Defund the death jets

Daire Ní Chnáimh sets out the grounds of the global campaign to take the F-35s out of the sky. This piece was first published by Scottish Left Review, and is part of rs21’s forthcoming pamphlet on demilitarisation.

In September 2024, with an air of litigious regret, foreign secretary David Lammy announced the suspension of 30 out of the 350 active licenses for arms exports to Israel. Aside from direct actions taken against arms manufacturers by Palestine solidarity activists, this was the only hiccup to Israel’s supply of weapons from Britain. Lammy made note that these suspensions would not, however, affect supply of parts for the F-35 fighter jet. ‘The effects of suspending all licenses for the F-35 programme’, he opined, ‘would undermine the global F-35 supply chain that is vital for the security of the UK, our allies, and NATO.’

Israel was the first military to attack with the F-35, near Beirut in May 2018. An example of its usage in the past year was on 13 July 2024. Buzzing above the Al Mawasi safe zone in Gaza, the F-35 dropped several 2000 pound bombs, murdering ninety Palestinian people in just one of the countless attacks that occurred throughout the last fifteen months of genocide. Despite proof that the F-35 was used to commit war crimes on a safe zone, the British government rationalised its continued supply as being ‘crucial to wider peace and security’. Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) pointed out the obvious: the supply of F-35 parts could continue for other countries but be halted for Israel. This would be a pragmatic step to limit the damage wreaked by the occupation. However, the F-35’s coveted role as the main NATO aircraft, and thus as the aerial upholder of the sclerotic Western imperial regime, not only necessitates unabated production but mandates that Israel should have these jets, and more of them than any other country. The destruction of Palestine is not just Israel’s project.

If Israel must have its F-35s, then the next logical move for a campaign would be to oppose the production of F-35s entirely. What could be the grounds for such a campaign?

Public money goes to private profits and the plane doesn’t work

Although arms companies always had some degree of independence from their nation states, the 1990s saw vastly more privatisation of the production of weapons. In the US, the neoliberalisation of the arms industry was overseen by US defense secretary William Perry. Perry shepherded huge mergers and acquisitions within the US arms industry, effectively creating corporate monopolies which could charge what they wanted for military supplies. Thus, when the military decided it needed a new fleet of jet fighters, only two companies could credibly deliver: Boeing and Lockheed Martin. In November 1996 both were approached to build conception aircraft. Lockheed Martin won the contract and development began in 2001.

It would be the most expensive weapons project in history. Initial projections costed it at $233 billion. By 2023, a decade of delays saw the project budget distended to an estimated $1.7 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain the aircraft and systems over its lifetime. It was thus necessary for the aeroplane’s existence that there be a captive market to purchase the completed jets at whatever price tag the arms industry could get away with. NATO members obediently complied. Greece, whilst shutting down hospitals during austerity, forked out €320 million for its fleet of forty. But it would be worth the lives lost in Greek A&E. The F-35 is a fifth generation air fighter. Like an evolving Pokémon, it has gained stealth abilities alongside its supersonic speed. It is ‘the most lethal, survivable and connected fighter jet in the world.’ It has the world’s most powerful jet engine, and it is strong enough to carry the heaviest of explosive matter. The state-of-the-art helmet system – ‘one of the most advanced pieces of technology on the planet’ — gives its pilots 360-degree vision. Their awareness of their embattled surroundings is second-to-none. Comfortable with air, land and sea, the F-35 is ‘air dominance defined’. Or is it?

As with most weapons systems, the F-35’s marketing team could be accused of having runaway imaginations. Prompted to scrutinise the F-35 given the British government’s massive public spending on the program, in 2017 journalist Deborah Haynes published an investigation which found that the stealth jet cannot transmit data to British ships or older planes without revealing its position to an enemy; broadband on Britain’s principal aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth is four times weaker than the average British household, severely restricting the F-35’s abilities. She also reported that a test pilot had to land the F-35 in almost total darkness after night vision failed in the plane’s $418,000 helmet. In 2023, the US lost one of the $100 million jets when its helmet system malfunctioned mid-flight and the pilot ejected. The plane continued to fly on autopilot before crashing into a forest, destroying both the forest and itself. The pilot was fired from the military. The F-35 project flew on.

