The sophistication of the F-35 cannot be debated. But the rest of the world doesn’t trust the US anymore, so it doesn’t matter how good it is - people would gladly explore a worse product because they see it as lower risk.

That’s the reality of where America is at the moment. There are many Americans on Hacker News (if not the majority) and naturally the merits of the product that America produces are being discussed, and its superiority is front and center.

This viewpoint is not relevant to the rest of the world. We don’t want the US’ stuff anymore and the only thing that can save that relationship is full software control. If America wants to make sales it needs to adjust to that expectation, or buyers are going elsewhere.

The argument is missing the forest for the trees - the relationship is more important than the product itself. The sooner that is acknowledged the more likely a political course correction is possible. Otherwise, sure, you might see a few short term F-35 sales conclude. But the purchasing will stop as soon as it can.

The vast majority of the comments I am reading on this site are not stating this. The vast majority, even the Americans, are agreeing that this is a bad decision. Unsure where you got this from.

Meanwhile, a helicopter with an anti-radiation missile can take out CRAM, let alone a stealth F35. F35 (and F16) are the next step after helicopters: you send F35 when enemy antiair is good enough to threaten helis.

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2025/03/no-more-viable...

Sure "tech" is hard to avoid but all the rest is still a massive loss for US companies and I suppose we'll see Europe and Asia working even hard to avoid American tech dependency now.

If political change is going to happen swiftly back to something more sane, it's going to be because of poor economic policy, and right now, that's looking like a given.

The Gripen has advantages for Ukraine. It's a more rugged aircraft, with lower maintenance demands and lower operating cost. It can operate from very basic airstrips and roads. Saab boasts about this.[3] Their pitch mentions that servicing an aircraft between missions requires just one trained tech assisted by five other workers. The USAF likes to operate from big, well-equipped, secure air bases, and US aircraft tend to be designed for that environment.

The US has, in the past, tried to discourage other countries from buying the Gripen, to protect US manufacturers. That sales advantage just disappeared.

[1] https://min.news/en/military/a409faa4bc530b328f75ed6ccff23b7...

[2] https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/03/04/saab-ceo-pushes-for-s...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyD0liioY8E

I suppose any afterburning turbofan engine will do if it fits? Again, not particularly opinionated. Just get out from under US control using the path of least resistance.

The Chinese have been trying for years to reverse engineer older Russian turbofan engines and still can't get them quite right. And those are a level below the F414 in complexity.

Shouldn't be to hard for Europe to make the required pylons for the planes who don't have the ECIPS and for those that do, some of them might already have CJS installed.

It's a problem for sure, but it's a manageable one.

> But the Russian air force could sidestep the jamming by reprogramming their radars to operate at slightly different frequencies. Under Biden, the USAF team might’ve kept pace with Russian adaptation by constantly adjusting the AN/ALQ-131s own frequencies. Under Trump, Ukrainian airmen are stuck with pods whose programming may soon be out of date.

Some people were asked why this got flagged, by I think there's some justification for that given the fact that it's a misleading headline for an article editorializing another article, and that most people here used it as a jumping off point to talk about politics and not what was actually being discussed.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...

> U.S. President Donald Trump has halted U.S. aid to Ukraine, including vital support for the F-16s’ radar jammers.

> That could deprive the Ukrainian air force of its most important aerial countermeasures at a critical moment

That does sound really bad, I think.

Can’t the Ukrainees (?) reverse engineer the update format and make their own on the down-low?

Yes, I'm talking about the totalitarian governments of China and Russia.

https://news.liga.net/en/politics/news/china-appalled-by-tru...

China has been mostly concerned about economic links with other countries and it has few oversea bases comparing to any of the other 4 big dogs.

It doesn't have the mindset to be a region police, let alone a world one.

Let's all be honest here. At the end of the day, what China wants is for everyone to shut the F up and buy a big screen TV.

Preferably on credit.

Anything that moves the world towards that goal will receive China's tacit support. Trump's moves are seen to move the world away from that goal, so we're seeing some signs of discomfort coming from China.

