Contributed to the Iceland garrison, matched the EU measures nationally, and supplies the radar picture over the Norwegian Sea.
At 03:00 on a Friday, engineers at Wright-Patterson revoke access for five allied air forces. By 08:30 GMT the maintenance consoles at RAF Marham start timing out.
Availability across the allied F-35 force falls by more than half in seventy-two hours. The United Kingdom brings forensic logs to Brussels showing the severance was administrative, deliberate, and American.
Ports, insurance, payments, designations. Hungary abstains and refuses to implement. Estonia records that the package "measures the rope while the arson is at the door."
Five heavy transports land at Keflavik in sleet. Royal Marines, French fusiliers, a SAMP/T battery on the Reykjanes lava, and Typhoons on continuous patrol. Iceland's demilitarised status ends overnight.
Second morning with no flying at Marham. You get used to the noise and then you notice the shape of it missing. Something is up.
Unusual: zero F-35B movements out of Marham today, zero out of Leeuwarden, and Ørland is quiet too. Three national fleets standing down on the same morning is not weather.
0300 Eastern this morning, Wright-Patt and Fort Worth revoked ODIN access for five allied networks. UK, NL, IT, NO, DK. Telemetry, supply diagnostics, mission data files. All of it, at once, on purpose. This was ordered. It is not an outage.
Breaking: RAF grounds F-35 fleet after loss of US-operated data services. Netherlands, Denmark and Norway confirm similar groundings. Emergency NATO session called.
Sorry, a stupid question. Does "grounded" mean they are broken, or that someone has told them not to fly? I cannot work out from the news which one it is and they seem very different to me.
Not a stupid question at all — it is THE question and the reporting is bad at it. They are not broken. Every one of those aircraft could take off right now. A safety system will not clear them because it cannot phone home to a server in the United States. So: …
Oh. That is much worse, isn't it.
Every defence procurement committee on earth opened a new agenda item this morning and the item is one sentence long: "what in our inventory has a switch we do not own?" I do software. The answer is going to be "almost everything" and it is going to take four …
Prime Minister Frederiksen: "This is an unprecedented, hostile breach of sovereign defence agreements. We are seeking immediate bilateral consultations with the White House."
Serious question from someone who builds things for a living: if you were the Japanese or the Koreans this morning, would you sign the next order? Because I would not. And that is my industry. That is my town.
The important detail is which aircraft are still flying combat air patrols this morning. Typhoon. Rafale. Gripen. Not one of them depends on a server in Texas. Twenty years of procurement argument settled in seventy-two hours.
Seeing a lot of "US hacked the F-35" takes. That is not what happened and the real thing is worse. The F-35 is not a plane you own. It is a plane you subscribe to. Three feeds keep a jet legal to fly: 1. Mission Data Files. Weekly. Tells th…
Everyone is asking whether there is a kill switch. Wrong question. There is no kill switch. There is a subscription. And the vendor has stopped taking your money.
We built those planes. We sold them those planes. We maintain those planes — at OUR cost, on OUR computers, for THIRTY YEARS. Now they want the planes without us. Doesn't work that way. Never did. They just never had to think about it before.
THANK YOU. Thirty years of paying for their defence while they lecture us about our own elections. If they want an air force they can build an air force.
I teach 8th grade. Tomorrow morning a room full of thirteen year olds is going to ask me whether we just sabotaged our allies' planes, and I do not have a good answer. Whatever this is, it is going to be in a textbook. Please think about which paragraph.
Genuine question and not a gotcha: who buys the next batch? I have spent thirty-one years welding things that get sold overseas. If the customer finds out the switch is in Texas, the customer buys French next time. That is my pension you are negotiating with.
I did two tours with Danes. Small army, no complaints, went where we went. You can think Europe underpays and still think this was a filthy way to do it. Both of those fit in one head. Mine has been holding them all afternoon.
I do not really understand what happened with the aeroplanes. My grandson says it is serious. Is it serious?
Eleanor, it is serious but nobody is hurt and nobody is likely to be hurt tonight. Some allied aircraft cannot fly because a computer service was switched off. Go and look at your birds. I mean that kindly. There is nothing you can do about it before morning.
Thank you dear. I had a woodpecker today.
I am a plumber in Copenhagen. I have never written anything political here in nine years. The Americans have switched off our aeroplanes. I do not know what to do with that sentence. My father worked at the base at Karup. We were the good ones. We went to Afgh…
Five heavy transports on the apron at Keflavik in horizontal sleet. RAF and French. Royal Marines coming down the ramps in cold weather kit. Iceland has no army. This morning Iceland has a garrison.
Prime Minister Frostadóttir to the Alþingi: "Iceland holds no armed forces of its own, but we will not allow our sovereign airspace and waters to become an unmonitored corridor for lawless aggression. Keflavik is restored to full defensive operational status."
There are Royal Marines buying coffee in my shop. They were polite. One of them apologised for the queue. Iceland has no army and now there are foreign soldiers here being polite about the queue, and everybody is being very normal about it, and nobody is norma…
Half of Iceland is proud today and half of Iceland is terrified and I have served coffee to both halves since six this morning. The proud ones say we finally have a defence. The terrified ones say we finally have a target. They are both right, which is the wor…
The Prime Minister to the House: "The GIUK gap is not an abstract strategic concept — it is the direct maritime and air shield of the British Isles and Western Europe. We are locking the gate."
Britain and France have just put a missile battery on Iceland. Seven hundred miles from our people in Greenland. Pointed west. Pointed at us. Remember who moved first here. It wasn't us and it wasn't today.
SAMP/T on the Reykjanes lava, Typhoons on CAP, Norwegian P-8s laying sonobuoy barriers across the Denmark Strait. Two hundred men and one missile battery have just turned an open ocean transit into a contested approach. That is what geography buys you. It is a…
A French missile battery. Seven hundred miles from our Marines. Eleven days after we secured the Arctic. Everyone screaming about aggression this month suddenly has nothing to say about this one. Funny how the escalation ladder only counts when we are on it.
It is an air DEFENCE battery. It shoots down things that are flying at it. It cannot hit Greenland, it cannot hit a ship, it cannot hit anything that is not already attacking Iceland. I am not being clever. That is what the letters SAM mean. If the presence of…