Earlier this year, Donald Trump offered India the F-35 stealth fighter. Last week, vice-president J D Vance reiterated the offer during a visit to India. It’s a terrible idea, and would almost certainly lead to the jet’s technological secrets immediately leaking to Russia.
But then, Trump might be okay with essentially handing the regime of Vladimir Putin the keys to defeating US air power.
India has been struggling for years to replace what was once a large fleet of old, Russian-made Mikoyan MiG-21 fighters. Most of the hundreds of crash-prone MiGs have retired, many of them without replacement. New Delhi is buying fourth-gen Dassault Rafale fighters from France as well as mostly-Indian Tejas fighters – but not nearly enough of them, nor fast enough, to restore India’s air power. The small, lightweight Tejas in particular has been long delayed and may not yet really be combat-worthy.
So it was surely tempting to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi when, in early February, US president Donald Trump offered him closer defence ties – including access to the Lockheed Martin-made F-35, the world’s most numerous fifth generation stealth fighter and the only one currently in production in the West.
But selling F-35s to India is tantamount to selling the jet’s design to Russia. India enjoys a close military relationship with Russia stretching back to the Soviet era. In more recent times India has been very willing to buy Russian oil, bankrolling Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine. And Indian forces operate Russia’s powerful S-400 surface-to-air missile system.
The problem for the Americans is that the S-400 requires Russian support. And when a military operates both the F-35 and the S-400, it essentially hands to Russian contractors detailed information on the F-35’s radar signature, as seen by the S-400’s radars. India might well supply other information on the jet as well, considering its close friendship with Russia.
It was Turkey’s insistence on acquiring the 250-mile-range S-400 in 2019 that compelled the first Trump administration to declare that Ankara’s ties to Moscow “render[ed] its continued involvement with the F-35 impossible.”
Turkey had hoped to acquire F-35s and also build components for the radar-evading planes, hundreds of which equip air forces in democracies across Europe and Asia. Now the Turks are stuck throwing money at a homegrown stealth fighter design that stands little chance of producing a functional front-line warplane.
But 2025 Trump is a different person than 2019 Trump was. A convicted felon with the full backing of an increasingly autocratic Republican Party, Trump has wasted no time wrecking American norms since assuming office in January.
He has filled his cabinet with conspiracy theorists with open conflicts of interest including lucrative business deals in China. He has fired federal employees, suppressed media he dislikes and pardoned violent criminals who rioted on January 6, 2021 and stormed the US Capitol. He has threatened to annex Canada, Panama and Denmark’s Greenland.
Equally egregiously, he has sided with Russia in absurdly blaming Ukraine for Russia’s 2022 wider invasion of the country – and in pushing for an end to the war that effectively hands a limited victory to Putin while extracting hundreds of billions worth of rare minerals from Ukraine as tribute.
“You should have never started” the war, Trump said from his Florida estate, addressing Ukrainian leaders who did not start the war.
Trump doesn’t care that his fondness for autocrats is bringing 80 years of staunch US leadership in the democratic world to a bizarre and calamitous end. If he gets his way, America will align closer to autocracies than to free countries.
Why then would he care if Russia gets a close read of the F-35’s radar signature? It’s not as though Trump would ever deploy F-35s in combat against a dictatorship he openly admires.
It’s not just US air power that stands to suffer, of course. Every air force that has made the Lockheed jet the centrepiece of its modernisation strategy will be exposed if and when F-35s arrive in India. That includes the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, who jointly operate F-35s both from Britain’s aircraft carriers and on land-based missions.
Russia claims that it already has fifth-generation fighter technology, in the form of the Su-57 (Nato reporting name “Felon”). But most analysts assess the Su-57 as being less sophisticated than American F-22 and F-35 stealth planes, or China’s J-20 and J-35. Worse still, Russia is struggling to actually produce substantial numbers of Felons.
Giving the most advanced fighter aircraft currently made in the West to India – a nation which is basically aligned with Russia – cannot be a sensible idea.