But believe me, it ain't because they're concerned about Ukraine or freedom or "ideals". Or even because they do or do not want to be world police.

We can't think about their goals in Western terms because the fundamentals of the thinking are just completely different.

The statement of the named Chinese official is either a psyop, or he is, in the parlance of intelligence agencies, "going native". I'm leaning towards the former hypothesis.

Or more likley China wants to sell to people, and thats hard if they are in a trade war, and spending money on a crash re-militarisation drive.

It also serves China well to be on the side of the EU as they can mop up some of the trade thats being destroyed by the USA.

I'm only discussing Trump's behaviour and its effect on totalitarian governments, I don't have enough knowledge to discuss the rest of what you wrote.

I think the recent series of Trump's actions against Ukraine have failed to send a message to totalitarian governments that matches his own words. This has nothing to do with how much of the population Trump rules.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/

China: 1,419,320,000

Russia: 144,820,000

World: 8,005,176,000

Russia + China = ~1.56 billion

(Russia + China) / World = 0.195 aka 20% or 1/5 of the world population

You can flag here, but the mainstream press has picked up the issue:

"Can the US switch off Europe’s weapons?"

https://www.ft.com/content/1503a69e-13e4-4ee8-9d05-b9ce1f7cc...

"Such is the concern that debate has turned to whether the US maintains secret so-called kill switches that would immobilise aircraft and weapons systems. While never proven, Richard Aboulafia, managing director at consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, said: “If you postulate the existence of something that can be done with a little bit of software code, it exists.”

In practice, it may not even matter because of how already reliant advanced combat aircraft and other sophisticated weapons — such as anti-missile systems, advanced drones and early warning aircraft — are on US spare parts and software updates."

There you go, finally mainstream press and politicians are mentioning the kill switch.

Jet Fighters need a lot of maintenance, they are not like cars.

So a kill switch in software is not needed. If the US stops shipping parts, then it is only a matter of time before the Jet Fighters is an expensive paper weight.

https://www.ft.com/content/1503a69e-13e4-4ee8-9d05-b9ce1f7cc...

Selling expensive weapons that can never be used against oneself sounds like a pretty significant strategic benefit to me. Are there risks? Sure, but the US could just shrug if exposed. A kill switch seems likely.

But retracting support is the nuclear option.

Figuratively, because you can probably one do it once, so you better pick a good reason for doing it.

And literally, because small European countries do now have to consider nukes.

A more realistic outcome is that French nukes will be stationed in other European countries. But France is also not willing to give up exclusive control over those nukes, and the next French government could very well be far-right, and thus become as unreliable as the current US government. It’s a difficult situation.

I wouldn't be surprised if it happens on the fact they could share the cost between nations alone for something they've already paid for.

For other countries, the problem remains that if the UK or France government turns far-right, the other countries may quickly be on their own again, just like what they now fear with the US.

An EU-level control over the nukes seems unlikely, as France (and even more the UK) want to retain their sovereignty over that.

The UK lacks an independant warhead delivery system since the cancellation of the Blue Streak in 1960, and currently uses US missiles for the UK submarines.

The UK was the first country to start a nuclear weapons programme and talked the US into starting the Manhatten project.

Once subsumed by the US project, the UK started again post WWII and developed warheads and bombs tested in Australia. They managed to dust a future UK prime minister with fallout as a child in Adelaide.

It wouldn't be all that surprising to see Poland and Finland doing atmospheric tests in the next few months. Given that Ukraine gave up their weapons for a totally vacuous security guarantee it would make sense for them to build bombs too. 2025 could be the year of global nuclear proliferation.

In fact, while most nuclear powers have dabbled in the idea of 'how could we conceal a nuclear test', it seems that only Israel is capable of doing it. That is an argument from the absence of evidence unfortunately.

Only because the US decided to officially look the other way. See "The Vela incident" which was never publicly attributed, but was almost certainly a joint Israel-South Africa test.

