Submitted 23 hours ago by AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee to [deleted]
I’ve seen a few articles now that US fighter jets have kill switches in them, so the US could just render them useless for anyone they’ve sold them to.
Is this true? It sounds insane to me, I’ve always assumed that countries that buy these jets have full control over them. It’s a gaping hole in your defence if you don’t.
They don’t need them.
Stop selling spare parts and they will soon be useless.
They are incredibly maintenance intense even in peace time. In wartime even more so because even minor combat damage adds up.
Iran bought 79 F-14 in 1974. Revolution and arms embargo 1979. In 1984 they had 15 airworthy planes kept in shape by taking parts from other F-14s.
They have since got some spare parts from hostage deals and the black market. Probably reverse engineering too so they have about 40 of them flyable. But the 5 first year has 80% of the fleet grounded should say something about it.
Turns out America's greateast weapoin in its fight against terrorism is the quality of its engineering.
I wouldn’t expect jets from other countries to be any different. Aircraft in general get a lot of inspection and maintenance. Military jets planes push the limits of what their materials and systems can handle, and it takes a toll.
Idk how credible the site below is, but they claim the F-16 averages 15 hours of inspections ad maintenance for every hour of flight time. Also that military jets are generally only mission-ready about 50%-75% of the time, which means they spend an awful lot of their useful lives in the inspection and maintenance queues:
https://simpleflying.com/military-aircraft-maintenance/
I would think that any decent military would stockpile any spare parts they would need to 2 years.
I understand if the supply stops they will eventually run out, but this is basic assurances that I’d think any military worth its salt would have in place when buying weapons.
I’m pretty sure it isn’t true and assume Trump misunderstood a general explaining gleefully that since the US manufacturers repair parts any country at war with America would quickly find its fleet inoperable due to the immense constant maintenance required for these planes.
But, the President claiming there is a kill switch should cause all purchasing countries to cancel their orders - if such a switch exists then there’s a backdoor somewhere in the software and the US sucks balls at espionage so if it exists China knows how to trigger it.
Turns out the supply chain for such a complex machine is in itself very complex. Some components are manufactured by suppliers in various countries formerly believed to be allies. This includes stuff like the ejection seats and some electronics that are made in the UK, parts for the wing sets that are made in Italy or inserts for the weapon bays that are made in Canada. Additionally the Netherlands currently houses the supply hub for spare parts for the European countries. It is estimated that there are spare parts to keep hundreds of F-35s in the air for a while there. The most worrying aspect certainly remains the software support, without which all the precious hardware loses much of its utility, even if there isn’t a master kill switch.
Same way you can buy a car and it can be remotely disabled by the company that made the car if they want to.
Always online always connected products are never truly 100% yours to own and do with what you please.
This is why the early 2000s Honda Civic will continue to be the pinnical of cheap transportation until the end of time
I throw the Toyota Prius 2 card on the table, IT’S ON
If only it wasn’t one of the most hideous vehicles ever made.
If a country doesn’t produce their own fighter jets (which only ~20 countries do) but needs to buy some, they don’t have a lot of options. And while it’s private companies that manufacture and sell the jets, the government of the manufacturing country isn’t going to let a business sell weapons of war to just anyone. The US doesn’t want to sell jets that might later get used against the US. So any weapons sales have to be approved by the US government first. Just like they don’t want to sell to an enemy, they don’t want the weapons they agree to sell to get stolen by an enemy. So they include technology (kill switch) than can prevent that from becoming a problem.
This sounds like unsupported nonsense to me, sorry.
No sovereign country would buy military hardware that could simply be switched off by the providing country, doing so would be tantamount to being annexed.
To me it’s absurd to suggest that this type of hardware could just be switched off remotely either on the tarmac or in the air. It’s an unconscionable security risk even for planes operated by the US. Imagine having this single point of failure for your entire air force.
It sounds like the on board computer communicates with a support service in the US and I have no doubt that if the relationship soured they could probably figure out how to do some nasty things through that API. However, you obviously wouldn’t plug your fancy plane’s computer in to your adversary’s API.
That said, the providing country could certainly make things difficult for you as regards parts and support. However, it sounds like there’s arrangements in place whereby all consumers of this type of equipment participate in manufacturing parts. That is to say that switzerland for example is responsible for the production of a selection of F-35 parts, as are other nations that use that plane.
The idea being that if the US withdrew support it would be a pain in the ass but not the end of the plane.
Can it not be removed? Or cracked?
Because encryption is a weapon of war (according to the US government, seriously look up why encryption tech cannot be exported even as open source to us enemies), breaking their encryption and trying to install your own software would be an act of war.
Kill switches also prevents sales of said tech. France?(?) Is rethinking their purchase of 35 f35s.
