But will the US renege on the supply of spare parts?
Will it tear up existing deals and say 'accept the new terms or your planes won't fly'?
Will it tear up existing deals and say 'accept the new terms or your planes won't fly'?
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.
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 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.
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.