Given the sensitivity of global seismometers, I don't think this is physically possible.

Maybe you could test one on the far side of the moon? :)

"US support to maintain UK's nuclear arsenal is in doubt (theguardian.com)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43299011

The UK has produced its own nuclear weapons in the past and has weapons grade processing at Sellafield. There’s ~140 metric tons of separated plutonium stored there.

It is apparently enough material to build tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Not every warhead has to be a billion megatons to be a deterrent.

[1] https://archive.is/Qz2lI

Personally I think the reason the US got strong, especially economically, is because of stability, rule of law, global trade and economy of scale due to large enough population. Not because of specific incidents of screwing someone.

Every other country was either recovering from being a colony, or not as far along industrially as US

This is the wrong view. The US got strong because it was able to convert its considerable industrial might to wartime footing within a very short timespan (which was frankly an incredible undertaking), and also because its geographic isolation allowed it to focus almost fully on offense.

(WWII^W) The US has had free reign to screw with dozens of countries since the end of WWII. And they did. But it wasn’t your[1] country so then it doesn’t count. Which is high school clique logic.

[1] Except if you were a politically active left-wing organizer post-WWII. Then the US and government-backed groups in Europe could have screwed with you through Operation Gladio, for example in Italy.[2]

[2] This is just an example. And I’m not terribly educated on the matter. I can’t learn about this by watching the tellie. So it takes more effort than the stupor that a slogan like 100 years of building trust hints at.

The biggest empire in the world paid for the US to re-tool its economy to produce arms for them. Later on the USA provided loans to continue that expansion.

Then Japan entered the war and it got personal.

Sure bretton-woods was a humiliation, but the Marshall plan was there to stop those humiliated allies from going communist.

In the very Forbes article the OP's article cites it links to info about this F-16 reprogramming effort[1], showing it was collaboration between the US/Norway/Denmark and that the US electronic warfare team wasn't familiar with the system, yet within two weeks they say they managed to reprogram them to meet the initial deadline.

> The 68th EWS assembled a dedicated team comprised of a mixture of seasoned experts and bright, young engineers to approach the reprograming challenge. Their first task was to understand the unfamiliar EW system and how to reprogram it.

> Relying on data provided by Denmark and Norway, then adapting new processes and approaches to the usual process, the team was able to understand the system and start their work.

> After understanding the system, the 68th EWS deviated again from normal methods and sent its members overseas to a partner-nation lab to collaboratively develop and test the system alongside coalition teammates.

[1] https://www.dvidshub.net/news/479401/dominate-spectrum-350th...

I am really amazed there are still almost half of the people able to twist reality to defend what is a direct attack against their own personal interests (they have proven already that other's interests do not matter for them). This sounds like self-flagellation seen from the outside.

Especially now that the U.S. government is also talking about not living up to its NATO obligations.

This is not gonna hurt the rest of the world. Defense is where the U.S. exports a lot. So cutting back on U.S. weaponry will only help other nations.

The same is true of Tech. Currently the tech industry is global, but expect it to become increasingly national. Considering this is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries in the U.S. and one of its biggest exports, again, this is only gonna hurt thenUS economy.

And the US’s dominance in this space is so high the rest of the world will simply push for open source at no loss to their own economies, since it’s only the US’s profit making will be hurt.

AWS, GCP and Azure looked unbeatable a month ago

but today, if you're a government official in the UK, Poland or Germany, would you be recommending AWS as your cloud provider?

absolutely not

they now have massive geopolitical risks associated with them due to being under the control of the increasingly unstable and authoritarian US regime that will sacrifice 80 years of foreign policy and soft power for a soundbite on fox news

They don't. Sovereign cloud in EU has been progressing for a few years now.

Such that some of your mentioned "unbeatable" hyperscalers have already been positioning (e.g. ceasable infrastructure), and some interesting new players on the block. As well as old benefiting from the related market positions: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/eu-sovereign-cloud/

they are not sovereign because they're running software developed by a company liable to coercion by the regime

Doesn't matter if it is a EU subsidiary. The US parent company must abide by US law and give US authorities the data.

