'The F-35 may not have a “kill switch” in the traditional sense, but the countries who bought it are locked into an irrevocable pact with Lockheed Martin and America. ALIS/ ODIN might not be able to turn off the F-35 remotely, but losing access to it can make it impossible to fly.
Only one country has escaped the F-35 software and logistics trap while still being able to fly the jet: Israel. The IDF’s contract for the jet allows it to operate its own software systems without ALIS/ ODIN and conduct its own maintenance.’
So apparently only Israel can operate these planes without their weird DRM.
How do they lock the systems out so much that it’s so difficult to reverse engineer something to make the mechanics work? I guess you wouldn’t want to try and fly something to test new software but surely ground testing is possible?
Hey now. To my knowledge, Teslas do not fall apart in the rain.
Time to give everyone nukes.
Honest question because I don’t know: I thought the US could only afford F35 development and purchasing cost because its supply chain was internationalized.
If all the world would suddenly decide to stop working on F35, and stopped supplying parts, wouldn’t the US fleet also disintegrate after some time?
The vast majority of the F-35 construction is actually done inside the US, and that’s required for security requirements for things like this.
Now a bunch of countries (Canada, UK, Netherlands, and some others) did contribute to the development of the F-35 but I want to say it was only around ~10% of the total cost. And that also went towards the purchase price of their first block of airframes.
They’re absolutely right in that regard—technically, it’s more of a Deadman Switch.
“Pentagon denies”
Lol
Honestly, it doesn’t matter if it’s possible or not. The very fact that key replacement parts of the jet can only be built in the US means that the very moment they chose not to sell those parts to Canada, the F35 is on a strict time limit before becoming the world’s most expensive paperweight.
And that time limit isn’t even very long. Maybe two years of normal use outside of a war, as little as a month or two during a war or any sort of foreign deployment.
We’re kinda locked in for the first few planes, but despite cancellation fees, we need to replace our aging fleet with something from someone that won’t throw a tantrum and erase a key component of our national defense with the swipe of a pen.
During the 1960s, the Australian Army bought the Swedish 84mm Carl Gustaf rocket launchers. It was believed perfect for bunker busting. However, Sweden refused to sell us the necessary munitions because we wanted them for the Vietnam War.
If you don’t own the supply chain, you don’t own the weapon system.
That’s actually pretty badass of Sweden…
Not arguing that it wasn’t. Perhaps we shouldn’t have bought shit we couldn’t use?
Did it seem as though I was trying to argue with you?
OPEN SOURCE FIGHTER JETS
Open source everything!!
I really don’t want to live in the times where you have to fork “OpenJet” to protect your freedom from religion, then build your copy in your garage, but we might get to that point…
OpenJet
LOL what year is it, 2036? How have you not moved on to “warplane” like the rest of us?
I mean, having a few of the plane is going to be handy… it’s rare that your enemies will sell you their equipment to dissect, normally you have to capture it
and it has ultra poor flight time such that maintenance, and part replacements, are ultra frequent. Wouldn’t surprise me if 3 flights is a maximum without Lockheed consultant required word.
Killswitch, definitely not.
The ability to upload a software patch that bricks the plane, maybe. The critical question will be whether the owner of the F-35 can control (i.e. block) software updates, and also whether there’s a software backdoor to allow access in.
I’d give it better than a 50% chance of being accessible.
“The Pentagon Denies” means absolutely nothing. Their president lies 1000 times a day, and denies all kinds of wrongdoing where there are objective facts contradicting him.
Americans cannot be trusted, especially not when we are talking about military equipment that we may need to use to defend ourselves FROM THEM!
Just buy from the EU.
Just buy from the EU.
Yes, but…
The same could happen the the EU, as with any foreign power.
It’s unlikely as the EU is fundamentally built differently. But it could, no doubt a country that wanted to push through their adjenda by exploiting loopholes that haven’t been discovered/exploited because of “decorum” could still happen.Buy source-provided.
So, you get everything you need to maintain the platform with the purchase cost.
If you want updates and improvements, they have additional cost.
Like so many software licencing models. 1 year of updates - except it’s source provided.
It’s more expensive, but you get what you pay for.
Renew your licence every year for another year.
Stop paying? You get to use the EJ69 fighter jet platform as it was in 2019 for as long as you can manufacture parts for it.Or you could buy the cloud-hosted fighter jets. And risk the off-switch. But it’s less upfront cost, higher long-term cost
This aligns exactly with what I expect is the real truth. I have doubts there’s any actual killswitch because that’d be dumb - but a constant devouring of proprietary parts is absolutely the case.
I maintain that what actually happened is an airforce general bragged to Trump about how every F35 sold means decades of political dependence and service fees that would act like a kill switch to keep our allies in line and Trump heard the words kill switch and just ran with that.
Yeah, what’s easier?
- Developing a kill switch that can’t be discovered and used against the States… somehow
- Not servicing parts.
Probably 2.
Yup! Also, Chinese intelligence work is insane - the chances that America could keep a kill switch out of Chinese hands is so vanishingly thin that anyone with a brain would prefer that such a kill switch didn’t exist so it couldn’t be used against the US.
Even if there isn’t right now only an idiot would buy these things given how the US treats its former allies. Only Russia should have any at this point.
It doesn’t have a kill switch
Yeah it’s more like a life support plug.
Oops, turns out your purchased 100 million dollar jet aircraft is uh, reliant on DRM to function, guess you should have read the fine print.
If you have any complaints, please contact our support line at 1800FUCKYOU.
Soon enough we will be torrenting cracked F35 software from TPB.
The US is gaslighting us.
lmao it absolutely has kill switches. And I all but guarantee they go beyond the already onerous ecosystem and software demands.
I’d wager some of the kill switches go below software and are hardwired in at the chip level.
Are you implying a massive company would collaborate with a government to build hidden backdoors into its computer hardware?!
Pshaw!
thanks for the link backing this up! I read about it in a book but got lazy and didn’t want to try to hunt down a source lol.
