According to US Ambassador Hoekstra, if Canada doesn’t buy the full fleet of F-35s, “that will affect NORAD”.   Coming from the Trump regime, this is another mafia-esque threat that boils down to “do as we tell you, or else”.  

Hoekstra might think that yammering on about NORAD, interoperability, and how the F-35 is “the superior aircraft” is some kind of sales flex.  It’s actually telling us all that buying the F-35 is ultimately going to be a huge mistake for Canada. 

Every second day, the US is threatening to annex Canada, and as our European friends just learned in the dust-up over Greenland – a deal with Trump made today isn’t worth the paper it’s written on tomorrow. Why would Canada think we’d be treated any differently if we bought the F-35? 

If I was a defence planner for Canada (I’m not), I’d be looking at the current situation and saying to myself “why would Canada buy a major military asset from a country that is threatening to invade us?”.  

The F-35 is very much a “closed, proprietary platform”.  What assurances do we have that any planes sent to Canada don’t have a “kill switch” buried in their software that Washington can use at will? Fundamentally, there are no such guarantees, and that has been a concern about the F-35 in my mind for a very long time.  

Then there is the servicing of the F-35 itself.  Need parts for the F-35?  Buy it from Lockheed-Martin (now a division of Boeing) … need major service?  Well that plane now has to be shipped to facilities in the US.  Software updates?  Oh yeah – that’s a thing, and those will also have to be installed in US facilities.  Starting to see a problem here, when the US has decided that we’re the adversary?  

Hoekstra wants to talk about the F-35 as the “superior aircraft”.  Maybe the F-35 is on some levels a “better” aircraft technologically than its rivals – but when the country selling it can so easily turn a fleet of F-35s into “Tarmac Princesses” by choking off parts supply, or by leaving booby traps in the software that enables these craft to fly, technical superiority takes a back seat to “actually flies”.

If I were making the buying decisions for Canada’s military, I’d be looking at the ground game as it looks today, not how it looked prior to 2016.  The ground game today is very different.  The US has shown itself to be not merely an adversarial nation, but it is one where an agreement today means nothing tomorrow.  This is a purchase that will affect Canada’s military for the next 3 decades or more.  Even if the F-35 is technologically “the superior aircraft”, that means very little if it effectively hands the US control over the fleet either directly or indirectly.