In response to recent European media reports, Lockheed Martin and several governments have pushed back on the idea that F-35 Joint Strike Fighters have any kind of a discreet ‘kill switch’ that U.S. authorities could use to remotely disable the jets. The stark reality is that a dedicated kill switch is not needed to keep foreign F-35s from being able to perform what they were designed to do. Just cutting off support to the jets would accomplish the same result, albeit maybe not instantly, but soon enough.
Without access to American-controlled maintenance and logistics chains, as well as computer networks, any F-35 fleet would quickly start to become unusable and any jets that remain flying for a truncated period of time would only be able to do so with massively degraded capabilities.
Claims that the Joint Strike Fighter has a remote disabling feature are not new but have resurfaced following the U.S. government’s abrupt decision to cut off military aid and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, and new questions surround America’s support for NATO under President Donald Trump. Outlets across Europe, including in Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have published stories touching at least in part on the possibility of an F-35 ‘kill switch’ in the past week or so. This, in turn, has prompted several official responses.
“We have no indication that this is possible,” Belgian Chief of Defence Gen. Frederik Vansina told that country’s newspaper La Dernière Heure on March 5. “The F-35 is not a remote-controlled aircraft. The program relies on worldwide logistical support, with spare parts circulating between user countries.”
“It is not possible to ‘remotely control’ or ‘block’ the F-35A fighter jets, for example by external intervention in the electronics,” according to a machine translation of a press release dated March 7 from the Swiss Department of Federal Defense. “Switzerland does not need consent if it wants to use its weapons systems or guided missiles for its own defense. It can do this autonomously, independently, and at any time.”
On March 8, manufacturer Lockheed Martin sent an email to TWZ and others about “rumors circulating that the F-35 has a ‘kill switch’ that the U.S. can activate to disable allied F-35 fleets,” which pointed to the earlier rebuttals from Swiss and Belgian authorities.
To reiterate, there is no evidence to date that F-35s in service anywhere feature some kind of dedicated capability that can be used to fully disable the jets at the literal or figurative touch of a button. What is true is that Joint Strike Fighters are subject to particularly significant U.S. export and other governmental controls. Virtually all F-35s in service worldwide are dependent in critical ways on proprietary support from the U.S. government and contractors in the United States.
“You don’t need a ‘kill switch’ to severely hamper the utility of an exported weapons system, you just stop providing support for it and it will wither away, some systems very quickly,” TWZ‘s own Tyler Rogoway wrote on X yesterday. “The more advanced the faster the degradation.”
“The F-35 was conceived, developed, and continues to be operated and sustained as a joint/coalition platform, built on strong partnerships with U.S. allies and partner nations across the globe. From its inception, the F-35 has been a collaborative effort, integrating the expertise and contributions of multiple countries to ensure it meets the operational needs of all its users,” a spokesperson for the F-35 JPO told TWZ yesterday in response to questions about U.S. authorities and procedures for disconnecting parties from aspects of the Joint Strike Fighter program. “The program operates under well-established agreements that ensure all F-35 operators have the necessary capabilities to sustain and operate their aircraft effectively. The strength of the F-35 program lies in its global partnership, and we remain committed to providing all users with the full functionality and support they require.”
What the JPO statement doesn’t explicitly mention is that, by retaining key data rights, Lockheed Martin, and to a lesser extent Pratt & Whitney, which supplies the F135 engines that power all Joint Strike Fighter variants, exercises substantial control on almost all aspects of sustaining the F-35. This includes imposing limits on what maintenance work can be done outside of contractor-operated facilities in the United States and other select countries. Many individual components on the jets, especially its ‘black boxes’ that contain critical electronics, are sealed for export control reasons and have to be sent back to designated facilities for maintenance. There is no knowledge base whatsoever to do so in the user’s country.
Even functioning as intended under peacetime conditions, the F-35 sustainment chains that exist now have had significant trouble keeping F-35s, including those in service with the U.S. military, operational. American officials have expressed fears in recent years that the current mechanisms for sourcing spare parts, regular shortages thereof, in particular, would present major operational risks in any future large-scale conflict. A lack of key spares is one of the most commonly cited contributing factors to the historically low available rates for all variants of the F-35 in U.S. service. You can read more about F-35 maintenance and logistics issues in detail in this past TWZ feature. This reinforces just how quickly the situation would deteriorate for any Joint Strike Fighter operator who might suddenly find themselves on their own without access to the tightly controlled global parts and support ecosystem.
Trying to get F-35 spare parts from alternative legitimate or ‘gray’ sources, or even via smuggling, would be extremely difficult if not impossible given the overall complexity of the jets and the very high tolerances of even the smallest components. Maintaining the Joint Strike Fighters’ critically important low-observable (stealthy) skins notably requires specialized facilities and equipment.
