THE SET-UP:
Is Turkey ‘The New Iran’?
https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-turkey-the-new-iran/
If you are not familiar, Frontpage was founded by the late David Horowitz. Horowitz pioneered the kulturkampf in American politics and he regularly ginned-up wedge issues to marginalize political enemies and, in the wake of 9/11, to generate support for US empire ... particularly when US empire advanced the lobbying agenda of AIPAC, the policy objectives of Likud and, not coincidentally, when US empire dropped bombs on Muslims. Frontpage's writers are prone to incendiary attacks on anything and everything Islamic and, IMHO, its content has a decidedly supremacist POV. As such, it is a valuable resource if you want to see previews of new fronts in the culture war and if you want to know what the AIPAC-Likud axis has on its agenda.
And it looks like Türkiye is next on their list.
Right now, it's playing out in the field of military procurement. Türkiye wants F-35s. Israel is lobbying hard in Congress against the proposed transfer of the coveted fighter. It’s not coveted because it's a great weapon system (it is not), but because buying-in to the system brings with it certain guarantees ... kinda like an insurance policy.
Once the Pentagon gives the okay to buy-in to big budget systems like the F-35, the country becomes truly valued customer in the supermarket of American military hardware. Customers are not quite king, but they are “preferred” and they can expect more latitude from the “vendor.” At the same time, the new customer becomes a little more integrated with and a lot more dependent on the US military. That’s why Türkiye is so keen on securing F-35s. And that’s also why Israel is working so hard to keep them out of the program. It will be far more difficult to turn Türkiye into “the New Iran” if Lockheed has a billion-dollar maintenance contract with Ankara. Add that to Türkiye’s membership in NATO and it’s hard to see how this dream of a Iran-icized Türkiye will ever come to pass.
That said, I wouldn’t underestimate the Israeli influence machine. An unnamed “senior Israeli “official” talked to Joel Pollak of Breitbart News last week and said “it was necessary for Congress to block sales of the F-35 Lightning to Turkey to prevent aggression toward Israel.” And what exactly is this predicated on? Per Breitbart:
The official raised the remote but growing possibility of military clashes with Turkey, which had stated a goal of restoring the Ottoman Empire, complete with control of Jerusalem, Israel’s capital.
Israel would act to block Turkey if necessary, but would prefer to avoid conflict, according to the official.
Congress could block F-35 sales to Turkey, and Israel hoped it would do so, the official said.
For the record, that article appeared on July 10. And guess what else appeared on July 10 in Aviation Week?
U.S. Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, said he will continue blocking indefinitely the transfer of Lockheed Martin F-35s purchased by Turkey during a July 9 hearing.
Risch, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that he is the lawmaker who placed a hold on delivering six completed F-35As ordered by Turkey, which effectively rules out such a transfer.
“I’ve got a hold on and I’m going to continue to have that hold for a lot of different reasons,” Risch said in a confirmation hearing for Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Trump administration’s nominee to become U.S. ambassador to Greece.
Unsurprisingly, Pro-Israel PACs have, according to OpenSecrets, lavished $255,787 on Risch over the course of his career as a Senator, which began in 2008. Given that “special relationship” between Risch and Israel’s proxies, it doesn’t look like those F-35 will be delivered anytime soon.
More ominously, it appears that the Israeli government cannot function without an enemy. The US and Israel have bombed numerous nations in the region. Those nations have become failed, failing or flailing states. Türkiye has not been bombed and it has a viable, functioning polity and economy. That alone is reason for Likudists to be suspicious! But I’d bet on the one similarity between Türkiye and Iran … support for the Palestinians. And in Türkiye’s case, their support has been moral support, not military support through proxies. That may make their advocacy, which is communicated through English language Turkish press outlets like TRT World, almost more dangerous than Iran’s easily demonized proxies.
The big winner is, of course, Lockheed and their fighter jet, which I like to call “the world’s great flying ATM machine.”
If you’ve followed the bug and glitch-filled journey of Lockheed’s shaky moneymaker from concept to costly boondoggle, Despite an almost continuous stream of bad press, costly retrofits and inauspicious audits, a number of US allies have purchased the much-maligned weapons system.
Why?
Because empire.
