Depending on who you ask, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II is either the most sophisticated weapons platform ever built, or an $80 million disaster that’s too fragile for rain and its namesake lightning. What it definitely is, Dutch defense secretary Gijs Tuinman insists, is jailbreakable — “just like an iPhone.”
In an episode of the Danish podcast Boekestijn en De Wijk show, translated from Dutch by the Register, Tuinman suggested that the incredibly expensive F-35s could be maintained by European armies with or without support from the US.
“The F-35 is truly a shared product,” Tuinman told the interviewer. “The British make the Rolls-Royce engines, and the Americans simply need them too. And even if this mutual dependency doesn’t result in software updates, the F-35, in its current state, is still a better aircraft than other types of fighters.”
That being the case, he continued, “if you still want to upgrade despite everything — I’m going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway — you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone.”
Tuinman didn’t elaborate, and the Register didn’t receive any elaboration. Still, his comments reveal a fascinating anxiety between US arms manufacturers like Lockheed and European military.
Per the Register, the F-35 Lightning II gets routine software updates from Lockheed through a proprietary Automatic Logistics Information System, which pushes updates to the entire fleet every year or two. (Think of it like an expensive iOS update.)
Though European militaries might own the physical planes, the US controls the software. If Washington decides to stop sending updates — perhaps in retaliation for trade tariffs or an unfavorable deal on Greenland — there’s an implied threat that the Dutch air force will essentially be left with some very expensive bricks on the runway.
While it remains to be seen if Tuinman knows of some secret backdoor hack for the F-35, jailbreaking a world-class fighter jet is almost certainly easier said than done. Still, with fears from European countries that the US could remotely disable European fleets with a “kill switch,” it wouldn’t exactly be a bad time for the Dutch to start cracking the F-35’s codes.
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