The still highly classified nature of much of the F-35 program would only make all of this more complicated, including the tight controls put in place on individual aircraft components. Further, “There’s certain F-35 Special Access Programs [SAP] that now our [NATO] partners are read into and they know about,” U.S. Air Force Gen. James Hecker said just last year, underscoring the level of secrecy that still exists around many elements of the Joint Strike Fighter.
SAPs provide additional heavily compartmented layers of security protocols for information that U.S. officials deem especially sensitive to national security, as you can read more about here. Hecker, who was and still is head of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa (USAFE-AFAFRICA), as well as NATO’s Allied Air Command, was speaking during a virtual talk hosted by the Air & Space Forces Association’s (AFA) Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in August 2024.
Even if an F-35 operator disconnected from the larger Joint Strike Fighter program’s supply chains can keep some number of its jets flying for a period of time through spares on hand and cannibalization, those aircraft would have extremely degraded capabilities. This is in large part due to the long-troubled Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) and its successor, the Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN), which is still in the process of being fielded.
ALIS/ODIN is a cloud-based network that is responsible for much more than just managing F-35 logistics, although that too is a critical part of keeping the aircraft flying as it talks directly to the supply and servicing networks discussed above. The system also serves as the port through which data packages containing highly sensitive mission planning information, including details about enemy air defenses and other intelligence, are developed and loaded onto Joint Strike Fighters before sorties as Mission Data Files (MDFs).
It’s this mission planning data package that is a major factor to the F-35’s survivability. The ‘blue line’ (the aircraft’s route into an enemy area) that is projected by the system is based on the fusion of a huge number of factors, from enemy air defense bubbles to the stealth and electronic warfare capabilities of the aircraft, as well as onboard sensor and weapons employment envelopes and integrated tactics between F-35s and other assets. To say the least, it is one of the F-35’s most potent weapons. Without it, the aircraft and its pilot are far less capable of maximizing their potential and, as a result, are more vulnerable to detection and being shot down.
When the jets return to base afterward, it is also the means by which intelligence and other data collected during the mission is downloaded for further analysis and exploitation. This information is mined for additional intelligence value and it can be used to update critical threat libraries that enable the F-35’s survivability. You can read more about the F-35’s electronic intelligence collection capabilities here and the importance of the ALIS/ODIN network here.
The MDFs themselves are processed through ALIS/ODIN and rely on work done in facilities located in the United States that are governed by U.S. policy.
The F-35 Partner Support Complex (PSC) “provides the capability to program, test and field F-35 Mission Data for Partner Nation and FMS [Foreign Military Sales] customers,” according to the official Air Force page on this civilian led unit, which is part of the service’s 350th Spectrum Warfare Group. “This activity is 100% funded by the supported nations, including: United Kingdom, Australia, Norway, Italy, Denmark, Netherlands, Japan, Korea, Israel, Poland and Belgium. These nations are not allowed to conduct independent test operations outside of the CONUS [continental United States] based on U.S. policy.”
In the past, TWZ has highlighted the potential danger of ALIS/ODIN being a vector for cyber attacks that could feed bad information into the network, or even disrupt or disable certain aspects of F-35 operations. Several countries have worked over the years to establish firewalls to protect sovereign data within the network, at least to a degree, underscoring the real concerns about its heavily centralized design. The idea that the U.S. could command a similar tactic if it wants to ground a country’s F-35s is interesting to ponder, but doing so would be in breach of contract and it could have dangerous implications on many levels, including to the rest of the F-35 fleet, if it is feasible.
If a country were to be disconnected from the F-35 program, American authorities might also move to block its access to other critical services like space-based communications networks. Without beyond-line-of-sight communications systems and datalinks, and the networks underpinning them, Joint Strike Fighters would suffer even greater negative operational impacts.
“On F-35 fears, I get it – there is real dependency,” Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for Airpower and Military Technology at the (RUSI) think tank in the United Kingdom, wrote on X yesterday. “But if all your targeting capacity, BLOS [beyond-line-of-sight] comms, penetrating/orbital ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and the munitions you assume you’d fight with in a war are U.S.-provided; then dependency on the U.S. for MDFs [Mission Data Files] and ALIS/ODIN for F-35 isn’t your main problem.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), rightly seeing the pitfalls of these critical and heavily intertwined dependencies, is the only F-35 operator to date to have negotiated a deal that allows it to operate its jets outside of the ALIS/ODIN network, to install domestically-developed software suites onto the aircraft, and to conduct entirely independent depot-level maintenance. As such, the Israeli F-35I, a subvariant of the F-35A model, is unlike any other Joint Strike Fighter in service elsewhere in the world. The Israelis do still need to source spare parts externally, although they appear to have supplemental access to these resources.
This all, in turn, speaks to serious broader downstream impacts a country would face in losing access to existing or future F-35 fleets. The Joint Strike Fighter offers a capable and survivable air combat platform with powerful intelligence-gathering, electronic warfare, and networking suites unlike any other currently in large-scale production. Work continues to be done to add new U.S. and foreign-made weapons to the jet’s arsenal, as well as expand its ability to serve as a flying ‘quarterback’ for future loyal wingman-type drones. A new radar, improved electronic warfare capabilities, and more, are also on the horizon as part of the Block 4 upgrade package.