-jp
TITLE:The Enshittification of American Power
https://www.wired.com/story/enshittification-of-american-power/
EXCERPTS: Another platform that Trump is weaponizing? Weapons systems. Over the past couple of decades, a host of allies built and planned their air power around the F-35 stealth fighter jet, built by Lockheed Martin. In March, a rumor erupted online—in Reddit posts and X threads—that F-35s come with a “kill switch” that would allow the US to shut them down at will.
Sources tell us that there is no such kill switch on the F-35, per se. But the underlying anxiety is not unfounded. There is, as one former US defense official described it, a “kill chain” that is “essentially controlled by the United States.” Complex weapons platforms require constant maintenance and software updates, and they rely on real-time, proprietary intelligence streams for mapping and targeting. All that “flows back through the United States,” the former official said, and can be blocked or turned off. Cases in point: When the UK wanted to allow Ukraine to use British missiles against Russia last November, it reportedly had to get US sign-off on the mapping data that allowed the missiles to hit their targets. Then, after Trump’s disastrous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in late February, the US temporarily cut off intelligence streams to Ukraine, including the encrypted GPS feeds that are integral to certain precision-guided missile systems. Such a shutoff would essentially brick a whole weapons platform.
But the reality is that, for many allies, simply declaring independence isn’t really a viable option. Japan and South Korea, which depend on the US to protect them against China, can do little more than pray that the bully in the White House leaves them alone.
For now, Denmark and Canada are the other US allies most directly at risk from enshittification. Not only has Trump put Greenland (a protectorate of Denmark) and Canada at the top of his menu for territorial acquisition, but both countries have militaries that are unusually closely integrated into US structures. The “transatlantic idea” has been the “cornerstone of everything we do,” explains one technology adviser to the Danish government, who asked to remain anonymous due to the political sensitivity of the subject. Denmark spent years pushing back against arguments from other allies that Europe needed “strategic autonomy.” And according to a former adviser on Canadian national security, the “soft wiring” binding the US and Canadian military systems to each other makes them nearly impossible to disentangle.
That explains why both countries have been slow to move away from US platforms. In March, the outspoken head of Denmark’s parliamentary defense committee grabbed attention on X by declaring that his country’s purchase of F-35s was a mistake: “I can easily imagine a situation where the USA will demand Greenland from Denmark and will threaten to deactivate our weapons and let Russia attack us when we refuse,” he tweeted. But in reality, the Danish government is even now considering purchasing more F-35s.
Canada, too, has already built its air-strike capacities on top of the F-35 platform; switching to another would, at best, require vast amounts of retooling and redundancy. “We’re going to look at alternatives, because we can’t make ourselves vulnerable,” says the Canadian adviser. “But we would then have a non-interoperable air force in our own country.”
If allies keep building atop US platforms, they render themselves even more vulnerable to American coercion. But if they strike out on their own, they may pay a steeper, more immediate price. In March, the Canadian province of Ontario canceled its deal with Starlink to bring satellite internet to its poorer rural areas. Now, Canada will have to pay much more money to build physical internet connections or else wait for its own satellite constellations to come online.
If other governments followed suit in other domains—breaking their deep interconnections with US weapons systems, or finding alternative cloud platforms for vital government and economic services—it would mean years of economic hardship. Everyone would be poorer. But that’s exactly what some world leaders have been banding together to contemplate.
TITLE: Britain's billion-pound F-35s not quite ready for, well, anything
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/15/uk_f35_failings/
EXCERPTS: The F-35 stealth fighter is not meeting its potential in British service because of availability issues, a shortage of support personnel, and delays in integrating key weapons that are limiting the aircraft's effectiveness.
The various problems are highlighted in a reality check from the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) that offers a contrast to the typically measured tone of official government communications when it comes to the state of the country's armed forces.
Its report calls on the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to address these problems in the F-35 fleet: firstly to increase the effectiveness of the aircraft but also to demonstrate the program is delivering value for the huge cost it represents to the taxpaying public.
The NAO, a public sector spending watchdog, starts by noting that the F-35 offers capabilities "significantly superior to any previous UK aircraft," not just because of its low radar observability, but due to its advanced sensor suite including an electro-optical targeting system and long-range infrared target sensors, which are combined to provide the pilot with an integrated picture of the space surrounding them.
