The "kill switch" is repair parts and manufacturer support.
daviding
Up here in Canada it's a question of trust, or rather the lack of it. Things are unlikely to ever go back to the way things were.
Buy, make and domestically develop drones, lots and lots of drones.
buildsjets
Canada should build their own air superiority fighter, with hookers and blackjack. They can call it the Avro Arrow.
Marsymars
With how generous Saab's JAS 39 bid is, I doubt there's much part for our own design: https://www.saab.com/markets/canada/gripen-for-canada/built-...
samdoesnothing
Maybe if there was some political will for building stuff but there isn't. Canada should be an absolute AI and energy powerhouse, but our politicians are some of the most incompetent buffoons on the planet.
biglyburrito
Also, there's Alberta.
samdoesnothing
I wish Alberta would diversify their industry but at least they have the right idea re. building and expanding our energy exports.
anigbrowl
I don't know enough about Canada to know if this is a reasonable take or not, but I think you'd get downvoted less if you took a few sentences to articulate what the politicians' main failings are.
samdoesnothing
That would take more than a few sentences, but in general there is a lack of willingness to build new infrastructure. Canada has endless opportunities to both export energy (and not just oil!) and use it domestically - we should be utilising this untapped potential to build datacenters and invest in AI companies and research. Instead we can't even build new houses or hospitals for our exploding population.
danieldk
Indeed.
So the question becomes whether these countries truly want to move off of the platform, or if this is all more of a bargaining chip in the trade negotiations.
JD Vance pretty much single-handedly destroyed most trust in the US in with his speech at the Munich Security Conference. Europe (and probably Canada and Australia) were shaken for days after it and realized that the US is not a reliable ally (or even not an ally) anymore. This was confirmed by the disastrous meeting with Zelensky in the White House and the US stopping to provide intelligence to Ukraine and F-16 updates (F-16s which were provided by European countries, not the US).
The pathetic little show you saw at the White House last week (with Macron, Mertz, etc.) is just a strategy to appease the US as long as needed so that the Europe can speed up its own weapon's production, increase independence, etc. It's damage control. The reason countries have stopped buying the F-35 is because nobody trusts the US anymore. And one or two sane presidents are not going to fix it (the US elected Trump a second time after all).
kjkjadksj
It is interesting how it is basically an indictment on the ability of the american people to manage their hard and soft power and military capability. That being said, populist right wing movements are taking root in europe as well. This threatens long term strategic planning in general, not just with the US, when critical positions of world power are replaced every few years by a subset of the population increasingly liable to propaganda influence granted by technology. In some ways regimes like North Korea are the most stable on earth due to careful control of the reigns of power and lack of any possibility of inroads for third party influence.
abletonlive
It's crazy that you're acting like this is some kind of policy failure for the US, when this administration has been telling Europe it shouldn't rely on the United States at this level. This isn't some "gotcha" that you're describing, it's exactly what the administration wanted europe to do. Wake up and start innovating instead of being the Disneyland for American tourists.
smodo
Us Europeans are just baffled by the fact that this ‘administration’ wants this. The EU is a big economy that’s relatively easy to deal with. Why would you alienate us?
But yeah so far Trump has been relatively true to his word, as far as it goes. Not really practically but going further down the road of a dare I say fascist outlook. I think Europeans still can’t believe it’s happening, much less intentionally so.
dingnuts
I don't know why Europe wants so badly to be reliant on the US. It's bad for them, it's bad for us. It's embarrassing for Europe that Ukraine is relying on the US instead of Europe for defense. It's embarrassing for Europe how little they contribute to NATO. The US isn't a partner, it's a caretaker. And as they say, if someone provides what you need, they also have the power to take it away.
Outsourcing your defense is stuupiiid.
Europe should be thanking Trump for waking them up to the reality that has always been the case through his boorish negotiation.
Animats
It's a real issue. The overall world reaction to Trump's policies has been to take steps to do without the US. That's just getting rolling, but it's happening. Canada exports oil to China now.[1] China's trade with Asia is up, and trade with the US is down.[2] Supply chains are slowly changing to cut the US out of the loop. The US is seen as an unreliable trading partner.
It's hitting software. "Dutch Parliament Calls for End to Reliance on US Software".[3]
[1] https://www.ualberta.ca/en/china-institute/research/analysis...
[2] https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/features/2025/canada-interna...
[3] https://www.usnews.com/news/technology/articles/2025-03-18/d...
jimnotgym
I always thought Trump missed an important concept with his 'who pays for NATO' rhetoric. A huge amount of NATO spending from Europe was going to US arms companies, so the US benefited massively. Now the US is an unreliable ally, that money will go back into Europe. And even when Trump is gone, governments will still remember that their sovereignty can't depend on the whims of the US. This damage will last a generation. Personally I think this will be an eventual benefit for Europe, who seem quite capable of making advanced weapons when they have to.
leoh
Sounds about right.
pointlessone
It’s not about trade. Trump and his administration pulled Ukraine aid on multiple occasions. They halted intelligence sharing for like a day and a half and that let Russia retake Kursk region.