For a number of America’s NATO allies, continued participation in the alliance’s nuclear weapon sharing agreement is also directly tied to the F-35. The nuclear mission played a particularly key role in Germany’s decision to acquire Joint Strike Fighters. However, this is not really relevant in the context of a country losing access to the F-35 program since the nuclear bombs in question would only ever be released from U.S. custody right before their approved use.
As it stands now, Lockheed Martin expects there to be around 600 F-35s, if not more, based just in Europe by 2035. Greece became the latest country to announce plans to buy the jets last year. The market for Joint Strike Fighters has continued to grow globally in recent years, too.
“There is no real replacement for the F-35. You would be sacrificing capability and survivability by stepping away from it. There is a whole ecosystem of capabilities provided beyond just the F-35 aircraft that would need to be established,” TWZ‘s Tyler Rogoway added in his thread on X yesterday. “So major investment would be needed and force structure alterations. Unmanned capabilities and future indigenous fighter programs can solve the capability gap potentially, but this is not in the near term. Stepping away from F-35 isn’t about just getting another fighter.”
For the United Kingdom, “a credible plan B force” that doesn’t include an F-35 “would take a decade and vast investment to generate,” RUSI’s Bronk also wrote on X. “Uncomfortable but true. Not saying it shouldn’t or can’t be done, but we need a thorough capability audit and honesty about the results as a first step.”
The United Kingdom is in the process of developing a next-generation stealth fighter, currently called the Tempest, in cooperation with Japan and Italy, both of which are also F-35 operators. Tempest is still years, if not decades, away from becoming a reality. France, Germany, and Spain are also pursuing a similar effort with a more aggressive, but still multi-year schedule. Just developing a stealth combat jet has historically proven to be a complex and costly affair, with actually getting such an aircraft into serial production presenting additional challenges.
The prospect of American authorities deciding to eject a country entirely from the F-35 program even after it has committed to buying the jets is not idle speculation, either. The U.S. government, with support from other program partners, decided to boot out Turkey in 2019 primarily over that country’s purchase of Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile systems. The Turkish Air Force was blocked from taking delivery of F-35As, as well as various parts and other ancillary equipment, that had already been paid for. Turkish companies that had been major Joint Strike Fighter subcontractors for years were also unwound from the global supply network.
There continue to be negotiations between the United States and Turkey about letting the latter back into the F-35 program. However, Turkey has also been pushing ahead with work on a domestically-developed stealth fighter, now named Kaan, which flew for the first time last year.
It is important to point out that, while the F-35 is a particularly good example of issues around foreign dependencies, many of them are not limited to the Joint Strike Fighter program. This especially so after decades of defense industry consolidation in the United States and Europe. Having to rely on a small number of sources, if not a single one, to support weapons and other systems, including networking architecture, especially tightly controlled ones like a stealth fighter, is not at all uncommon. The more advanced a system is, the faster it is likely to degrade without support that is also less likely to be truly independent of foreign sources. Some countries have taken steps to try to retain as much materiel independence as possible, with long-neutral Sweden, which is now a NATO member, being perhaps the best known example.
“Switzerland strives to achieve the greatest possible operational, technical, and logistical autonomy when procuring its weapons systems,” the Swiss Department of Federal Defense’s rebuttal to the recent ‘kill switch’ reports notes. “However, complete independence from foreign manufacturers would only be possible if the systems and their components were developed entirely in Switzerland. This is neither the case today nor is it a realistic or economically viable scenario for the future.”
For many countries in Europe, especially, interdependent defense contractor relationships with the United States often go both ways.
“We cannot ignore the level to which some of our major industries are now embedded in the U.S. and U.S. programmes – so some of the dependency is a two way street,” Greg Bagwell, president of the U.K. Air & Space Power Association and Distinguished Fellow at RUSI, as well as former Royal Air Force officer, wrote in a thread on the ‘kill switch’ issue on X yesterday. “For example, BAES [U.K.-headquartered BAE Systems] gets 42% revenue from the U.S., and only 26% from the U.K. (2023 figures).”
While the F-35 might not have an explicit ‘kill switch’ feature, the program down to its very core, at least currently, creates significant and historically worrisome dependencies for the majority of Joint Strike Fighter operators. The aircraft requires constant support from a supply chain and just-in-time logistics concept that already has raised massive concerns. So many of its key features being tied to ALIS/ODIN only exacerbate these concerns. But really, the F-35 is just the proverbial canary in the geopolitical coal mine.
With the current trajectory of U.S. government policy toward Ukraine and NATO, real worries about future support for American-made systems are only likely to grow, and there is a real possibility that U.S. arms exports to Europe could shrink as a result.
Howard Altman contributed to this story.
Contact the author: joe@twz.com