Earlier this year, Donald Trump offered India the F-35 stealth fighter. Last week, vice-president J D Vance reiterated the offer during a visit to India. It’s a terrible idea, and would almost certainly lead to the jet’s technological secrets immediately leaking to Russia.
But then, Trump might be okay with essentially handing the regime of Vladimir Putin the keys to defeating US air power.
India has been struggling for years to replace what was once a large fleet of old, Russian-made Mikoyan MiG-21 fighters. Most of the hundreds of crash-prone MiGs have retired, many of them without replacement. New Delhi is buying fourth-gen Dassault Rafale fighters from France as well as mostly-Indian Tejas fighters – but not nearly enough of them, nor fast enough, to restore India’s air power. The small, lightweight Tejas in particular has been long delayed and may not yet really be combat-worthy.
So it was surely tempting to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi when, in early February, US president Donald Trump offered him closer defence ties – including access to the Lockheed Martin-made F-35, the world’s most numerous fifth generation stealth fighter and the only one currently in production in the West.
But selling F-35s to India is tantamount to selling the jet’s design to Russia. India enjoys a close military relationship with Russia stretching back to the Soviet era. In more recent times India has been very willing to buy Russian oil, bankrolling Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine. And Indian forces operate Russia’s powerful S-400 surface-to-air missile system.
The problem for the Americans is that the S-400 requires Russian support. And when a military operates both the F-35 and the S-400, it essentially hands to Russian contractors detailed information on the F-35’s radar signature, as seen by the S-400’s radars. India might well supply other information on the jet as well, considering its close friendship with Russia.
It was Turkey’s insistence on acquiring the 250-mile-range S-400 in 2019 that compelled the first Trump administration to declare that Ankara’s ties to Moscow “render[ed] its continued involvement with the F-35 impossible.”
Turkey had hoped to acquire F-35s and also build components for the radar-evading planes, hundreds of which equip air forces in democracies across Europe and Asia. Now the Turks are stuck throwing money at a homegrown stealth fighter design that stands little chance of producing a functional front-line warplane.
But 2025 Trump is a different person than 2019 Trump was. A convicted felon with the full backing of an increasingly autocratic Republican Party, Trump has wasted no time wrecking American norms since assuming office in January.
He has filled his cabinet with conspiracy theorists with open conflicts of interest including lucrative business deals in China. He has fired federal employees, suppressed media he dislikes and pardoned violent criminals who rioted on January 6, 2021 and stormed the US Capitol. He has threatened to annex Canada, Panama and Denmark’s Greenland.
Equally egregiously, he has sided with Russia in absurdly blaming Ukraine for Russia’s 2022 wider invasion of the country – and in pushing for an end to the war that effectively hands a limited victory to Putin while extracting hundreds of billions worth of rare minerals from Ukraine as tribute.
“You should have never started” the war, Trump said from his Florida estate, addressing Ukrainian leaders who did not start the war.
Trump doesn’t care that his fondness for autocrats is bringing 80 years of staunch US leadership in the democratic world to a bizarre and calamitous end. If he gets his way, America will align closer to autocracies than to free countries.
Why then would he care if Russia gets a close read of the F-35’s radar signature? It’s not as though Trump would ever deploy F-35s in combat against a dictatorship he openly admires.
It’s not just US air power that stands to suffer, of course. Every air force that has made the Lockheed jet the centrepiece of its modernisation strategy will be exposed if and when F-35s arrive in India. That includes the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy, who jointly operate F-35s both from Britain’s aircraft carriers and on land-based missions.
Russia claims that it already has fifth-generation fighter technology, in the form of the Su-57 (Nato reporting name “Felon”). But most analysts assess the Su-57 as being less sophisticated than American F-22 and F-35 stealth planes, or China’s J-20 and J-35. Worse still, Russia is struggling to actually produce substantial numbers of Felons.
Giving the most advanced fighter aircraft currently made in the West to India – a nation which is basically aligned with Russia – cannot be a sensible idea.