Allies Cancel Orders of F-35s, the Fighter Jets That Will Cost $2 Trillion
The U.S., in turn, should cancel the F-35 program altogether.
So far, President Donald Trump's second term in office has been characterized by antagonism to allied nations. In just two months, Trump has shown hostility to the NATO defense alliance while gleefully pursuing a trade war against Canada and Mexico by imposing double-digit tariffs on the two largest purchasers of U.S. goods for specious reasons only to then agree to a pause, before repeating the cycle all over again.
One side effect of Trump's brash, undiplomatic attitude is that some allied nations may back out of purchasing F-35 fighter jets from the U.S., the latest indignity in a program that has infamously become a years-long boondoggle.
"The F-35 Lightning II aircraft (F-35) is the Department of Defense's (DOD) most ambitious and costly weapon system and its most advanced fighter aircraft," according to an April 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). "However, DOD's projected costs for sustaining the F-35 continue to increase while planned use of the aircraft declines." While the DOD plans to keep the jet in service through 2088, it estimates the cost to do so at $2 trillion.
The department has little to show for the exorbitant price tag. "DOD plans to fly the F-35 less than originally estimated, partly because of reliability issues with the aircraft," GAO found. "The F-35's ability to perform its mission has also trended downward over the past 5 years."
In September 2018, the jet entered its initial testing phase, expected to last a year. In November 2019, a DOD assessment extended the testing period another year due to the sheer amount of problems it had found. "Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies, new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number," the report found.
Among the jet's issues were "unacceptable" accuracy in its mounted gun and 873 separate software problems, 13 of which were classified "must-fix" issues "that affect safety or combat capability."
Yet despite the F-35's questionable track record and ballooning taxpayer-funded price tag, some allied nations agreed to buy them. In 2023, Canada agreed to purchase 88 F-35s for $19 billion after previously pledging not to. In April 2024, the Portuguese Air Force chief of staff said his country would transition from the F-16 to the F-35 in a process estimated to cost 5.5 billion euros ($6 billion).
That all appears to be changing. "Portugal is getting cold feet about replacing its U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets with more modern F-35s because of Donald Trump," Politico reported last week.
"The recent position of the United States, in the context of NATO," Defense Minister Nuno Melo told Portuguese media, "must make us think about the best options, because the predictability of our allies is a greater asset to take into account."
Over the weekend, the CBC reported Canada may follow suit: Defense Minister Bill Blair said his country was "examining other alternatives" to F-35s.
And it may not stop there. "Trump's calls to seize Greenland from Denmark and turn Canada into America's 51st state pose a 'real challenge' for the program," Audrey Decker of DefenseOne wrote last week, citing a former defense official, "as both countries fly the fifth-generation combat jet and rely on U.S. spare parts and software upgrades."
The U.S. could "degrade" allies' F-35s, Decker added, "by withholding spare parts, canceling services, and blocking software updates delivered by U.S. cloud-based software systems."
Last week, the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland called for the country's defense department "to stop the F-35 procurement immediately."
In May 2023, U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told reporters the government saw the F-35 as a learning experience for how not to make the same mistakes on future projects—though in a perfect example of the sunk cost fallacy, the government continued funding it.
Indeed, canceling the F-35 program would not recoup the money already lost—which the November 2019 DOD report estimated at $428 billion—but it could prevent the government from continuing to throw good money after bad.
Incidentally, one prominent critic of the F-35 program is Elon Musk, who now nominally runs the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). "Some US weapons systems are good, albeit overpriced," Musk posted on X in November 2024, "but please, in the name of all that is holy, let us stop the worst military value for money in history that is the F-35 program!"
"Manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway," Musk added. "Will just get pilots killed."
So far, Musk has not addressed the F-35 in his capacity as government cost-cutter—indeed, Canada's National Post reported last month that the nation's Department of National Defense "continues to have confidence in the F-35 program" and did not fear any DOGE cuts.
But one potential benefit of Trump's chaotic public statements and antagonism of America's allies could be that it gives us a perfect excuse to finally kill the F-35, a project that has gone significantly over budget with little to show for it.
