Auf Wiedersehn, Swiss Democracy.

Another Successful Strike by the F-35.

            As I have previously reported, the push to unload the scandal-plagued F-35 aircraft onto allied air forces amounts to a sustained program to disarm NATO.  Now we have convincing evidence that in one country at least the campaign has inflicted a mortal blow on democracy itself.

Flying with the First Team

            Promoting NATO expansion back in 1996, thereby violating prior U.S. pledges to Moscow that this would never happen, President Bill Clinton spoke of NATO being as big a boon for Eastern Europe as the Marshall Plan aid program had been for Western Europe after the Second World War.  Impoverished ex-Communist countries took him at his word and scrambled to get on the rearmament bandwagon.  Needless to say, the U.S. weapons lobby offered eager encouragement. In April, 1997, Norman Augustine, CEO of the weapons giant Lockheed Martin, took a tour of prospective customers. Topping his product-list was the F-16 fighter.  According to Dick Pawloski, a Lockheed F-16 salesman at the time, the sales pitch was straightforward: “Augustine would look them in the eye, and say, ‘You may have only a small air force of twenty planes or so, but these planes will have to play with the first team,’ meaning that they’d be flying with the US Air Force and they would need F-16s to keep up.”   

The Monster in the Rat Hole    

            The same pitch is being deployed today to fuel sales of the F-35A fighter. In the last year alone, Finland, Canada, Germany and Switzerland have signed up to buy the plane, with the Greeks and Czechs following close behind, all seemingly determined to ignore the program's many and obvious deficiencies, as succinctly summarized by Christopher Miller, Acting Secretary of Defense at the end of Trump’s term: "We have created a monster..the F-35 is a piece of [shit.]"  Adam Smith, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, describes the program as a "rathole." Backup for these unequivocal  pronouncements has long been freely available in the reports of the Pentagon's Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, as expertly analyzed (along with other sources) by marine veteran Dan Grazier of the Washington watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. The gun, for example, cannot shoot straight; the F-35A (the variant flown by the US Air Force) is "fully mission capable" just over half the time; the plane cannot take off within twenty-five miles of a thunderstorm; the pilot cannot look over his shoulder because the helmet is too big, and so on.  Nevertheless, public interest, let alone protest, in the customer countries has been negligible or non-existent, perhaps because of a near-total lack of informed commentary in the European media. 

The Swiss Tried to Be Different.

            Switzerland has a long and honorable tradition of direct democracy, as expressed in regular referendums in which citizens deliver binding verdicts on any number of issues. In recent years these have included a proposal to curb tobacco advertising (passed) and an effort to mandate the deportation of immigrants convicted of any crime (rejected.)  This hallowed system allows citizen groups to bypass the political establishment, since the verdicts have the force of law. Thus, the anti-immigrant measure, proposed by a right-wing party and initially set to pass, was successfully opposed by an ad hoc group of activists campaigning on the theme that the measure was antithetical to Swiss values.  Thanks to this mechanism, the Swiss people even get to have a say on matters of defense and national security, a privilege almost universally denied elsewhere.  In 2014, in a vote organized by the pacifist group "Switzerland without an army" the people voted to quash the purchase of Swedish Gripen fighters by the Swiss air force.  A further effort by the group to beat back government plans for air force modernization failed only by the narrowest of margins in 2019.   So, soon after the government announced in June 2021 that it intended to buy 36 F-35s for $6 billion, the largest arms deal in the history of Switzerland, the group, in alliance with the Green and Socialist parties, launched  "Stop the F-35"  to demand a referendum on the issue.

Who Says “Moneyburner?”

            As noted above, there was much to object in the proposed deal. The military gave little sign that they had seriously considered buying any other plane, although the French, hawking Dassault's Rafale fighter, offered attractive inducements. Joe Biden personally lobbied for the arms sale (a core obligation for U.S. presidents) when in Geneva for his summit with Putin in June, 2021.  The Swiss defense minister forbore detailed explanation for the decision, simply declaring that the F-35 was by far the best aircraft in terms of both cost and capability. Displaying a touching faith in American blandishments, Armasuisse, the defense ministry's procurement division, stated that Lockheed's promises on cost were "binding," a view not shared by the Swiss Federal Audit Office, which reviewed the agreement and concluded in a May 2022 report that "[T]here is no legal guarantee of a fixed price, i.e. a lump sum in accordance with Swiss legal precedent, for the procurement of the F-35A. The maintenance costs for the full life-cycle of the aircraft are also uncertain." Such truth-telling went down badly with the  Armasuisse bureaucrats, who accused the Auditor of "endangering the interests of the [Swiss] Confederation." Investigative reporter Jan Jirat, covering the story of the "Geldverbrenner" (moneyburner) F-35 in the Zurich weekly WOZ, confronted Armasuisse with Grazier's coverage of the DOT&E reports, only to be told that "The author stands out for his regular one-sided and erroneous reporting on the F-35" along with the bizarre pronouncement that Switzerland "benefits from the oversight of the testing agency and its reporting," which it clearly does not, as Swiss taxpayers will eventually learn to their cost.

