Dutch defense secretary says 'you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone,' and I'm here to tell the Dutch defense secretary that this is a great opportunity to run Doom on a fighter jet

As the Trump administration works to strain every one of America's diplomatic relationships, its European allies are being forced to reevaluate their reliance on American military aid and equipment—equipment like the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II multi-role strike fighter that's currently or planned to be operated by 14 European militaries who will, theoretically, be relying on American cooperation to ensure continued maintenance of their air fleet.

According to Dutch defense secretary Gijs Tuinman, however, Europe's F-35 fleet might not be as totally reliant on American maintenance as we might assume—for its software, at least. In an episode of BNR's Boekestijn en De Wijk (via The Register), Tuinman said the F-35 can be jailbroken "just like an iPhone," indicating that European militaries could potentially circumvent Lockheed Martin and implement their own homebrew solutions if the need arose.

"The F-35 is truly a shared product. The British make the Rolls-Royce engines, and the Americans simply need them too," Tuinman said. "If, despite everything, you still want to upgrade—I'm going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway—you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone."

While the fact that your military has identified a potential vulnerability in its fighter jets' software package might not be the kind of thing you'd want your defense secretary to just share for everyone to hear, Tuinman's comments contradict long-standing anxieties about whether—if relations continue to sour—the US could simply disable the aircraft and weapons systems it's supplied to militaries around the world.

Last year, the head of comms at German military contractor Hensoldt—a Lockheed Martin partner—told the tabloid Bild that it was "more than just a rumor" that the US could activate a "kill switch" capable of grounding aircraft it had supplied abroad. Years earlier in 2020, Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, said that the older F-18s operated by the Malaysian air force essentially can't fight without Washington's permission, because the country "cannot program the plane by ourselves."

However, Tuinman's statement has drawn skepticism from sources like the Aviationist, which notes that the F-35's onboard software suite is just a facet of a larger "controlled software supply chain that includes development environments, validation frameworks, and secure distribution systems." Even if the Dutch military could achieve aircraft-level software modification, it would also need its own replacements for the global-scale systems that the F-35 relies on: ALIS and its replacement, ODIN, which incorporate the aircraft into a global-scale maintenance, mission planning, and configuration architecture.

But the Dutch secretary's claim, however feasible, leads me to a more important question: If you can jailbreak an F-35, you can probably run Doom on there, right?

Well, it's complicated. An aircraft like the F-35 uses a distributed array of electronics, sensor units, and avionics computers, many of which aren't directly comparable with consumer hardware. But with the help of the peerless detective work of the sickos who were posting in a DCS forum thread in 2015, I was directed to a 2003 Avionics International article describing Lockheed's plans for the F-35's electronics suite as featuring off-the-shelf Motorola G4 PowerPC microprocessors—32-bit CPUs theoretically like those found in G4 Power Macs, PowerBooks, and iMacs.

We've veered perilously into baseless speculation territory, and I'm not confident about how much deeper I can dig into F-35 specs without ending up like those guys who leak classified military documents on the War Thunder forums. But in my book? The odds seem pretty good—even if it takes more work than getting Doom to run on a tractor control unit.

Unfortunately, I suspect the F-35 would need more intensive retrofitting before somebody could install SteamOS and turn it into the world's most expensive Steam Deck. We'll check back in when the next generation of multi-role strike fighters is rolling out.