A Dependency Investigation (#04) – May, 2026
About This Series
The Magician’s Hands is a series of dependency investigations. Each report examines a single case in which a structural dependency, between a state and an infrastructure owner, a farmer and a seed company, a continent and an energy supplier, was created, normalised, leveraged, and converted into power. The cases span domains and decades. The grammar beneath them does not change.
The series takes its name from a simple observation: the most consequential things happening in the world are rarely the things that take centre stage. While we watch the visible hands, something else is being built in the structural layer underneath. These reports are an attempt to make that layer legible.
The founding article, “”, sets out the full grammar. Each investigation that follows applies it to a specific case.
Scene-setter
There is a version of the F-35 story that is told at air shows and in defence ministry press releases, and it is not entirely wrong. A fifth-generation multirole combat aircraft, jointly developed by the United States and a coalition of allied nations, replacing ageing fleets with a common platform that allows coalition partners to train together, share logistics, and operate with a level of interoperability that previous generations of military planners could only approximate. The programme is, by that account, a triumph of alliance management: expensive, complicated, occasionally troubled, but fundamentally a shared enterprise among nations with shared interests.
This investigation is not about that story. It is about what was built underneath it. The F-35 programme did not merely produce an aircraft. It produced a structural condition in which the core combat capability of more than a dozen sovereign air forces is now tied, at the operational level, to decisions made in Washington and in the Lockheed Martin facilities in Fort Worth, Texas. The platform is visible. The dependency architecture embedded within it is not.
What the five moves will show is this: a dependency was created under the genuine cover of military utility, normalised through the operational logic of alliance interoperability, and converted into a durable instrument of strategic alignment that individual partner governments are structurally unable to exit, modify, or collectively override. The Turkey case did not reveal the leverage mechanism. It demonstrated that the mechanism had always been there.
Move 1: Creating the Dependency
The Joint Strike Fighter programme began in 1993 as the Joint Advanced Strike Technology initiative, with two prototype consortia selected in November 1996 and Lockheed Martin awarded the System Development and Demonstration contract in October 2001. The stated ambition was to replace multiple aircraft types across the United States Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps with a single, adaptable platform available in three variants. The innovation, relative to previous procurement cycles, was the early integration of partner nations into the development architecture. Eight countries, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Norway, and Denmark, were brought in as development partners at tiered levels of financial contribution and corresponding levels of access to programme data and workshare. This was presented, correctly, as burden-sharing. It was also, though this was not the framing offered at the time, the mechanism by which the dependency was created before a single aircraft had been built.
The hook was genuine. A common platform across alliance airpower offered real operational advantages: shared training doctrine, interoperable logistics, the ability to sustain coalition operations without the friction of incompatible systems. For smaller air forces operating ageing fleets, the F-35 offered fifth-generation capability that no domestic programme could plausibly deliver at comparable cost. The rational case for adoption was not fabricated. It was real, and it was the condition that made the dependency attractive.
What individual adopters could not see at the moment of adoption, or chose not to examine, was the architecture of the platform they were adopting. The F-35 is not merely an aircraft. It is a networked system whose operational capability is inseparable from two infrastructure layers that would remain under US control regardless of how many aircraft a partner nation purchased. The first is the logistics and maintenance system, initially ALIS and currently being replaced by ODIN, which centralises maintenance data, parts ordering, and mission readiness tracking in a US-managed data environment. The transition from ALIS to ODIN, announced in 2020 and still under active development as of 2026, has not altered the underlying architecture: the successor system remains government-led and US-controlled. A partner nation’s fleet readiness is not determined solely by the physical condition of its aircraft; it is determined by its access to and standing within that US-controlled information environment. The second layer is the mission data file architecture, through which the aircraft’s threat libraries, electronic warfare responses, and sensor fusion parameters are programmed and updated. Partner nations receive mission data calibrated to their security agreements with the United States. They cannot independently generate, update, or modify this software. Their aircraft’s battlefield awareness is, at the operational level, a function of what Washington chooses to provide.
The moment the dependency became costly to reverse was not the moment the first aircraft was delivered. It was the moment the first development contract was signed and the partner nation’s future fleet planning became structurally organised around a platform it could not control. By the time the F-35B reached initial operational capability in July 2015, the switching cost had already been built into defence budgets, pilot training programmes, maintenance infrastructure, and political commitments stretching across multiple electoral cycles.
