Saab dangles sovereign data centre in Montreal to undercut F-35 fighter contract

The keep company is framing it as a "unique vantage" in the combat to convince the authorities of ground Minister Mark Carney to limit the purchase of U.S.-manufactured F-35s, which have all of their data stored at a Lockheed Martin centre in Fort Worth, Texas.

The centre would be staffed by Canadians who possess "Canada/U.S. Security clearance," presumably to handle data related to the defence of North America through the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).

"Gripen data will also be housed here, securely within Canadian borders," Fullerton said. "With the fighter mission system, communications and technical data all hosted in Canada, Gripen exceeds all industrial, security and controlled goods requirements.

"With Gripen the Royal Canadian Air Force will have full, independent control over aircraft, software and sensitive data."

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It's been more than a year since Carney ordered a review of Canada's purchase of the F-35, which has been under contract since January 2023. No formal result or decision has been announced, although the federal government has authorized the purchase of parts for the assembly of additional stealth jets — over and above the 16 fighters already on the order books.

As a counter to the F-35, Saab is offering a comprehensive package featuring 72 Gripen E/F fighter jets and six GlobalEye airborne early warning and control (AEWAC) aircraft. 

The company proposes to assemble the jets in Canada, playing directly into Carney's stated desire of bolstering the Canadian economy through defence spending.

The issue of data sovereignty touches a nerve, though.

As relations with the Trump administration remain rocky and the U.S. President continues to criticize NATO and senior American officials question the alliance's future, Carney has made establishing data sovereignty at scale an important priority.

A sovereign data centre for the country's warplanes ensures that sensitive mission-critical, operational and intelligence data remains within national borders, said Jussi Halmetoja, a test pilot and operational adviser to Saab, in a recent interview.

"What it really gives you is sovereignty — your indigenous capability to take the data that you collect, and to own it," he said.

Halmetoja said the centre would prevent unauthorized access by foreign governments and protects against extraterritorial laws like the U.S. CLOUD Act, which could otherwise allow foreign agencies to subpoena data stored on their servers.

"You can take the data that you collect, analyze it in your nation without anyone interfering," Halmetoja said.

The issue of how data is protected and managed among the international partners in the F-35 program has been a quiet concern for almost a decade. 

In 2018, the Pentagon's joint project office overseeing the fighter program issued a $26-million US contract that allowed Lockheed Martin to sequester each country's data and build firewalls to prevent the transfer of potentially sensitive information gathered by the jet — either mechanical, or mission related.

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The online defence industry publication The War Zone (TWZ) wrote extensively, at the time, about the Joint Strike Fighter's Autonomic Logistics Information System (which has now been updated and renamed as the Operational Data Integrated Network or ODIN) and how it harvests an enormous amount of data for aircraft maintenance in a system that could be vulnerable to cyberattack. 

The Pentagon's Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation raised concern about cyber vulnerability.

But the F-35 also collects a host of secrets from other nations, including flight path data, mission profiles, communications data, video imagery, electronic signatures, locations of friendly and opposing radars and potential details about an allied country's tactics, techniques and procedures.

Among some of the fixes that have been talked about publicly, Defence News reported in 2019 that F-35 operators can block some systems from sending data back to the United States. Italy and Norway have apparently worked on interim firewalls at Eglin Air Force Base to manage data sharing.

How effective all of the changes have been is unclear because the Pentagon, in 2022, changed how it reports on F-35 technical and serviceability concerns.

Asked for comment about the Saab data centre proposal, a top Lockheed Martin official says the company has addressed all concerns.

"As part of our government contracts, we deliver all system infrastructure and data required for all F-35 customers to operate and sustain their aircraft independently and according to their sovereign requirements and operational needs," Chauncey McIntosh, vice-president and general manager of the company's F-35 program, said in a recent written statement.

One of the leading experts in data sovereignty, Daniel Araya, a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), said the Canadian and U.S. Militaries have worked hand-in-hand for decades and will almost certainly continue to do so.

"But for the moment, we look at the U.S. Leadership when we ask ourselves, do we trust that?" Araya said in a recent interview.

He said geography leaves Canada forever embedded to some extent under the U.S. Security umbrella.

"But if we wanna maintain our sovereignty in the face of the United States moving in directions that we're very uncomfortable with — something that may outlive the Trump administration — then we need to think about having our own autonomy at the energy level, the infrastructure level, the software level and the data level," he said.

There is also, he said, an important — perhaps underappreciated — technology aspect. All of the data being gathered is being used to train AI models. If the data remains the property of one company in one nation, that's a competitive issue with sovereignty implications.

"If we depend on the United States, its data trail, its software, its broader security stack, then in a sense we become dependent upon the United States more broadly, not just for security, but for everything else that data facilitates, and that data feeds into," he said.

Senior reporter, defence and security

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