European military warns F-35 combat power depends on US-controlled software and sustainment

A senior European military official has compared Lockheed Martin’s F-35 to an $80 million iPhone: impressive hardware that ultimately runs on someone else’s software, and therefore someone else’s permission structure.

Futurism, citing reporting aggregated by DNyuz, relays the official’s claim that F-35s “can be jailbroken” — a deliberately provocative way to describe a real and long-running issue: the aircraft is not merely a fighter jet but a licensed ecosystem. The United States — through Lockheed Martin and the broader US defense bureaucracy — controls key elements of the jet’s software stack, update cadence, diagnostics, and sustainment pipeline. That means Washington doesn’t need to seize your aircraft to influence its combat value; it can shape the availability of mission data, maintenance authorization, and software functionality that keeps the platform credible.

This is vendor lock-in at the scale of national defense. The F-35’s sustainment model depends on centralized logistics, proprietary components, and networked maintenance systems (historically ALIS, now transitioning to ODIN). Even when allies “own” the airframes, they often rent the ability to keep them current, interoperable, and fully mission-capable.

The sovereignty implications are not theoretical. If your operational readiness depends on regular updates, parts flows, and remote diagnostics, then your foreign policy inherits a quiet constraint: don’t pick a fight with the supplier. Export controls and end-use restrictions already formalize this logic, but software-defined weapons make it continuous rather than episodic.

European governments have spent years talking about “strategic autonomy” while buying a platform whose core advantage is also its leash: deep integration with US systems, intelligence workflows, and supply chains. The same networked architecture marketed as coalition-strengthening can also become a single point of political failure — or, in less dramatic terms, a bureaucratic throttle.

Calls for a “right to repair” usually target tractors and smartphones. The F-35 debate suggests the concept may belong in defense procurement too: if states insist on buying software-defined weapons, they may need enforceable rights to audit, maintain, and modify the code paths that determine whether those weapons work when politics gets inconvenient.