How the president spoiled the F-35, America’s most popular warplane.
This article orginally ran in New York magazine on March 24, 2025.
Not so long ago, the F-35 fighter jet was the hottest ticket in the international arms market. Though it had suffered teething pains in development, going over budget by 50 percent in its first decade, Lockheed Martin’s Lightning II glowed up into a remarkably capable weapons platform. Stealthy, supersonic, and able to both dogfight and strike targets on the ground, it’s arguably the most sophisticated weapon in the U.S. arsenal and undeniably the most sought-after. As nation after nation held competitions to choose their next frontline fighter, the F-35 came in and trounced its rivals time and again. “I can’t think of a competition that it entered in Europe that it didn’t win,” says Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Anywhere Lockheed Martin pitched the F-35, it wound up getting chosen.” Today, some 18 years after its first flight, more than 1,000 F-35s are in operation in 20 countries.
But then, earlier this month, something happened. One after another, nations that had signed up for the F-35 started voicing qualms. On March 13, Portugal’s defense minister said that the country would cancel plans to buy the plane. Then Canada’s prime minister said it would reconsider its purchase. Germany, too, is said to be wavering in its commitment to the jet.
Nothing had changed about the plane’s performance. It’s just that, in the eyes of some international customers, the F-35 can’t fully be trusted anymore because of who is the commander-in-chief. Donald Trump has an affinity for authoritarianism, has exhibited poor treatment of NATO (whose Article 5 obligates collective defense), and, in particular, has threatened to annex Greenland and Canada.
“Canada is one of our closest allies, and they have fought with us. They have died with us,” says Cynthia Cook, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And to have the new president of the United States cast doubt on their independence is really viewed as a challenging pill to swallow. It’s making the U.S. be seen as a less reliable ally.”
The long-term effects of America’s heel turn might not just be deleterious for the F-35 program but for the $238 billion U.S. weapons-export industry as a whole, including the recently announced Boeing F-47 next-generation fighter, which could enter service in the 2030s. If the “arsenal of democracy” no longer stands on the side of democracies, what is it good for?
To understand why the F-35 is suddenly in trouble, the first thing you need to know is that a state-of-the-art fighter jet isn’t just a physical airframe. It’s both hardware and software, a whole suite of networked systems that requires software patches and data in order to work effectively. It’s a bit like a smartphone: If you don’t update the software, it gradually works less and less well and eventually bricks.
The F-35 has to depend on software because of the environment it will fight in. Even though the plane is stealthy, meaning hard to detect by conventional radar, it is not invisible and will not survive long in a modern air-defense environment unless it can track and assess enemy radars and countermeasures. To do that, it needs to constantly update its assessment of the threat environment. That information is stored inside a software package called the mission data file, or MDF. The software is updated by a civilian unit located at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida called the F-35 Partner Support Complex, whose website explains that nations deploying the F-35 “are not allowed to conduct independent test operations” outside the U.S. and that “U.S. citizens perform specific functions in order to protect critical U.S. technology.”
In other words, any one nation that flies the F-35 is wholly dependent on the U.S. to keep the planes functioning properly. When the program launched, this provision rankled some allies, but it didn’t prove to be a deal-breaker because it was inconceivable at the time that the U.S. would ever be anything other than a trusted ally. (Israel, presciently, insisted on retaining control of the F-35’s software and today operates the aircraft with considerably more autonomy.)
Buying planes that they don’t fully control now looks like an incredibly poor decision. Since Trump took office, Europe’s trust in its ally has withered as the U.S. has pivoted from democracy toward autocracy, increasingly aligned with Europe’s most dangerous adversary, Russia. As the legendary aviation journalist Bill Sweetman writes, “A hypothetical: A crisis is emerging, and U.S. strategy and policy differs from that of a partner nation; the U.S. is not going to intervene militarily at any likely threshold. The pressure point is simple: The door code at Eglin is changed. The partner nation’s people can’t get in.”
Effectively, the F-35 is bricked.
The delicacy of the situation that Europe now finds itself in goes far beyond the F-35 or any of the other major weapons systems that it is heavily dependent on the U.S. to maintain and operate, like the U.K.’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s that the whole defense edifice, from top to bottom, has been designed with a deep level of interdependence baked in. “One of the strengths of the U.S. defense industrial cooperation is we’re able to incorporate the best offerings from our allies and partners from their technological advances,” Cook says. “It’s something that our adversaries like Russia and China can envy but not replicate.”
The idea that the U.S. would just walk away from a global security system that it has spent the better part of a century building and nurturing, and which undergirds the country’s global power, is nearly incomprehensible. For Europeans, it’s a bit like coming home and finding your husband in bed with the au pair. The swiftness and profundity of the betrayal is so enraging that a lifetime of commitment can vanish in an instant.
“Since I’ve been born, all I’ve ever known was a U.S. alliance,” says Thomas Withington, a white-haired associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, Britain’s venerable defense think tank. “Occasionally, there’s been good-natured criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. But nobody has ever envisaged a world in which the U.S. and Europe are not very strong security partners. And what’s shocking to me now is that I have a number of friends — mainly French but German and Italian as well — who were quite strong Atlanticists but have totally changed their position in the last two weeks.
“I was having a drink with a colleague last week, and he said that he remembered vividly how in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. declared Article 5 and pretty much all allied nations around the world stepped up. And he said, ‘God forbid if that happens again, because we would never assist America in any future wars.’ He was very adamant: Europe must not come to U.S. aid in the future. The U.S. is on its own.”
“Trust is hard to win, and it’s really easy to lose,” Barrie says. “Even if this is a four-year blip in terms of the transatlantic relationship, it’s going to take a bit of time to move back toward a more balanced position.”
For now, even if Trump’s most ominous pronouncements turn out to be mere bluster, Europe has been forced to confront how exposed it is. With remarkable speed, it has pivoted to the consensus that it needs to achieve self-reliance as quickly as it can, and that means replacing U.S. weapons and capabilities with those of a more dependable origin. With a friendly neighbor locked in an interminable and grinding bloodbath, the sense of urgency is real.
As for the U.S., it is hard to see how it is going to come out ahead in this realignment. Trump often talks about rebuilding American manufacturing and restoring American military power around the world, but by torpedoing allies’ trust in us, he has profoundly undermined the strategic capabilities of the U.S. military and tied an anchor around the defense industry, which last year reached a record-breaking $318 billion in overseas sales.
“The U.S. defense industry lives off exports,” says Withington. “And anything that that reduces that will have a serious effect — and not only on the defense companies themselves but all of the businesses around them geographically. Think about all of the businesses that support the F-35 line in Fort Worth, everything from sandwich joints to real-estate agents and Uber drivers. There’s a whole ecosystem that’s developed. I saw what happened when the U.K.’s defense industry had to retool post–Cold War. Towns that were dependent on it just died.”
If there’s a winner in all this, it’s Vladimir Putin. “If you were to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say, ‘What are the things, both in terms of domestic and international policy, that an American leader could do that would best suit Russia’s and China’s long-range strategic goals and visions?,’ it looks a lot like the last 70 days,” says Steven Horrell, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Another big beneficiary is European weapons-makers. Amid a planned surge in regional defense spending, French president Emmanuel Macron is pushing the Dassault Rafale as an alternative to the F-35, and Airbus is doing the same with the Eurofighter Typhoon. Sweden’s Saab, which makes the Gripen fighter jet, has seen its share price double since Trump took office, and German arms titan Rheinmetall has also doubled its stock valuesince last year. “If you’re a European defense aerospace manufacturer,” says Barrie, “somebody else is doing your marketing work for you at the moment, and that’s the U.S.”