On 9 January 2023, the Justin Trudeau government finalized an agreement with the U.S. government, Lockheed Martin, and Pratt & Whitney for the acquisition of a fleet of 88 F-35 Lightning fighter jets for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). The first CF-35A jets are due to arrive in 2026, with the fleet fully operational by the mid-2030s.
In 2023, purchasing the F-35 for the RCAF was a logical choice. By then, the United States Air Force (USAF) was using the F-35 for North American air defence, and so it made considerable sense to have the RCAF fly the same plane as part of Canada’s contribution to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), particularly since the F-35 is a highly network-centric aircraft, and the only Western fifth-generation stealth fighter available to Canada.
Moreover, for nearly thirty years Canada had been part of a multinational partnership with Lockheed Martin for the development and production of the F-35. This unique and innovative partnership featured three levels of contributors to the program. The United Kingdom is the sole “level 1” partner, contributing more than $2.5 billion. Italy and the Netherlands are “level 2” partners. There are five “level 3” partners: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Türkiye. Israel and Singapore have been added as “security cooperative participants.” In addition, the following countries are buying the F-35: Belgium, Czechia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Japan, Poland, Romania, South Korea, and Switzerland.
In an era when the United States was heavily invested in the maintenance of an American-led, Western-dominated rules-based international order, friends and allies of the United States had few qualms about participating in a defence procurement program that would not only provide their air forces with the latest military technology, but would also provide their individual defence industrial bases with an opportunity to contribute to the production of what was in essence a global jet fighter with production lines that stretched decades into the future.
But what does participation in this program look like:
- When the United States president no longer has any desire to provide the kind of global leadership of the kind that every American administration from 1945 to 2017 — and from 2021 to 2025 — sought to provide?
- When the United States is led by a president who has unambiguously abandoned the long-standing American commitment to European security through Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949?
- When the United States openly sides with the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin on the Russian efforts to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign state and the Ukrainian people as a separate nation?
- When the president of the United States openly threatens a NATO ally — the Kingdom of Denmark — with punishment if it refused to cede one of the territories that make up the kingdom — Greenland — to the United States?
- When the president of the United States talking about Canada sounds exactly like Putin talking about Ukraine — questioning the “viability” of a neighbouring sovereign state, suggesting that the “artificially-drawn border” be erased, and then bludgeoning Canadians with tariffs in an effort to annex Canada by destroying the Canadian economy?
- When the president of the United States demonstrates that treaties mean nothing by openly violating an international treaty that he himself signed, and sneering at the idea that the United States should be bound by rules agreed to with other states?
The short answer is that recent changes in American geostrategic policy mean that whoever operates the heavily computerized and networked F-35 must always worry about an often-taken-for-granted aspect of modern life: software updates. For the United States government has, from the very beginning of this multinational program, always insisted on maintaining exceedingly tight control over the millions of lines of source code that provide the F-35 with its superior military capabilities. Not even the British — a prized level 1 partner — were able to persuade the administration of George W. Bush to allow them the ability to operate their F-35 fleet autonomously from the United States. After Bush’s initial rebuff, the partners, participants, and operators all just went along with the supreme vulnerability and dependence built into the system, no doubt working on the assumption that the United States would never openly turn on its allies and friends.
In the few months since the election of Donald J. Trump, however, that turning has now occurred. The result is that all of those countries that operate the F-35 have to worry that any time that Trump wished, he could refuse to allow software updates to be uploaded to any F-35 he identified. In a stroke, he could render entire fleets of foreign-operated F-35s seriously compromised.
Is that a reason for those countries like Canada that have embraced the F-35 to cancel their participation in the program, as some have suggested?
In my view, cancellation would be a poor option — at least at this point. First, the sunk costs would be huge, since Canada has spent more than twenty years trying to replace its aging fleet of CF-18s — acquired in the early 1980s by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Second, cancellation would trigger stiff penalties. Third, cancellation would bring to an end Canadian participation in the production of the F-35, with considerable costs to the defence industry in Canada, which is estimated to be worth $425 million annually and to generate 3,300 jobs annually over the next twenty-five years.
Finally, even though Canada now faces an existential threat from the United States president, it would be unwise to mirror Trump’s burn-it-all-down tactics. It may well be that the Trump administration will eventually burn NORAD down, but in the meantime, it would be in Canada’s interests to continue contributing in an inertial way to North American air defence — even if Trump has no idea what form that contribution actually takes.
However, this is not to suggest that Canada should ignore the obvious hazard that flying a fleet of fighter jets controlled by a hostile power poses. Rather, Canada should consider calling a meeting of the nineteen non-U.S. operators of the F-35 to discuss a common response to the vulnerabilities created by the geostrategic turn of the Trump administration, including the possibility of working on an alternative source code should the Department of Defense in Washington be ordered by the president to disable some or all of the non-U.S. F-35 fleets.
In addition, the prime minister should, after the next election, subject Canada’s foreign and defence policy to a full-scale reassessment to take account of the radical shift in American global policy that has taken place under Trump.
One of the questions on the table for Canadian defence policy in the decade ahead should be whether we actually need such a large fleet of 88 F-35s. Perhaps we should rethink our commitment to a fleet of a single fighter aircraft, and consider instead the possibility of flying two different fighter jets in the 2020s and 2030s. Why not reduce the size of the F-35 fleet to whatever would be required to fulfill our responsibilities under NORAD? If a hostile administration in Washington were to decide to compromise the RCAF fleet by refusing to provide software updates (or to permit stealth recoating, or interfering with spare parts or training regimens), the negative impact would be limited to NORAD operations.
Reducing the number of F-35s would allow us to acquire a fleet of Saab Gripen Es, which would provide a range of fourth-generation fighter capabilities, including effective Arctic operations or overseas engagements. And while there would be penalties for downsizing the F-35 purchase agreed to in 2023, Canada would still be involved in the Lockheed Martin production partnership. Moreover, Saab has promised that the Gripen fleet would be built in Canada, adding to Canada’s defence industrial base.
It is true that the costs of two different types of fighter jets — acquisition, recruiting, training, and maintenance — would be huge. But if we Canadians are serious about maintaining our independence in the might-makes-right, spheres-of-influence, mob-boss world that is emerging as the post-American global order, we are going to have to spend far more on defence than we were used to during the post–Cold War era.
Kim Richard Nossal 