Deep Dive
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Tom Noonan and Alex Dibble. Europe's long been reliant on the US for its defence in terms of troop numbers, intelligence and hardware.
But as NATO allies try to rearm in response to Donald Trump's threats, German media has discovered Germany's advanced F-35 jets could be grounded against its will, not by its enemies, but by the United States. Given a number of America's allies have bought the jets, how seriously could this hamstring Europe's attempts to defend itself against Russia or any other enemy in future if the relationship with the US doesn't improve?
And is there anything Europe can do about it? Our guest today is The Times' Berlin correspondent, Oliver Moody. Oliver, just talk us through how the US would stop F-35s flying. Because it's not as though there's a kill switch, is there? And planes are just going to drop out of the sky suddenly. What we are talking about here is two slightly different things. The first of which is this deep suspicion among many of the European allies that have bought the F-35 or ordered it.
that the US doesn't need a kill switch, that it can simply cut off the spare parts and the software updates to the F-35s, much as it did with things like the targeting systems on the HIMARS rocket launchers in Ukraine, and that that would sufficiently compromise the F-35s to make them effectively unusable or to seriously jeopardise their combat effectiveness. And the second thing is that, according to Stern Magazine's
assessment of the previously very, very strictly classified German contract ordering 35 F-35 Lightning IIs from America. The US has reserved the right to veto
any sortie that it feels might compromise American national interests. And that doesn't have to involve a kill switch. That could simply be a kind of political process where Washington says, you do not have our authorisation for this mission. And can you just give us an example of how that might actually happen? Yeah. One of the scenarios that has caused me a lot of lost sleep is
is one where the US and Russia strike some kind of deal along the lines that Putin demanded at the end of 2021 that would involve the withdrawal of American forces behind what were previously NATO's borders before 1997.
which means Poland, or at least large parts of Poland, certainly all three of the Baltic states and other parts of the eastern flank are left without an American forward presence. And then Russia tries to exploit that sort of not exactly a vacuum, but certainly that weakened security position for the frontline states,
And the Americans say, well, hold on, don't make any sudden moves, because if you do, you saw what happened to the Ukrainians when they crossed us. And you wouldn't want all of your rocket launchers and your intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance systems to suddenly crash.
go blind, would you? And that would be potentially a very powerful tool of leverage. And I know from conversations with various European officials that although they're very reluctant to admit to this kind of thing publicly, it is something that is exercising their minds too. Why is this clause in the contract, Oliver? Why isn't it just a case that, you know, the US builds the kit, the Germans pay the money, and then they get full ownership of it?
In this particular case, it's possible that the US has imposed particularly strict conditions on Germany because the point of these F-35s is that they are there to carry American nuclear bombs that are stationed on German soil if there's a crisis. So you can understand, in a sense, why the Pentagon is so sensitive about how these jets might be used.
But more broadly, the reason why there appears to be so many restrictions on how allies can use the F-35 and in particular things like how they can inspect the codes and how they have to bring in American technicians to service the jets.
is that they are basically computers with wings. And aside from the kind of virtues of the airframe, it's the software that really makes the F-35 in particular, you know, the kind of radar systems and the electronic warfare modules. And you can definitely see why the US would be protective about that and why it wouldn't let just any ally do whatever it wanted with that code.
Obviously, this contract is specific to Germany, but there's a number of other countries which have bought F-35 jets. Isn't that right? That's correct. There are, I think, about 20 countries that have bought or ordered F-35s so far. And they are mostly but not exclusively NATO allies. So you also have countries like Japan, Australia, Korea on the list of customers. Some of them
in the light of what happened in Ukraine, are expressing publicly very serious reservations about whether they still want to buy the F-35s to fulfill their orders. So the particular cases that have been very public recently have been Canada, which is currently subject to threats of an American invasion.
And Portugal, where the government has just collapsed and which is facing a snap election. So there are kind of special political circumstances in each case. But they are far from the only allies that are kind of privately very worried about how all of this fantastically sophisticated American kit they bought might be a security vulnerability in extremis.
So if Europe or other allies, for that matter, start to see F-35s as a security vulnerability, as you say, what can they actually do about it? Are European defence companies in a position where they can actually compete with the US and build something similar to an F-35, for example? It's a really, really good question. If you are a European government that is sitting on an order for F-35s and is thinking about cancelling it or wondering whether to order them in the future,
You have to ask yourself, OK, if I don't trust the Americans, then what are my realistic alternatives? Because the F-35 is pretty much the only fifth generation fighter jet on the market. They could reach for less sophisticated alternatives such as the French Rafale or the kind of multinational European fighter.
Eurofighter but those are older jets with lower performance specifications on the whole
However, there are very serious concerns in the American defense industry that this unpredictability is a kind of serious drag on their ability to sell things in future to the Europeans, especially if those things are very dependent on software updates. So there's definitely a sense in which this has really kind of put the willies up everyone.
And people will certainly be thinking twice about ordering American kit, but whether that will stop them from ordering American kit entirely, I very much doubt.
And Oliver, how much are these concerns down to Donald Trump? These contracts were presumably there before Trump was elected and they've been negotiated under other administrations. But it's only now that this is making the headlines. So do you think this would be worrying the US's allies if it wasn't for how Trump has shifted US policy since January?
I don't think this would be a significant problem were it not for the steps that we have seen the Trump administration take over the past couple of months because the entire setup of NATO and we're not just talking the purchases of American armaments here we're also talking how the alliance processes military intelligence and where that intelligence comes from and it's
command structures which are overwhelmingly reliant on high-ranking American officers. And that entire edifice is built on 75 years' worth of hard-won trust that the US has a deeply founded belief that Europe's security interests are its security interests too. And what Trump has done is
is effectively not just cast grave doubt on that premise, but also given indications that the US is in some fields hostile towards Europe. And that has raised the question, which is extremely awkward and which I haven't yet seen any European leader grapple with seriously in public,
of how on earth you could start to disentangle the American presence from these structures if you wanted to. And I think in the intelligence and command and control systems, that is, if anything, an even deeper problem than it is in relation to weaponry.
Oliver, thank you. That is Oliver Moody, The Times Berlin correspondent. Today, J.D. Vance and his wife are visiting Greenland as he and Donald Trump keep putting pressure on Denmark to give the US control over the island. Yesterday, we looked at that visit specifically about why minerals buried on the world's biggest island are such a big part of Trump's demands and how it fits into his minerals deal with Ukraine.
The episode is called The Fight for Rare Earths is Defining the World. Do go back and have a listen to that. That's it from us today, though. Thank you for taking ten minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.
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