A widespread concern is what would happen to Dutch weapon systems if the Americans were to withdraw completely as an ally. For example, Dutch F-35 aircraft are dependent on American software updates. Yet, Tuinman isn’t particularly worried about this.
“The F-35 is truly a shared product. The British make the Rolls-Royce engines, and the Americans simply need them too.” And even if this mutual dependency doesn’t result in software updates, the F-35, in its current state, is still a better aircraft than other types of fighters.
If you still want to upgrade despite everything, I’m going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway: you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone. (Crack it with your own software, ed.)
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.
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”.