Military Fought to Keep F-35 Photo Secret
Canadian Forces tried to block rare image. Journalist obtained it anyway. Here's what the Pentagon didn't want public.
Somewhere inside National Defence headquarters in Ottawa, locked in a vault or a secure server, sits one of the rarest recent photos of the Canadian Forces in action. The Department of Defence didn't want that photo to see daylight.
But journalists from the Ottawa Citizen obtained it anyway—and the story of how reveals something about how military institutions manage information in the digital age.
The photo involves a Canadian F-35, the fifth-generation fighter jet that Canada has been integrating into its air force. These aircraft are expensive, cutting-edge, and politically sensitive. Every image of them in operation carries operational security implications—or so the thinking goes.
What makes this story interesting isn't just the photo itself, but the effort to suppress it. The Department of National Defence refused to release it through official channels. That refusal itself became newsworthy—a signal that something in the image mattered enough to fight for secrecy.
This is the modern paradox of military transparency: governments want to appear open while protecting what they consider genuinely sensitive. But in an era where information travels instantly, secrecy often generates more attention than disclosure would have. By fighting the release, Defence may have made the story bigger than it would have been otherwise.