Move 2: Normalising the Dependency
The narrative that normalised the F-35 dependency was not constructed cynically. It emerged naturally from the genuine utility of the platform and was carried by the institutional architecture of the alliance itself. NATO interoperability is not a slogan; it is a doctrine with real operational content. The argument that allied air forces should be able to operate together, share parts, train on common simulators, and present a coherent electronic warfare posture to adversaries is an argument that serious defence planners find compelling because it addresses real problems. The F-35 programme positioned itself inside that argument and allowed the argument to do its normalising work.
The institutions that carried the narrative were not primarily commercial. They were governmental. Defence ministries, parliamentary defence committees, and allied military commands absorbed the interoperability logic and reproduced it in budget submissions, strategic reviews, and procurement justifications across more than a decade. Voices that questioned whether partner nations were purchasing a capability or a structural condition were marginalised not through suppression but through framing: they were positioned as technically uninformed, as reflexively anti-American, or as advocates for domestic procurement alternatives that demonstrably could not deliver equivalent capability. The counter-narrative failed to land because it could not match the concrete operational specificity of the interoperability argument.
Operational normalisation proceeded in parallel, and more quietly. As partner nations began receiving aircraft and integrating them into their air force structures, the ALIS system became the maintenance workflow. Technicians trained on it. Squadron planners built their readiness reporting around it. Mission data files became the intelligence baseline from which crews planned operations. The dependency stopped being a relationship the moment it became infrastructure, the point at which questioning it would have felt like questioning why the lights work. When ODIN began replacing ALIS from 2021 onward, the transition was processed as a system modernisation, not as a reminder that the underlying architecture remained outside partner nation control. The new name obscured the unchanged structural condition.
The switching cost, by this point, was not merely financial. It was institutional, doctrinal, and generational. Pilots trained exclusively on F-35 systems. Maintenance cultures built around the platform’s specific demands. Strategic planning assumptions embedded in documents that would govern alliance posture for decades. None of this was announced as a dependency-deepening mechanism. It was simply how things worked.
Move 3: Leveraging the Dependency
The most visible exercise of leverage in the F-35 programme’s history occurred in July 2019, when the United States formally removed Turkey from the programme following Ankara’s decision to accept delivery of the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system. Turkey had been a development partner since the programme’s earliest phase and had planned to purchase 100 F-35A aircraft. It had developed substantial domestic industrial workshare, contributing components including centre fuselage sub-assemblies, and its pilots and maintainers were already training on US soil when the removal was executed. The leverage that the US had held structurally since the development contracts were signed was exercised in a single policy decision. Eight aircraft that had been built for Turkey were redirected to the US Air Force. The door has not been reopened, anchored by statutory conditions in the FY2020 National Defense Authorization Act that require Turkey to remove all S-400 equipment before any F-35 transfer can proceed.
The significance of the Turkey case is not that it was exceptional. It is that it was transparent. For every other partner nation, the same leverage exists at the structural level without needing to be exercised, because the option-space effect has already done its work. Governments that have committed their air force’s future capability to the F-35 platform do not need to receive a direct instruction from Washington to align their strategic behaviour with US preferences. They already know which policy positions are compatible with continued programme participation and which are not. The Dutch government does not openly debate purchasing Chinese air defence systems. The Norwegian government does not pursue security arrangements that Washington would interpret as incompatible with the programme. No pressure is applied directly, because none is needed. The dependency has already reshaped what feels strategically possible.
Structural leverage operates at a more granular level through the mission data file architecture. Partner nations’ aircraft capabilities are, in operational terms, what the United States decides to provide. A nation that found itself in political tension with Washington would face the prospect of degraded mission data: threat libraries not updated, electronic warfare profiles not current. This is not a theoretical concern. It is the operational reality that every F-35 operator’s defence planning staff has, at some level, already internalised. The aircraft they fly are capable of exactly what the US chooses to make them capable of, within the terms of their security relationship.
Move 4: Obscuring the Mechanism
The temporal gap between the creation of the F-35 dependency and the moment at which its structural consequences became legible spans more than two decades. The ministers who approved development partnership agreements in the late 1990s were not the ministers who faced the operational implications of US-controlled logistics architecture in the 2020s. The parliamentary committees that reviewed initial procurement commitments were not equipped, and in most cases not constituted, to assess the long-term software control architecture that would govern their nation’s fleet readiness for five decades. The dependency was approved at a moment when its consequences were not yet visible, and it matured during a period when the institutional memory of the original decision had dissipated.
