I haven’t done adequate due diligence yet - could be inaccurate
I came across this article alleging that Germany is considering bailing on the F-35 aircraft because the US can remotely disable them.
If the US could do this to German F-35s, presumably they can do it to ours…
Additional reporting alleging concern in Canadian defence circles
Nothing in the article backs up the headline claim. The closest it gets is their quoted expert saying that he worries about the US doing to the F-35 what they’re doing to Ukraine. He’s almost certainly referring to the fact that parts and software updates are produced by the US, who could choose to withhold them, just like they’re withholding aid from Ukraine.
Every serious defence analyst has laughed at the idea that the F-35 has a secret killswitch. This would be the dumbest thing ever to include in an aircraft, because there is always the possibility that your enemies could find out about it.
Consider; if an F-35 kill switch did exist, any buyer of the craft could invest the resources required to go over every inch of circuit and line of code and find it, and then deactivate every US F-35. It would be more of a liability for them than it is for us. And, equally, our experts could simply patch around the killswitch on our planes. Nations like Canada and Germany are not lacking in technical expertise.
This bonkers notion seems mostly to be rooted in the broader fear that the F-35 is somehow “too advanced”, an idea that largely springs from the diseased brain of Pierre Sprey (seriously, if you chase down every bad thing said about the F-35, odds are ridiculously high that Sprey said it first). Sprey also believed that the ideal design for a modern attack fighter has a machine gun, no missiles, no computers, and no radar.
I’m not joking, not even slightly. Pierre Sprey wanted the modern world to fight Russia with planes that had no radar.
There are valid concerns to be raised about the idea of adopting a craft whose supply chain is centred on the US. That’s a discussion that NATO partners should be having. But this “killswitch” nonsense just derails that important discussion into paranoid conspiracy theorist nonsense rooted in the deranged ramblings of a self-aggrandizing madman.
Every serious defence analyst has laughed at the idea that the F-35 has a secret killswitch. This would be the dumbest thing ever to include in an aircraft, because there is always the possibility that your enemies could find out about it.
And yet, intelligence agencies do that kind of thing all the time. If they’re sure only they have the key, or if they can patch it out of their own planes, the risk is pretty low. Which defence analysts are you thinking of?
Nobody can point at proof it’s there, but I’d be surprised as hell if it’s not, so at least I’m not looking for extraordinary evidence.
This is a good breakdown of both the mythical nature of the killswitch claim, and the actual real concerns that we should be talking about, in regards to the US tight control over the supply of firmware updates and parts for the F-35: https://theaviationist.com/2025/03/10/f-35-kill-switch-myth/
Not a fan of speculation and we’re likely to never see any official documentation, considering it’s a military aircraft.
But I will say: If it is true, it’s probably the dumbest thing you could do to an advanced fighter like this. Just imagine that you’re in a conflict, then the enemy hacks your command and control systems and disables/hijacks all of your aircraft. Yeah, that’s pretty dumb.
Even the Star Trek writers realized this sort of thing is a bad idea.
While speculation, I don’t doubt it one bit.
It’s unlikely you’d be able to fly these without US maintenance and supplies in the first place, but even if you could, I’d trust them as much as pagers from Israel.
BAE Systems (in the UK) has full F-35 manufacturing capabilities. The Brits could tell them to toss it any day now and I wouldn’t be surprised, with the way things are going.
Just because you put kill switches in the ones you sell, doesn’t mean you’ve got to put them in your own.
But yeah, being able to remotely kill a fighter jet is incredibly stupid.
Just because you put kill switches in the ones you sell
That right there is what it is. I can almost guarantee this to be the case, as a Canadian I have always opposed the F-35’s. We need twin engine for our Arctic climates and who cares about stealth when you are defending your territory. We aren’t an aggressive country.
You care about stealth when defending your country because stealth is how you win air to air combat now.
Dogfighting is as meaningful to modern air combat as the horse and lance are to modern ground combat. Fighter planes work like submarines now; the goal is to detect and kill the enemy before they can detect and kill you. Kills happen from outside of visual range.
A defensive aircraft without advanced stealth can be shot and killed by an aggressor before they ever have the ability to target that aggressor.
To put it another way, do you think that our soldiers only wear camouflage when they’re planning a sneak attack? Do our troops wear hazard vests and strap road flares to their helmets when they’re defending a location to make sure the enemy knows exactly where they are? Or is it, in fact, always beneficial to see your enemy before they see you?
My understanding is that there’s some weird shenanigans going on with an encryption key or something of that ilk that has to be renewed daily from US servers for the aircraft to continue to function, but I’m not sure how reliable the source I got that from is. However, I wouldn’t buy F-35s either, if I were a nation-state shopping for aircraft.
If true, that could be a massive problem if communications get damaged in a conflict, even if the US is not acting maliciously.
I haven’t been able to identify the source from which I first got the information, unfortunately, but other stuff I’ve found while looking makes me think there may indeed be a comms issue: ODIN, the new software platform for these birds that’s now being put into production, is repeatedly described as “cloud-based”. That and one site’s cryptic reference to “F-35 crypto ignition keys” do not exactly inspire confidence in me. Or at least, if whatever I read first was a misinterpretation, I can kind of see where it was coming from.
That seems like just a rumour, I doubt anybody would have accepted it. The software is written exclusively in the US and proprietary, though, including every update.
And be careful with Switzerland ammo. They forbade Ukrainians to use it because of war. Literally. “You can’t use our ammunition during the war”.
Switzerland will do anything and everything possible to protect it’s neutrality, always has. If you buy weapons and or ammo from there, you kinda get what you’re asking for. They are good to use in training and that’s it
Does anyone know of a FOSS F-35 alternative?
As an average Windows user, I feel like that shouldn’t be necessary. If you don’t want your F-35s remotely disabled, just go into the system settings and disable the cockpit personalization, DoD telemetry, flight control suggestions, and especially uncheck the “Help make America safer by sending usage and crash statistics to the Pentagon” box.
Of course you also need to double check after every system update to make sure that none of these settings ended up getting patched back on without notice, but for the average pilot, it couldn’t be more user friendly.
And remember, please try to press the OK button to send Microsoft your anonymous crash analytics before your F-35 smashes into the ground.
This is why you don’t buy US.
Boeing taking a page from the John Deere playbook…
And out of curiousity… what’s to keep these other countries from swapping out the software and/or hardware that causes this? They bought it and the US can go pound sand. Am I saying it’s easy to do? No. But it’s not impossible and a far sight cheaper than buying all new planes from someone else.
The risk is the US sticking a logic bomb into a firmware update that physically breaks chips without regular updates that are signed by the US manufacturers CA.
Trust is important and frankly the US isnt very deserving of trust at the moment.
Poland, Finland and all three Baltic states are buying F-35s, which is less than ideal.
I wonder what Putin would have to offer Trump to nerf, say, Estonia’s F-35s at an opportune moment.