Don’t Let the People Vote! (At Least Not On Arms Deals.)

         In fact, a large number of Swiss voters have already provided written evidence that they understand the deal well enough to want no part of it. Proposed referendums require a certain number of citizens' signatures, in this case 100,000, to get on the ballot, after which the government organizes the vote.  "It was hard work,” Marionna Schlatter, a member of the National Council (the lower house of the Swiss parliament) for the Green party told me. "We had to do it over the winter, when COVID restrictions were still in place. The outbreak of the Ukraine war made it even harder. We gathered signatures on the street, by mail, at peace rallies. But we did it in less than a year, though normally it takes a year and a half.” "There was huge pressure on the campaign," Anja Gada of the Switzerland Without an Army group told me.  "Defense minister Viola Patricia Amherd went on TV to tell people not to sign,"   an unprecedented violation of the normal process. By tradition, government officials are not meant to intervene. "That was a huge scandal," Schlatter explained, "such a thing has never happened before in Switzerland.” Nevertheless, by May of this year the "Stop the F-35" movement had collected well in excess of the required number of signatures, of which no less than 102,664 were validated. It was now up to the government to schedule a vote before signing a final contract with the Americans.

The authorities reacted to this unwelcome development by declaring that it would be impossible to hold a vote any time before the scheduled date for signing the final contract, next March.  Failure to sign, insisted defense minister Amherd, would mean that Switzerland would forgo the sellers' commitments on price and delivery, be forced to renegotiate cost agreements, and relegated to the back of the line for delivery. "We showed them how we could have the vote at the beginning of March," Schlatter told me, "but they ignored us." Despite this wholesale flouting of established tradition, a majority in both houses of the Federal Assembly - the Swiss Parliament - have now obediently voted to finalize the deal ahead of the referendum, thereby rendering any people's vote meaningless.  Accepting the inevitable, Stop the F-35 have called off the referendum.

            "We always thought we had the best democracy in the world," Schlatter told me sadly. "But that doesn't seem to apply to arms deals."

A Heavy Load to Bear

            Responding to criticism that embracing the F-35 effectively terminates Switzerland's hallowed neutrality, the Swiss authorities have stoutly denied that buying the F-35 will render their air force utterly dependent on outsiders, in the first instance Lockheed.  But this is indeed the case. Lockheed has carefully designed the program so that customers must use its facilities for all but the most basic repairs. Furthermore, the Swiss will now be utterly reliant on America's  good graces to operate their F-35s even if the aircraft are one day in proper working order. Not only will they be flying with the "first team," - the U.S. Air Force - they will be unable to operate without it.  The principal selling point for the plane is its presumed ability, enabled by its (massive software capacity, to fuse a vast amount of electronic intelligence from a multiplicity of sources, thus giving pilots and controllers maximum "situational awareness" regarding the aerial battle environment.  In theory, an F-35 should be capable of threading its way through enemy defenses in perfect knowledge of threats that need attacking, friendly or civilian targets to be avoided and so on. The concept is rooted in the U.S. military’s fantasy of an “all seeing - all knowing multi-domain battlefield” in which all elements are connected and controlled in a seamless web of information, a system of limitless complexity, highly profitable to high-tech contractors, and no less highly vulnerable to breakdown or unexpected events. To perform its allotted task in the scheme, the F-35 absolutely depends on a “Mission Data Load” comprising vast files of maps, electronic signals, information about threat missiles, not to mention data about F-35 and other 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. Unfortunately, there is just one facility in the entire world for updating the vital loads: the United States Reprogramming Laboratory, a small facility at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. As Dan Grazier confirmed to me recently "it is taking them six months to update the data load for just one region, in which time the entire situation might have changed."

A $6 Billion Florida Vacation

It is unclear if anyone in the Swiss military hierarchy understood or even cared about this little technical detail, seemingly obscure but in reality all-important, let alone the entire sorry record of the "monster." Schlatter believes the military’s eagerness has been powered simply by a desire to spend time in Florida (home of F-35 operations,) “in the sunshine, with their American friends.” If the incentives were truly that trivial, it is sad indeed that so much is being thrown away for so little. As Schlatter concluded : “Now there will be no chance for the public to debate our being drawn into NATO. This couldn’t be worse for democracy.”