Technology

I’ve been working in the Dutch tech sector for decades. My general opinion about the culture of Dutch governmental institutions, including Defense, is one of neoliberalism and technological opportunism.

Public officials are completely ignorant about technology, yet misuse technology to advance their careers by starting megalomanic IT-projects, meant as nonsensical solutions to help realize highly unlikely business cases, that will only be realized (maybe) years after they’d handed over the reigns.

All of this has caused governments to become highly digitized, with large pools of IT-‘professionals’, yet barely able to maintain and develop the digital infrastructure they built up, because of a catastrophic shortage of tech-savy leaders and actual experts.

The reason I mention this, is because Dutch public officials are generally both highly techno-optimistic as well as highly techno-ignorant. Its not uncommon to see them making claims that sound misguided or downright false to anyone who’s anyone.

My take is that Tuinman likely shared his comment in an attempt to comfort the public, but that it betrays his fundamental lack of understanding about the digital infrastructure that makes up the F35. And if Tuinman is being fed this sort of information by his subordinates, then I’m worried that the experts at Defense might not actually understand the infrastructure themselves either.

The risk in all of this, is that Defense and the political establishment might be lulling themselves into a false sense of security, by underestimating the risks. Sure, you can jailbreak software, but many of the F35’s capabilities still require live access to the American intelligence infrastructure. Without that access, knowing there is no European alternative, the F35 would be a fundamentally broken plane.