Not only cloud, but the entire defense industry that was hibernating for the past 70 years, for you know good reasons.
All of these nice F35s made in USA, will soon have no buyers except the USA itself.
All of these nice F35s made in USA, will soon have no buyers except the USA itself.
It is this generation's F-16, many thousands will be built and sold.
Will it tear up existing deals and say 'accept the new terms or your planes won't fly'?
Why today would one spend $100M on 1 equipment unit when you can pump instead $100M and get 10M unstoppable drones?
What drones are you going to get for $10 each (now or in the future)? How are they “unstoppable”? How are you going to deploy millions of $10 drones on the battlefield without tons of $100M platforms that can survive AA defenses long enough to get to the engagement? How much range do you think $10 of batteries even gets you?
That is without me manufacturing any of the components. If one had a nation state backing I am confident it can be done for a fraction of it.
They are unstoppable because if you have a tank and there is a swarm of 500 of them what do you aim? One of them will find the opening to drop the grenade on your tanks weak spot. These are all single use kamikaze drones.
Same for battery range. Europe is preparing for a defensive war on their land. Even 10 miles of ranges should suffice. You can always deploy them from a mothership.
And you’re entirely ignoring the very real problem of the mothership which has to survive to get within ten miles of the battlefield, unless you’re planning on releasing them from box trucks which means their range will either be useless or they’ll get taken out by bigger, more expensive loitering drones the second they’re spotted. War is antagonistic co-evolution in its purest form, these naive solutions dont last very long which is why our weapons cost so much (for everyone, not just the west).
I totally agree with you that drone swarms is not a silver bullet, and likely some effective adversarial strategy will be developed(jamming, attacking motherships etc), but the point is that airplanes are not as important as they were in the past. Ukraine is still standing with no real air presence.
The main point of conflict is that the US holds the source code for the advanced software systems very closely, no partner country has access. A lot of the differentiated and exotic capabilities of the F-35 that make it attractive to other countries are in the software, everyone recognizes this. There are many algorithms and techniques that rely on classified computer science to deliver qualitative advantages. Even if other countries could replicate the hardware, without replicating the software anything they built would be a pale shadow of the F-35 in terms of capability, which makes alternative hardware much less compelling.
The US knows all the leverage is in the software, so that is the part they strictly control. It is yet another case of the software eating the world, military systems edition.
I suspect that by the time anyone was able to successfully reverse engineer it, it would be semi-obsolete, which limits the value in doing so. Playing catch-up requires taking a lot of aggressive R&D risks that European governments have traditionally been very uncomfortable with or which take far too long to execute.
Maybe the source code also contains a secret kill switch? I'd definitely put one in if I was selling fighter planes to 3rd parties. Alliances can switch overnight, as we're seeing right now.
IIRC the French refused to give the UK the means to disable Argentina's Exocets during the Falklands War.
I think European alternatives for F35 are obviously needed.
Given that for today's election here in Germany actual problems barely played a role. Not just that, over the last two decades very little was done. For example, we have skyrocketing rents due to a general lack of housing, which leads to all kinds of problems apart from affordability. For example worker mobility. Who dares to move to another job and city when it's so hard to find a flat?
That's par for the course for almost all big problems.
I think the probability is high that the new German government is going to try to sit this one out. After all, they survived Trump the last time, and it's only four years, right? Worse, they would have to do many things that will be very unpopular with one or the other interest group.
Unless somebody puts a gun to the heads of all those in government they will procrastinate rather than make any big changes.
I see little chance that they will cancel the order for US military hardware. They might actually buy a lot more, to appease Trump. After all, not getting the F-35 would have repercussions for the nuclear sharing agreement with the US. They need the F-35 to have a certified platform for nuclear bombs they are supposed to get from the US, stored in Germany for that purpose.
That would mean they would need a European approach to nuclear weapon sharing and weapons. The German government regularly has trouble even just to work together with only France, due to wildly different philosophies and interests.
Europe is far too divided, and the German government sees its role in doing as little as possible when it comes to radical change.
I think part of it is that the leadership of all our big parties mostly consists of politicians whose whole life is just that. They don't have anything else. Even if they get a job at a company it's for their political connections. They won't risk this, and they barely have any strong opinions! They look at polls and change what they stand for accordingly and easily. I'm not saying this to sound mean, I think that this is a mostly accurate description.
Opposing the US would take spine! It's a lot of trouble and uncertainty. They will try to avoid that if at all possible.
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By the way, it's not just F-35. Germany also ordered the Israeli-American Arrow 3 long-range missile defense system, sixty CH-47 Chinook, and 380 other contracts worth 23 billion just from the "Sondervermögen" (special fund) of 100 billion. Surely that will just become more, given that Germany continues to need to purchase things like Patriot missiles.
The strategy was - to the chagrin of the French if I understood the news articles written at the time right - to rather buy something proven and quickly available from the Americans rather than start a lengthy inter-European development process.