Not if the US becomes more and more adversarial, especially if they jeopardize NATO. The current administration already acts almost like an enemy of Europe, it's quite baffling. Politicians have to justify military expenses to the voters.

But will the US renege on the supply of spare parts?

Will it tear up existing deals and say 'accept the new terms or your planes won't fly'?

Not sure how valuable is the hand that Trump has.

Why today would one spend $100M on 1 equipment unit when you can pump instead $100M and get 10M unstoppable drones?

$100M/10M drones = $10 per drone.

What drones are you going to get for $10 each (now or in the future)? How are they “unstoppable”? How are you going to deploy millions of $10 drones on the battlefield without tons of $100M platforms that can survive AA defenses long enough to get to the engagement? How much range do you think $10 of batteries even gets you?

I can today assemble a drone from parts from Alipay and program the firmware in an esp32 for ~ 20$. I am not kidding, Google it.

That is without me manufacturing any of the components. If one had a nation state backing I am confident it can be done for a fraction of it.

They are unstoppable because if you have a tank and there is a swarm of 500 of them what do you aim? One of them will find the opening to drop the grenade on your tanks weak spot. These are all single use kamikaze drones.

Same for battery range. Europe is preparing for a defensive war on their land. Even 10 miles of ranges should suffice. You can always deploy them from a mothership.

You’re massively underestimating what it takes to get from an esp32 hobbyist drone to a weaponized drone with 10 mile range and an actual explosive payload capable of taking out armor (in any number). Or the sensor package it would take to make them useful against personnel. Let alone deploying ten million of them in a real war.

And you’re entirely ignoring the very real problem of the mothership which has to survive to get within ten miles of the battlefield, unless you’re planning on releasing them from box trucks which means their range will either be useless or they’ll get taken out by bigger, more expensive loitering drones the second they’re spotted. War is antagonistic co-evolution in its purest form, these naive solutions dont last very long which is why our weapons cost so much (for everyone, not just the west).

When you spread the risk across 10M units you are better off compared to placing all of your bets in one super fancy unit. Remember in the Ukrainian war, Russia took out most of the Ukrainian planes in their hangars, before even they took off.

I totally agree with you that drone swarms is not a silver bullet, and likely some effective adversarial strategy will be developed(jamming, attacking motherships etc), but the point is that airplanes are not as important as they were in the past. Ukraine is still standing with no real air presence.

The battlefields in Ukraine is how we know the real cost of those drones - they managed to push it down to around $300/unit for FPV ones, which are the primary armor killers.

Many of the physical parts are manufactured in Europe under license. I've never heard of this as a major concern.

The main point of conflict is that the US holds the source code for the advanced software systems very closely, no partner country has access. A lot of the differentiated and exotic capabilities of the F-35 that make it attractive to other countries are in the software, everyone recognizes this. There are many algorithms and techniques that rely on classified computer science to deliver qualitative advantages. Even if other countries could replicate the hardware, without replicating the software anything they built would be a pale shadow of the F-35 in terms of capability, which makes alternative hardware much less compelling.

The US knows all the leverage is in the software, so that is the part they strictly control. It is yet another case of the software eating the world, military systems edition.

I wonder how hard it would be to reverse engineer it, if it really came to that.

Might be a good idea to spend a couple of million by setting up a small office of 10 people to work on it in the coming years.

The US has a bunch of (classified) tech to make reverse engineering unusually difficult. It is also several million lines of complex code. Different countries have different builds of the software, with some features missing, degraded, or disabled. There are also regular capability upgrades with new software versions; the production versions of some software features are roadmap items still under development.

I suspect that by the time anyone was able to successfully reverse engineer it, it would be semi-obsolete, which limits the value in doing so. Playing catch-up requires taking a lot of aggressive R&D risks that European governments have traditionally been very uncomfortable with or which take far too long to execute.

That's interesting. I'd have assume the secret sauces were in the radar and targeting systems.

Maybe the source code also contains a secret kill switch? I'd definitely put one in if I was selling fighter planes to 3rd parties. Alliances can switch overnight, as we're seeing right now.

IIRC the French refused to give the UK the means to disable Argentina's Exocets during the Falklands War.

They would lose access to lots of tech for example top radar tech which is designed (and I think built) in Europe as well as lithography machines. We'll sell the latter to China instead of the US if they try to play those games.

My country bought the F-35 for the sole purpose of being a deterrent to a future Russian invasion. Now that the US and Russia are allies, how can we trust that those planes will receive spare parts and other support during a conflict?

I think European alternatives for F35 are obviously needed.