The kill switches are fine so long as the seller remains stable and predictable.
Especially given how bad the US is with regards to keep backdoors and their keys secret. Just look at what state hackers did with American telco equipment recently.
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but if someone is buying military equipment from an enemy, they already have a giant hole in their defense.
With all the software, GPS, and network capability of modern equipment, there’s no way of knowing what kind of secret backdoors were put into it. Especially if the maker KNEW they were selling it to an enemy. Why not put GPS trackers or a kill switch in that only you can access?
Of course, maybe both parties were allies when the purchase was made, so they weren’t too worried about it, but a lot of those alliances are being tested right now, and I do fear that the US will NOT be supporting the good guys this time around.
The few things I could understand about that.
Modern fighter jet have a huge software part. Remember the Top-Gun film where the F-14 needed an officer on the backseat to monitor radar, position, identify target and tons of stuff I have no idea about ? In machine like the F-35 it’s replaced by a computer. Like any other software it’s relatively easy to implement some permission to use-it.
Modern fighter are pretty complex piece of hardware, and you can’t just have a good mechanic reproducing a part with their own tools and need a whole supply chain running
It’s not even that new nor American only. Remember the Falkland war ? Airbus sent some french engineer to help Argentinian operating the Exocet missile because sinking a British warship is good for marketing and once done, the French gov told their British allies where the missile batteries were located (because their allies after all). Except that with modern technology, you can do both without having to have a defence industry engineer travelling. And realistically, any country exporting weapon would have way to make sure the weapon won’t be used against them (while not limiting too much their usage to not fuck their marketing)
I am very sure that it is true.
Not only such primitve things as a kill switch - because nobody can make any profit directly from deactivating a device - but also lots of dependencies from the manufacturers and from the Usa, for the supply of ammunition, materials, spare parts etc. The same idea that we know as “vendor lock-in” in lots of consumer products.
I’m not so sure. From a software perspective adding a kill switch is needlessly adding a potential vulnerability. Given that (as many others have said) the planes will need spare parts and software updates anyways I see it as quite unlikely that there would be an kill switch.
From a software perspective adding a kill switch is needlessly adding a potential vulnerability.
Of course they would test against all imaginable vulnerabilities. It is a weapon after all.
And of course they would make all the needed software tests in a safe environment where the switch doesn’t really destroy things.
need spare parts and software updates
As I said, no direct profit from the kill switch. But the possibility of indirect profit: for every destroyed weapon, there is the potential to sell a new one later.
It’s entirely possible that the F-35 or F-22 has something like that. Even if it doesn’t, it’s definitely expecting regular software updates which it wouldn’t be getting.
The older jets, like the F-16s they’ve given to Ukraine, I highly doubt have any kind of kill switch.
It’s only a hole in your defense if you need to defend against the country that sold you the hardware.
“kill switches” don’t make any sense. Nobody would buy weapons knowing they had one, so you could only use it once before your export market tanks.
And why on Earth would you program weapons that deactivate upon receiving a signal? Obviously this would suck if our adversaries (who are all technically sophisticated) learned how to alt-ctrl-del our allies’ equipment.
I don’t think they do. No military would buy such things. The way they prevent their own gun from being used against them is buy making the export models inferior to that of their own. Same applies to Abrams tanks too.
My thoughts exactly, I can’t imagine a military paying 100 million per F35, that somebody can just turn off remotely, leaving them dead in the water.
You cannot fight US with them
Or Israel. (Turkey apparently replaced the original avionics of their US jets so that they could hypothetically target Israeli fighters.)
soyboy77@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
Tanks and fighter jets are becoming less rekevant. The war in Ukraine underlines how drones are changing everything. They’re cheaper to manufacture (and buy/retrofit) and just about everybody can make or reverse-engineer them.
PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
We already have auto-tracking drones. They can lock onto a person and follow them around. The intended use is to allow live streamers and YouTubers to be able to stream/record video by simply sending the drone out. But if it can automatically track and follow a person, it can likely be reprogrammed to automatically home in on a person. And at that point, it’s just a matter of strapping some C4 to it.
cynar@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
The game changer will be swarm capable drones.
A few smart drones can be used to guide a swarm of cheaper drones on target. Additional sensor drones can feed back info to improve this.
Currently, defensive systems can cope with a drone attack. However, if you have 20 coming in from all directions, in perfect coordination, they will be overwhelmed. You don’t even need all of them to be armed, just a couple, protected by the rest.
Current drone usage is akin to the first tanks in WWI. The WWII equivalent will be terrifying.
AnonomousWolf@lemm.ee 3 hours ago
Their tracking capability sucks though, what you see in the promotional vids is now what they’re capable of.
The struggle to keep up with someone lightly jogging