The narrative that made the dependency unaskable was not a conspiracy of silence. It was the interoperability doctrine itself. Within that frame, the specific questions that would have revealed the structural condition, who controls the mission data files, under what conditions can access to the logistics system be suspended, what remedies does a partner nation have if US software decisions degrade its aircraft’s capability, were not merely unanswered. They were framed as inappropriate, as the kind of questions that only an adversary or an isolationist would ask about an allied programme. Alliance trust, weaponised as an epistemological norm, made the dependency mechanism structurally unexaminable within the institutional contexts where it most needed to be examined.
Structural opacity compounded the temporal and narrative barriers. The F-35 programme is managed through a Joint Program Office that coordinates relationships across fifteen partner and purchasing nations, multiple security classifications, jurisdictions, and procurement frameworks. No single partner nation’s parliament has access to the full picture of how the logistics architecture operates across the programme, what data is retained by US government systems, or how mission data file decisions are made and applied differentially across partners. The information is distributed across classification levels, legal jurisdictions, and institutional silos in ways that make collective legibility structurally impossible, not because anyone designed it to be, but because the complexity of the programme makes assembly of the full picture available only to the US government itself.
Move 5: Converting the Value
The F-35 programme converts dependency into value across several registers simultaneously, and the most consequential conversions are not the financial ones, though those are substantial. According to a 2024 Government Accountability Office report, the total projected lifecycle cost of the programme, now extended through 2088, has reached more than $2 trillion. The flyaway cost of the F-35A currently sits at approximately $82.5 million per aircraft for production Lots 15 through 17, excluding the engine, which is contracted separately. The financial transfer from partner nation defence budgets to the US defence industrial base over the programme’s planned lifetime is structural, not incidental.
But the commercial transfer is the least interesting conversion. The more consequential conversion is strategic. By tying the core airpower capability of more than a dozen sovereign militaries to a US-controlled platform for five decades, the programme converts partner nation security dependency into durable geopolitical alignment. Nations that cannot replace their primary combat aircraft without a decade-long procurement cycle and a fundamental restructuring of their defence doctrine do not adopt foreign policy positions that risk their place in the programme. The F-35 is, in this sense, an instrument of strategic binding: it converts the transactional logic of an arms purchase into a structural condition of political alignment.
The normative conversion is subtler and perhaps more durable. Alliance partners that have built their air force doctrine, training culture, and operational planning around the F-35’s networked architecture have, over time, come to think about airpower in the conceptual vocabulary that the platform’s design embeds. What a mission looks like, how threat environments are modelled, what electronic warfare posture is available: all of these are shaped by choices made in Fort Worth and in the US programme office. The platform does not merely carry out strategic decisions. It shapes the conceptual environment in which strategic decisions are made.
The cost of this conversion is not borne equally. The governments that made the original procurement decisions bore the financial cost and, in most cases, exited office before the structural consequences matured. The air forces that inherited the dependency operate within its constraints without having designed them. The populations whose defence posture is structurally aligned with US strategic preferences did not vote on that alignment directly. The dependency decision was made by people who are no longer accountable for it, and its consequences will be borne by people who were not consulted.
Closing
What the F-35 case reveals about the grammar is this: the most durable dependencies are the ones that do not feel like dependencies at the moment of adoption, because the utility is genuine. The aircraft works. The interoperability is real. The alliance benefit is not fabricated. A dependency that offered nothing would not survive the normalisation stage. It is precisely because the F-35 delivers meaningful military capability that the structural condition embedded within it has been so successfully obscured. The useful and the binding are the same object. That is what makes the grammar difficult to see and nearly impossible to act on once it has matured.
The Turkey case is, in this light, both the most transparent moment in the programme’s history and the most misleading one. It is transparent because it showed, without ambiguity, that the leverage mechanism exists and will be used. It is misleading because it invites the conclusion that leverage is the exceptional case, the thing that happens when a partner makes a rogue decision. The more accurate reading is the inverse: Turkey is what visible leverage looks like. What the other partner nations experience daily is the invisible kind, the option-space narrowing that happens before any decision point, the strategic self-censorship that leaves no record because it never needed to become explicit.
The question the reader should carry forward is not whether the F-35 was a mistake. For most partner nations, in narrow military terms, it probably was not. The question is what it means for a sovereign state to possess a military capability it does not fully control, and whether the institutional frameworks that approve such dependencies are constitutionally or practically equipped to understand what they are approving before the cost of understanding it has already been paid.e visible. The question is whether we are watching the right ones.
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