Once a solid partner Trump turned USA into an unpredictable dependency that can change allegiance at a drop of a hat.
And "the best weapons” USA sells are best not because of hardware but because of the services that pull the hardware together. Patriots, F-35, even Abrams are all so good because they’re all networked and work together. If the service is cut it all become much more expensive and so much less usable than competition from Europe.
So while technically Mirages, Grippens, Typhoons, and whatnot are a bit less advanced than F-35, now they seem much more reliable.
Bratmon
The irony is that if the countries that pull out of the F-35 program buy jets that actually function instead (and aren't just a $2 trillion piece of scrap metal), this trade war might be what saves democracy.
mpyne
F-35 functions fine, lots of its problems relate to things like its logistical tail and associated IT system pain points that you'd have to solve with a different plane than F-35 either way, but I can't argue against the fact that a lot of countries are having to wake up to the reality of meeting their defense needs in much different ways than you'd have thought in 2015.
mrweasel
That's just not what's happening, at least for some of the countries. Spain is rejecting the F-35 for the EuroFigther (which is the plane they already operate) and Tempest (which doesn't exists yet). So in that case it's not that they are buying jets from competitors, they just aren't buying anything. In this case it feels much more like the Spanish government not really wanting to spend the money, or can't afford it, and Trump is just a convenient scapegoat.
toomuchtodo
Why would you transact with a country for defense infrastructure that will use force against you whenever they deem it necessary for leverage and power in a transaction? Better to replan and retool for sovereignty even if it means you lack some capability in the near term.
atoav
In most European countries I have traveled to during the past months the popular opinion regarding the US is that we have to operate under the worst-case-assumption that the US won't assist or would even actively use their tech as leverage in the case of a conflict.
That was unthinkable a year ago, but it is now. Given that it is probably better to roll your own in the mid/long term and not rely overly on US tech.
cm2187
Though technically France always worked on that assumption. Or rather, that the US would support France against a soviet invasion up to a certain level, but wouldn't risk a nuclear war for France's pretty eyes. Hence the will to have no other finger than the French president's finger on its red button.
And to be honest that's the only way it can ever be. I don't understand France's talk about extending its nuclear deterence to the rest of Europe. Those european countries can no more rely on France than France can rely on the US in those extreme scenarios. Nuclear deterence is like the bee's sting. It will die if it uses it, but it's because you know it will use it that you tread carefully.
actionfromafar
I think it's very simple. France hinted at placing its own nuclear bombers closer to the Russian border. That does not require that other European countries trust France. It's just France shifting its nuclear posture a bit more to the East.
noxer
The article seems deliberately misleading for example the "F-5s, which the U.S. Air Force retired out of service in 1990" is of course still in use in the Navy and Marine as well as in China, South Korea, Iran, Brazil and probably other countries.
Also the F-35 is an always was highly controversial in Switzerland from the very first day it was publicly considered that was around 2017. In 2020 the people voted in favor of the F-35 with 50.1% support. So the reality is that any and all reasons to stop or delay the purchase of these jets will be uses by the parties that opposed the purchase, it has little to nothing to do with the so called "trade war".
more_corn
Super weird that our allies don’t want to do business with us after we enacted strong-arm trade war tactics. It’s almost like people will choose not to trade with a bully if they have the choice.
neilv
Maybe this post is buried because more comments than upvotes?
Don't forget to upvote if you comment, unless you want the post to be buried?
119. The F-35 is losing the trade war (jalopnik.com)
45 points by rntn 1 hour ago | unvote | flag | hide | 65 commentsbigyabai
taps the sign
The F-35's Defining Characteristic Is Surviving Hostile Airspace
Most nations don't need an F-35. They want to protect their own airspace, intercept potential threats and minimize the cost-per-mission for their operations. The sort of power projection afforded by a Joint Strike Fighter just isn't worth the cost to most nations - unless you're intent on molesting hostile airspace it's kinda a waste of taxpayer money. The existence of the F-35 is a byproduct of imperial ambition that few peer powers can match.
scott_w
I think you’re missing something huge: when you’re under attack, YOUR OWN AIRSPACE can become hostile if you don’t fight to gain air superiority. NATO doctrine prioritises air superiority for good reason.
bigyabai
No number of stealth planes will help you regain the advantage in that scenario if your ground assets can't support them. If your own airspace is hostile and your ground radars/SAM systems are disabled, then your CAP/supremacy mission has already failed.
scott_w
The two aren’t separate. If your jets can’t defend your ground assets then they’re likely to go boom. One way you can do this is to send your jets into enemy airspace and make their ground assets go boom, forcing them to keep jets in their own territory to stop that.
siliconc0w
It also compromises your sovereignty since you cannot operate them without US assistance. These days that is a deal breaker.
scott_w
I think this is the biggest factor. Comments about the USA potentially cutting access to software updates could have cooled interest. The UK is the only country that can operate F-35 semi-independently (our government bought the system to run our own updates).