EU citizens cannot trust their data in the hands of US companies. No matter if it is on servers in Europe hosted by European subsidiaries.

So the US legal system can say "give us this data" but they don't have access as they are on another company's servers in another company's data center operated by another company's staff.

US institutions don't hesitate to demand their companies to implement secret backdoors in their hardware or software, as evidenced by Snowden's leaks (for Cisco routers) and the Lavabit shutdown (mail company ordered to implement a tap on their clients' data).

Sure, you can have all you described, but how are updates vetted?

The EU should really fight these illegal circumventions

Unfortunately critical infrastructure providers flock to that, though there are some exceptions.

I think you underestimate what a capitalist system can accomplish, and how quickly.

It's a cute little badge that does very very little to address the real concerns.

Just last month, I had to change my dedicated server provider and was genuinely concerned about hosting my websites on US-based entities. Would Trump impose a tariff to antagonize my country and president? I don't have the resources to keep changing providers and migrating my services.

I ended up hosting locally.

It's even more absurd to suggest that this can be done in response to the US becoming more hostile than they are today. By the time they are more hostile, we're talking about open hostilities. It's only safe to assume that they will have exfiltrated all the data they are interested in, and then sabotaged or destroy as much of the hardware as possible (as can be done remotely), making the data center next to worthless. And prior to nationalization it was "their data-center", they were entirely within their "rights" to sabotage and destroy it.

The time to migrate away from data-centers to minimize geo political risk is now, not when the current data centers operators are actively trying to deal damage.

I have not looked at the US-EU agreement.

You don't need an agreement.

Tthe EU commission has tried to create schemes bypassing the issue, and twice they were dismantled by the EU supreme court.

To obey local laws

The USA is going "unlawful", so the risks are technical and real. Local laws do not apply

But long before that, I believe there will be other noticeable effects. As someone working in a medium sized European company, with substantial investments across private infrastructures, AWS, GCP and some Azure, I can testify to that since last couple of weeks the Public Cloud Exit strategies around having services being prepared is a very hot topic. This concerns both existing services preparations as well as enforcing standards and configurations for new services.

The reserve status is overblown. The question is if not the USD what asset would reserves go into. Certainly not the yuan with china's currency controls.

the enemy will never put you into a position where the rational thing to do is to launch your nukes (nationalise their data centres)

but they will push and push up against that line

the way to deal with this is gradual decoupling, ideally backed up by legislation and government subsidy

I see the point. But I would not underestimate the grit of Europeans when backed into a corner, like this

The USA a Europe had very friendly relations for decades, that has changed overnight.

All bets are off

Maybe Europe should open source a fighter jet and let the world compete on how they'll manufacture it.

The ability to scale advanced or exotic materials science at will was a cornerstone of why US weaponry is difficult to copy. People always underestimate this aspect but it is a major reason why manufacturing of state-of-the-art hardware is not fungible.

Heck, even Italian Agusta sold some of their platforms to a NATO ally with build/iterate/export permissions...

I'll not be able to leave some companies outright, but I'll be taking backups and reducing my reliance fast.

Now there are new ideas getting pushed (through influencers like Musk): that Ukraine "should be sanctioned", that Ukraine "should give their minerals to the US", that Ukraine "should give up their lands", that Zelensky "should resign" and finally that "US should leave NATO".

With such allies, you don't really need enemies.

https://www.abhafoundation.org/assets/books/html/1984/24.htm...

https://reddit.com/comments/j6z8eh

In fact, we discussed how the whole idea of an USA ex-president calling up a personal militia, trying a coup that could reboot a civil war, giving up half way, and not ending up in jail or even politically castrated was garbage fiction until 5 jan 2021.

Modern Russia resembles the USSR in some respects: oppressive government, not particularly wealthy, over-militarized. But it’s definitely not communist.

If freedom and democracy is your thing then that part doesn’t matter. But if your thing is anti-leftism, conservative morality, militarism, powerful rulers, and white people, modern Russia looks pretty good.