Britain has spent billions on its F-35s, and private companies like BAE Systems and Leonardo stand to take huge profits from that. Scottish Enterprise has subsidised these companies to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds each, since October 2023. A campaign against the F-35 could make some headway by questioning the spending decisions of both Westminster and Holyrood, on a jet that even patriotic drumbeaters may not want.

However, the F-35 remains a war machine that can wreak a huge amount of havoc. Opposing it on the grounds that it is faulty doesn’t go far given that we also oppose it when it works.

Technology is serving imperialism

Some 15 per cent of each F-35 jet is made in Britain, across 79 sites. It is widely agreed in the Palestine solidarity movement that arming the genocide equates to committing the genocide. With a Marxist understanding of technology, there are still further grounds to dismantle the F-35 project. To wage a resource war with your fighter jet, you will have already waged resource wars to secure the means to build it. Marx understood technology as dead labour, but didn’t adequately attend to how the imperial pricing of labour, land and resources would make that technology profitable. Just as the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution could only reward their capitalists due to cotton plantations which relied on stolen land and slave labour, so the F-35 is an arms industry golden goose only due to the relative cheapness and availability of the fossil fuels, metals and minerals expended in its production, maintenance and everyday bombing sorties.

For instance, take the F-35’s engine — the fastest in the world — designed by US company Pratt and Whitney. To be the fastest, it has to get the hottest. To prevent the engine melting entirely, its turbine blades are fortified with ‘superalloys’ of 6 per cent rhenium, which has the distinction of a 3186 degree Celsius melting point. It is estimated that there are only 2500 tons of this rare earth mineral to be found in the earth’s crust. At present, 50 tons are extracted every single year. At least 70 per cent of this is used to make jet engines.

Technologies are not simply materials funnelled into a new form by engineers, but comprise asymmetric global resource flows organised by the world market. Because a given weapon system represents the destruction of swathes of land elsewhere, represents exploited mining labour elsewhere, represents the burning of tons of fossil fuels for the production process of its constituent parts, this weapon contains imperialism within itself regardless of its usage. Mining regimes from Chile to Kazakhstan would be defunct were it not for aircraft such as the F-35, which contains double the quantities of rhenium consumed in the engines of previous jets like the F-15 and F-16.

To capture this more materialist view, Alf Hornborg redefines technologies as ‘social relations that have assumed mechanical form,’ noting that ‘to deliberate on whether to adopt or reject a technology is to deliberate on different forms of social organisation, at the global as well as the local scale.’ The F-35 leaves disembowelled earth in its wake even before it scorches the earth with its bombs. Further research on its impact on the earth could strengthen the movement to take it from the sky.

The realisation of the right to life

As Brian Parkin reported last year, an innocuous footnote to a US Congressional budget revealed plans to store over one hundred B61-12 series thermonuclear bombs in the US military base in Lakenheath, Suffolk.  Each bomb contains the explosive ‘yield’ of twenty Hiroshima bombs.¹ On 12 October 2023, the US Department of Defence certified that the F-35A can carry two of these nuclear bombs at a time. Lakenheath currently hosts two US squadrons of F-35s. The nuclear bomb storage facility is set to be complete by Autumn 2025.

And so, F-35s are nuclear bomber planes. This new phase of nuclear development rests on the propaganda that NATO could enact a ‘winnable nuclear war’, given that nuclear bombs could be dropped from a stealth aeroplane and the ‘enemy’ populations won’t see it coming. The production of F-35s presupposes the mass destruction of life and lifeworlds, wherever they fly.

In the 1980s, measures to kit out Britain for nuclear warfare sparked a powerful social movement, the occupation of Greenham Common, and the radicalisation of a generation of young people. In 2024, journalists barely whispered about the arrival of more nuclear weapons, and the film and gaming industries make fighter jets seem cool anyway. Contemporary mainstream media has deadened the will to dissent.

The news of nuclear bombs in Suffolk has fallen flat on a population distracted by the strains of neoliberalism and the circus of far-right resurgence. No Greenham Common Peace Movement has yet risen to oppose this. We need to break the cultural consensus that technologies such as the F-35 are an acceptable way for the government to spend public money. This will require a diversity of tactics, and renewed attention to all the ways that the arms industry encroaches into civic life.

1. Zach Rosenburg, ‘US to construct B61-13 nuclear gravity bombs’, Janes, 31 October 2023.  ↩︎