I’ve seen people point out that the F-35 is still better than anything else you could buy but an inferior jet is probably better than an F-35 with no targeting information!
abletonlive
Insanely short sighted. If all you need to do is "intercept potential threats" instead of dealing with a real threat when it becomes apparent then just send a balloon.
null
n4r9
Which aircraft models would be more suitable for European countries to give a deterrent against potential threats like Russia?
mrweasel
While I'd generally say that the F-35 is probably the best (one of the best) option for countries like my own (Denmark), who need/want a plane that can do a bit of everything, we also need to see what's happening in Ukraine.
If you have a large country and can hide your airfields hundreds of kilometers from the front, the F-16, Rafale, EuroFigther and the F-35 are all fine, but you have more options with the F-35. If you're a small country, like the Baltics, or Denmark, they are a silly choices if you expect to fight a battle at home. You simply don't have anywhere to service the planes after missiles and drones take out your three airfield equipped for the F-35. In those cases the SAAB Gripen is a much better choice. You can service is straight of a highway with basic tools and conscripts. It's also a plane designed to fight Russia, so if that the enemy you expect, it's fine.
xdennis
> Which aircraft models would be more suitable for European countries to give a deterrent against potential threats like Russia?
Ironically, S300's from Russia. That's what Ukraine used to deny Russia air superiority. You can fight the orcs with orc weapons but you cannot fight them with American made airplanes because the US can stop support at any time.
bigyabai
The F-16 is cheap, attritable, highly available, and occupies a similar multirole mission profile as the F-35. It should be able to launch the same standoff munitions, albeit from a slightly further distance to avoid detection. It's likely they can be bought secondhand for ~1/10th the price of an F-35 and equipped with MBDA Meteor/IRIS missiles for a mean air patrol payload.
More realistically though, I'd imagine many European nations are eying twin-engine multirole fighters like the Rafale and Eurofighter. These have a larger range and payload than the F-35, bigger radars and pylons and the all-important high top-speed (mach-2 intercepts are a must-have bordering Russia). These can be had cheaper than the F-35 and are generally better suited to a high intensity inland conflict.
maciejw
Thailand invested in Swedish Gripen recently.
izacus
Can you explain this "don't need" concept?
richardw
Temporarily. At some point all the allies need world class kit. They just can’t buy it from the US exclusively. But they have committed to higher defence spending. That problem solves itself over time, especially when the world’s researchers are now looking for a safer home than under this administration.
TL;DR: you don’t need a world class jet when you trust your partner 100%. Anything less than 100, collaborate fast to overcome the limitation.
toomuchtodo
It’s kind of wild to watch the US squander its allies trust and therefore ability to project force globally as every other country that would’ve bought this weapons platform finds an alternative, leaving the US to shoulder the entire program cost burden.
Who could’ve ever foreseen these consequences? /s
varispeed
It's not the trade war, but the fact US administration is run by Russian assets.
E.g. it's pure coincidence that few months into Trump's rule, Russia suddenly can overcome Patriot systems.
Basically US industry is compromised and nobody with brain cells is going to buy American weapons any time soon.
mnky9800n
Can you say where you read about Russia suddenly overcoming patriot systems
doublerabbit
I saw this too. America pretty much selling, giving away their near-deprecated toys.
themafia
Perhaps Ukraine's military is not as good at keeping secrecy as the US would be against Russia.
Maybe we don't need to invent entire international conspiracy theories to explain something this basic.
Weapon systems have a shelf life. The longer they're deployed in the field the shorter that life is.
hagbard_c
> the fact US administration is run by Russian assets.
fact
noun [ C or U ]
UK /fækt/
US /fækt/
something that is known to have happened or to exist,
especially something for which proof exists, or about
which there is information
proof
noun
UK /pruːf/
US /pruːf/
proof noun (SHOWING TRUTH)
a fact or piece of information that shows that something
exists or is true
varispeed
You’re demanding a sealed dossier, which is an absurd standard for public discourse. The ‘proof’ is in the public record of actions and consequences.
An administration acting as an asset would:
- Dismantle alliances (undermining military cooperation, trade disputes, questioning mutual defence).
- Give concessions without return (walking away from long-negotiated agreements, reducing deployments unilaterally).
- Sideline national security and intelligence professionals who oppose the adversary’s interests.
- Stoke domestic instability that distracts and weakens national unity.
When these patterns converge, you don’t need classified files to hear the smoke alarm. My point stands: U.S. weapons are a hard sell when its own foreign policy works against its strategic interests.
Btw. Your command of English is very good, comrade.
whatsupdog
Go back to Reddit
The article doesn't mention it, but there is an increasing worry that the USA could remotely disable some jet functionalities at will, or that any basic operation should be monitored and approved by them. So, this is not a reliable weapon that any country would like, unless the politicians agree to be vassals for life.