EDIT: more seriously, though, throughout the 20th century America hewed much closer to fascism than communism. It's always been there, if not always out in the open.

Communism had an internationalist phase but that was over by the middle of the cold war. It started as an ideal, then become a way to rationalize the USSR's grip on the East, then it died out as countries started to realize they would be better off with the other bloc.

Edit: of course communism had more ideals than internationalism. For example it did not include the authoritarianism part. However they disappeared after it was implemented as a way to rule a country and were replaced by the means that allowed the ruling group to stay in power.

By the 2008 attack on Georgia it was clear that there is no democratisation of Russia, but some people didn't want to believe it for a long time, not even after 2014 attack on Ukraine.

But as Russia started to regain strength in the early 2000s, they specifically aimed for positive relations with the US, but also were not happy with a Germany style relationship and wanted to be treated as equals. This led to us doubling down on hostilities towards them. But this deterioration of relations inevitably led to where we are today, but fortunately not where we could have ended up - which is in the nuclear wasteland that was briefly called WW3.

This also ties right back in to Georgia. Back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit the US was openly encouraging and supportive of Georgia's efforts to join NATO. France and Germany were strongly opposed to such, arguing that such a move would needlessly provoke Russia, but we aimed to move ahead with it anyhow. The Georgia-Russia war would start a few months later.

[1] - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/us-russia-putin-re...

I don't know which is more wrong, the broad claim here or the claim that you are a liberal.

I mean, what you describe was generally the case...but between the fall of the USSR and the start of the new US-Russia Cold War around 1998-1999, with the belief that Russia was on a path that, while rocky, led to Western-friendly democracy with the right support.

From 1999-2014 (but generally declining through that period) engagement was viewed as useful, in part because Russia’s hostile turn was seen by some as curable with reassurance, but more because Russia was seen as a generally hostile generally but having useful alignments of interest in some parts of the world.

But by a decade ago, 2015? “Normalizing relations with Russia and disengaging with the rest of the world militarily” was certainly not a common, much less the dominant, American liberal position on foreign policy.

And then the coalition of the willing invaded Iraq[1], again, against Russia's protests, and by that point, that's like two countries attacked (one invaded and occupied) by NATO/most of its members, and you'd have to be an idiot to look at that and not notice that it shifted from a purely defensive alliance to an offensive one. [2]

Putin isn't an idiot, he looks at this and starts surrounding himself with buffer states, through both soft and hard power. Unfortunately, soft power isn't working out great in this, for various reasons.

---

[1] It's weird how when you mention Iraq in isolation, people think it's indefensible, but when you mention it in the context of Russian anxieties, all of a sudden, we are all bending over backwards to explain how it was perfectly justified, and it wasn't unprovoked aggression against an uninvolved country.

[2] It's been 14 years since NATO attacked a country, though (Libya in 2011 - if you squint hard enough, Syria might not count), so I guess we could once again reframe it as a defensive alliance. [3]

[3] It the US continues on it's insane trajectory and withdraws, it will definitely become a defensive alliance, simply because it will lack the ability to project power.

Wat? I’ve never heard anything like that. I’ve heard people try to justify it on the basis of believing the WMD lie or removing Saddam from power, but Russia is never even mentioned in this context.

All Europe has to do is stop all local support for US bases and force all resupply to be done via the US military and the bases existing infra, not via ANY civilian infrastructure (no civilian airports, no civilian trucking, no civilian shipping). That's just one pain point in the USAs soft underbelly that we didn't have to worry about before because we had allies.

US power in Europe has been our intentional policy since the end of WW2. I can't do justice in educating you on the geopolitics of it all but there is a plethora of information out there for you. Not sure how an American can get to be an adult without understanding the background and reasoning.

We did this to the point of encouraging Germany to include limitations on their own power in their constitution (along with Japan). Anyways it's a long, thought out standing position of our country that has 70 years of thought put into it versus the recent 'but it's not fair to us' MAGA reaction based position.