Sitting alongside me in the press gallery were a row of senior executives of my employer, Granada TV, then a leading British broadcasting company. As bipartisan denunciations of my reporting thundered down, one of these bosses gripped my arm in panic. “My god,” he whispered, “they’re saying you’re a Soviet agent!”

“Worse,” I replied. “They’re saying I’m an agent of the American aircraft industry.”

As it turned out, my treacherous report was proven entirely correct. The Tornado proved incapable of operating at high altitude, was grossly unmaneuverable, prone to breakdown, hard to repair, and deficient in radar and armament. It finally saw action in the 1991 gulf war and quickly suffered significant losses to Iraqi air defenses, after which it was withdrawn from front line operations.

The Threat.
Always There When You Need It

But the dream of repelling American dominance of the European weapons market never died, even while the Lockheed salesforce managed to sucker a number of NATO allies, including Britain, into buying the notoriously deficient F-35. (The French, who were always good for a venomous quote about the Americans, tried to stay aloof.)

Today, spurred by Donald Trump’s irksome efforts to end the Ukraine war, European leaders appear determined to sever their dependence and build their own. Money is pouring into the European military-industrial complex, accompanied by shouts of defiance at Putin and Trump. This is against a steady drumbeat of confident assertions that Muscovite hordes are poised, if and when the gallant Ukrainians have been crushed, to sweep into and across Western Europe.

There is, of course, no evidence that Putin has either the plans or the capability to do any such thing, but invocations of The Threat have been doing yeoman service for defense budgets on either side of the Atlantic almost since the end of World War II. Now they are running at fever pitch.

If encouragement were needed, it comes in the form of demands from Trump and others, that “Europe pay more for its own defense,” ideally by buying more American weapons systems. In the past, there have been fitful efforts, usually led by the French, to create some sort of European Defense Force independent of the US.

I recall an EU diplomat in Brussels telling me that at the first sign of any such initiative, US emissaries would erupt out of NATO headquarters in droves to put a stop to the idea before it got out of hand. The point, as he explained, was that an independent European defense force would also mean independent European defense procurement, which would bode no good for the US weapons industry.

Who Needs a Kill Switch When We Have ODIN?

So what are the prospects for a robust European defense capability, shorn of US input? In a word, dim. F-35s sold to European air forces may not have a literal “kill switch”, as recently suggested, but they are entirely dependent on the cloud-based Operational Data Integration Network (ODIN) controlled by Lockheed that manages maintenance and logistics for the fighter. Furthermore, the US retains tight control over the vital “mission data load” files, comprising vast files of maps, electronic signals, information about missile and radar threats, along with friendly systems in the relevant area of operations. These must be updated in the plane’s software on an almost daily bases as new intelligence comes in.

The Typhoon Eurofighter, a successor to the Tornado built by a consortium of Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain, is reliant on the Lockheed Sniper targeting pod and Northrop inertial and satellite navigation systems, not to mention those same mission data load links. Entering service a decade later than promised, by some calculations it rivals the F-35 in cost, an impressive achievement.

Confirming the definition of insanity as doing the same thing and expecting a different result, the British have now teamed up with the Italians and Japanese to build the Tempest fighter, already years late and vastly over budget. Even the French Rafale, touted by Macron as a worthy substitute for the F-35, relies on the Lockheed Sniper and a number of other electronic components. The Swedish Gripen fighter has an American engine.

The bulk of Europe’s airborne intelligence, surveillance and intelligence fleet, as one industry source told the Financial Times, is “effectively mortgaged to the US and predicated on their collaboration.” Britain’s so-called “independent nuclear deterrent” consists of Trident D5 submarine-launched missiles rented from the US.

Thump that Tub!

None of these realities appear to matter much to tub-thumping European leaders, notably Britain’s Starmer, France’s Macron, and Germany’s Merz. Beset by faltering economies, they have convinced themselves that a strong dose of Military Keynesianism, sold to their voters on a torrent of threat-inflation, will set things to rights.

The most likely outcome is a Europe burdened by defense spending and baroque, overpriced defense programs, with populations whose welfare programs, built over generations, have been abruptly shredded in the name of “defense.” All worth it, I suppose, if they can defend Greenland.