However, the report finds the MoD has not been able to deliver on its own targets for aircraft availability – the proportion of time each aircraft is ready to fly – despite these targets being lower than those for the global program.
It claims that last year, the UK F-35 fleet had a mission-capable rate (the ability of an aircraft to perform at least one of its seven defined missions) about half of the MoD's target. The full mission capable rate (the ability of an F-35 to perform all required missions) was only about one third of the MoD's target and significantly lower than for F-35B aircraft operated by other nations.
Just as worrying are the ongoing delays in getting key weapons integrated with the F-35 so that they can be used in operations. The report states that the original support date for the Spear 3 air-to-surface cruise missile and the Meteor medium range air-to-air missile was December last year, but the F-35 is not expected to get these until the early 2030s.
These delays have been caused by "poor supplier performance," the NAO says, referring to the US defense firm responsible for the F-35, Lockheed Martin. However, it also criticizes Britain's MoD for "negotiating commercial arrangements that failed to prioritize delivery" and the low priority given to Meteor by the global program.
This means that UK F-35s are currently only capable of operating with the Paveway IV laser-guided bomb and US-made missiles such as the AIM-120D.
Part of the problem is that support for many of the key weapons British forces wish to use was planned for the Block 4 upgrades to the aircraft's systems software, and these have been massively delayed. Much of the blame for this lies with Lockheed Martin and the Joint Program Office (JPO), the agency within the US Department of Defense (DoD) responsible for overseeing the F-35 program.
It was originally expected that this would be fully delivered by 2022, but the NAO says that in 2023 the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that it would not be delivered until 2029, and now the JPO doesn't expect Block 4 to be completely delivered before 2033.
There has been a certain suspicion that the US doesn't see supporting European-made weapons as a priority, especially when F-35 operators are then forced to buy American kit instead.
Small wonder, perhaps, that Britain is pushing ahead with a program for its planned next-generation fighter – currently codenamed Tempest – that does not involve any US defense companies but partners with Japan and Italy instead.
Switzerland: F-35 debate about billions in additional costs
https://militaeraktuell.at/en/switzerland-f-35-debate-comes-to-a-head-billions-in-additional-costs-political-criticism-and-alternatives/
What was initially played down by Bern’s politicians and administration has been official for a few days now: the billions in additional costs for the purchase of the F-35 for the Swiss armed forces, which have been known since the end of 2024 Swiss armed forces are a reality. Defense Minister Martin Pfister admitted that the USA – contrary to what the Swiss side once assumed – does not guarantee binding fixed prices for third countries.
Although official documents in 2022 still stated that Switzerland had received “binding offers from the US government”, these were apparently based on different principles than assumed in Bern. After all, the US approach to arms deals is not designed to fix prices.
The question arises as to whether Lockheed Martin manufactured F-35A – an expensive “Striker” designed to penetrate deep into contested airspace – is really the means of choice for safeguarding airspace sovereignty.
Historian and former SP military politician Peter Hug is one of the most prominent critics of the project. He expressed his concerns to Militär Aktuell back in 2021 – now he is presenting an alternative in several Swiss media outlets:
Withdrawal from the F-35 deal, write-off of the down payment of 700 million Swiss francs (751 million euros)
Conservation and extension of the service life of the existing F/A-18 Hornet fleet beyond 2032
Development of a European successor solution for the air force
Cautionary voices are also coming from Austria: Military expert Gustav Gressel demanded in the Aargauer Zeitung that Europe should at least insist on data sovereignty and self-sufficiency when procuring F-35s. Israel is a role model here: the F-35I Adir used there flies with its own targeting and EloKa software, which is not analyzed by US servers.
In addition to the F-35, another ambitious project is also coming under pressure: the procurement of six Hermes 900 reconnaissance drones from Israel is in danger of failing after more than ten years. Although five systems have been delivered, they are not operational.
The latest developments show: The Swiss armaments strategy is in turmoil. F-35, Hermes drones, successor debates – all of this is now also being closely monitored in Austria, as Militär Aktuell recently documented. The lessons learned in Bern should not be disregarded in future procurement decisions.