Lockheed Martin must be really annoyed at the current administration. Who's going to want to put in new F35 orders now
As long as executive compensation is tied to stock performance, coorperations will only care about their stock price and the kinds of things that will affect it. I do not trust them regardless of who is in the White House. Their alignment of values/incentives is diametrically opposed to mine...
That's a double whammy for European countries who signed on to spend hundreds of billions on these planes in the belief that they're part of a NATO security umbrella. Now it seems like NATO will soon be in shambles and the planes might not even fly if that one drunk frat guy with Nazi tattoos running the Pentagon says so.
Finland bought F-35's recently, and the Finnish government is saying that nothing should change because America will hopefully be back to normal before the fighters are delivered. I don't think that kind of ostrich strategy is going to pay off.
I have hopes for BAE Tempest.
The Finnish military basically runs on the collective trauma of the last Russian invasion. There's a general conscription for male citizens, and reserve forces receive regular refresh training to keep their skills active. But you can't transform that kind of spirit into fighter planes.
Splat!
https://www.stimson.org/2024/eu-defense-this-time-might-be-d...
I can’t find the article I read earlier. But they are working toward outside alliances also for military manufacturing with Canada, the UK and Japan and are explicitly excluding any US components.
It does not appear to have sunken in that damage to the F-35 export market will affect the per-unit cost of the F-35 and its parts for the US military. Given the amounts of money involved, it seems likely a really big abandonment of F-35 overseas will do more damage to the federal budget than all the oddball firings they're doing could offset.