How to leave your abusive international warplane-supplying partner and start a new life

Update on alliances and defence, in conversation with Bill Sweetman and Jim Smith

Nations whose destinies are intermingled with the foreign policies of the USA (excluding Russia) have had a rough couple of weeks. The world has changed, leaving many thinking, ‘What the fuck happens now?’ We take a brief look and then turn to Bill Sweetman and Jim Smith for further analysis.

For Britain’s Royal Air Force and Fleet Air Arm, a chaotic USA has a great deal of implications, among them, hardware. For a very long time, Britain has not been the sole producer of its military aircraft. Before the Royal Air Force even came to be, the Royal Flying Corps operated French aircraft like the Morane-Saulnier Bullet, various Nieuports and the SPAD S.VII. And with the simple technology of the time, this caused little in the way of problems, as you could improvise spare parts if you and your supplying nation fell out. The same cannot be said of modern combat aircraft; if the Spitfire was your conventional loyal spouse, the F-35 is the polyamorous type, and you are reminded that the US will always be its 'primary’. Whoever nicknamed the F-35 the iFighter was a genius because it embodies the same must-have technology with the same screw-the-customer philosophy that made the iPhone so successful, lucrative and infuriating. As Ron Smith noted to Hush-Kit, “While working at British Aerospace, I attended a 'Quad A' Conference in the US (Army Aviation Association of America). There was a discussion concerning ITAR and international supply and support. A delegate from a Foreign Military Sales (FMS) European air force (I think backed up by the Netherlands) complained that the FMS F-16s were delivered with US radar data deleted from the Radar Warning Reciever threat library.

He complained that when this was raised as a safety of flight concern (as they could not safely engage in dissimilar air combat training with USAF F-15s) - some Major in the Pentagon said 'no'. This was a safety issue as they couldn't detect the USAF jets coming and thereby maintain situation awareness in 'combat. Not that you'd expect them to use their radar a lot, but one can imagine situations where it could become an issue.

The issue had to be raised at the ambassadorial level before being sorted out. The European air force’s complaint was publicly stated that "the US does not seem to realise that we are your allies".

The F-35 (with the exception of the F-35I) has made operator air forces ancillary forces of the USA. This is a masterstroke for the Americans and a crappy deal for the customers who naively imagined they still had sovereign air power.

The question must be, how many days after falling out with the US can you keep your F-35 flying and capable?

Britian is a bit fucked in some senses, as hardware takes a silly amount of time to develop these days. Getting a combat aircraft from conception to squadron service takes around the same time as a sperm and egg do to coagulate into a person dreading their impending 30th birthday, which is pretty alarming in a fast-changing world. So far, there are no signs that Tempest is any faster.

Nationalism is a lot of fun until it collides with reality. In a world of problems that can only be dealt with internationally, the retreat into nationalism, or at least the veneer of it, is deeply depressing. It also leads to impossibly tangled questions regarding aircraft production, for this, like the internet or business, does not respect national borders, either in terms of airspace or in terms of where their parts are made. There are next to no sophisticated aircraft that are from one country. Here’s the supply chain for the F-35 from a few years ago, before Turkey got bumped.

Everything is Lego in aircraft, and taking away all the yellow, or red, or blue bricks is not easy. Reality is fundamentally international and all this flag-waving bollocks is hard to resolve. One of its many odd curses is that nationalism begets nationalism; if bullied by another country, your country becomes more unified, and cries out for more indigenous solutions.

Nationalism, when in a small country under genuine attack, can be a useful mechanism for social cohesion; a toned-down version in a country at peace can also have some uses. But when it is rampant in powerful countries, not under genuine attack, it can be a very destructive force. Full bonkers nationalism is very fashionable these days, and as usual this fun rallying cry against international collaboration is fucking shit up.

It leaves Britain standing with its pants down, wondering what to do next. Time to consider whether Britain has a truly indigenous aviation industry, and if anyone does.

So, I asked Bill Sweetman some pertinent questions:

Why does F-35 ownership remove customer autonomy? And is it to a greater extent than with, say, the F-16?

Your HP printer will stop working if you install a third-party or refilled cartridge. Does anyone think that a $170m stealth fighter has less protection than a $120 junk printer?

The Pentagon learned a lesson from Iranian F-14s. Everyone was sure that they would become paperweights in weeks without US support, and they're still flying (I think). So things will have been designed-in.

The F-35 is particularly vulnerable because pretty much everything on the aircraft is run through the Integrated Core Processors, and the higher functions of the ICP are contained in the Mission Data File (MDF), and the MDFs for non-Israeli export aircraft are updated in US-controlled labs in