Small militarily not small economically. The Royal Netherlands Air Force is small, especially compared to the USAF. The USAF has more pilots than the RNAF has total service members.

The RNAF has 50 F-35s, not all are active at the same time, and Wikipedia does not list any other active combat aircraft since they sent their F-16s to Ukraine. So not a lot of aircraft and not a lot of pilots.

I don't think a US Army/Air Force vet is going to have any less biased of a take than the a Dutch government official lmao

Besides the critique towards the person have you any insights as to which of his statements could be biased?

I'm just going to leave this here for reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Apply that astute logical assessment to your own arguments and claims first 😚

"I installed some mobile app games on my plane."

OK, I think I've lost track of what I was arguing. F-35 is fine.

It's just that strategic reliance upon such a complex system intuitively seems bad without some Russian\Iranian style main scalable cheap body, which is also what Ukraine has, Turkey has and what USA is building. Basically everyone with a pretense at having self-sufficient military.

What would EU countries do if right now a mass of cheap drones, cruise missiles and stormtroopers started moving their way?

I have one question. From where?

Name the other countries building equivalent aviation equipment and platforms. So far as I know they're pretty much all fascist.

If you can buy USBs that brick when plugged into the wrong system then you can make your aircraft inoperable.

The goal of the F-35 is to keep the lead in aircraft technology development. China can clone all the designs they want and build as many planes as they want but will need more then waves of planes to project power on the level of the United States.

I’ve been working in the Dutch tech sector for decades. My general opinion about the culture of Dutch governmental institutions, including Defense, is one of neoliberalism and technological opportunism.

Public officials are completely ignorant about technology, yet misuse technology to advance their careers by starting megalomanic IT-projects, meant as nonsensical solutions to help realize highly unlikely business cases, that will only be realized (maybe) years after they’d handed over the reigns.

All of this has caused governments to become highly digitized, with large pools of IT-‘professionals’, yet barely able to maintain and develop the digital infrastructure they built up, because of a catastrophic shortage of tech-savy leaders and actual experts.

The reason I mention this, is because Dutch public officials are generally both highly techno-optimistic as well as highly techno-ignorant. Its not uncommon to see them making claims that sound misguided or downright false to anyone who’s anyone.

My take is that Tuinman likely shared his comment in an attempt to comfort the public, but that it betrays his fundamental lack of understanding about the digital infrastructure that makes up the F35. And if Tuinman is being fed this sort of information by his subordinates, then I’m worried that the experts at Defense might not actually understand the infrastructure themselves either.

The risk in all of this, is that Defense and the political establishment might be lulling themselves into a false sense of security, by underestimating the risks. Sure, you can jailbreak software, but many of the F35’s capabilities still require live access to the American intelligence infrastructure. Without that access, knowing there is no European alternative, the F35 would be a fundamentally broken plane.

My question would be: do we really need a next-gen, multi-mission stealth fighter to safeguard ourselves from the Russians?

I'm not saying that's not a relevant question.

But also, there's not that many countries making their own military hardware anymore (fighter attack, electronic attack, stealth, or even just bombers). The ones that do are all pretty much on a fascism kick (Russia, China, USA).

And while we're at it, The SU-57 would like a word. Because it's the main reason so many countries do want the F35.

The goal for the F-35 was to create jobs and taxable revenue. Projecting power indeed. Manipulating other countries to “keep up with mil tech” even tho we all know our adversaries are 20 years behind. Maybe investing in schools or diplomacy could have created greater returns for the American public

Worked as an American consultant for the Dutch government in IT, can confirm this absolutely. It's a case of finding private companies to funnel money to instead of actually creating capacity, all because of the incorrect illusion that the private sector is magically efficient.

My unofficial advice to my colleagues while leaving my posting was "stop hiring people like me. Spend the money on developing good internal devs".

The idea that $5000 will pay for replacing a core component or system is just plain preposterous.

A flash memory chip is a flash memory chip, whether it's part of a USB stick or soldered to a custom board. You don't need to replace the custom board, you need to solder on a new memory chip that contains the instructions you want it to.

I'm late to this reply, but Chinese pilots and aircraft have actually become quite competent this decade. Their behavior with international intercepts doesn't mean anything, especially when its usually done by some ye olde J-11s. And amazingly they kickstarted the LRAAM arms race again with their highly successful PL-15.

The F-35 does get to face off against China's J-20 and J-35, but to answer your question, the thing was built as an export product to make a ton of money for Lockheed.

While there is obvious technological advancement from the F-22, it has a top speed akin to a dated block I JF-17, reliability as good as a land rover, and parts/munitions expensive as golden caviar.

It's just an export all in one stealth solution because there is no alternative that was developed.

Which is why I want to see it pitted against any nation that has properly delved into counter stealth operations. I feel like if you can successfully light it up, it would struggle in a BVR fight, unlike the F-22 which has plenty of power to mess around.

There's no direct Chinese equivalent because both the J-20 and J-35 are more akin to the F-22 (although J-35 is a bit closer), but I would not be surprised to find the F-35 not being able to keep up with such adversaries.

And I'm fairly certain USAF is completely aware of this in their redteam exercises, which is why they continue to field the F-22 as their primary stealth air superiority fighter, if not outright their primary air superiority fighter.

Even more annoyingly for the USAF, I don't think the upcoming F-47 is going to come before China decides to jump on Taiwan, so they'll more than likely be fighting with whatever they have today.

Thank you for the thought provoking comment!