Summary
European nations refute claims that the U.S. has a “kill switch” for F-35 fighter jets, despite concerns raised after Trump suspended military aid and intelligence support to Ukraine.
While no evidence confirms such a switch, experts warn the U.S. could limit access to crucial software updates.
Belgium and Switzerland assert their F-35s remain autonomous but acknowledge reliance on U.S. data systems.
Set to receive 35 F-35s in 2026, some German politicians are questioning whether the purchase should have been made amid these concerns.
Yeah, I’d probably at least question a purchase of 35 $100mil items when the seller casually states they can just arbitrarily make them stop working on a whim.
Time to remove all the anti hacking tool laws and give nerds a go at the firmware for these things. Open source that shit and allow everyone to install a non backdoored version to their US equipment.
This 100%.
The US bullied the rest of the world into passing these anti-circumvention laws that make it illegal to modify the appliances you buy. Stick it to them and let us run our own firmware free of US cloud services.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/
I have been linking this blog too much already so i didnt link it this time but yes, thats exactly what i was thinking about.
Or just let the US know that if they’re gonna tamper with your F35s you’ll put one F35 in a box and ship it to China. They’ll have a copy ready by next year and software cracked within the week
I hate to break it to you, but China already stole all the data on F-35s years ago: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/theft-of-f-35-design-data-is-helping-us-adversaries-pentagon-idUSL2N0EV0T3/
And yes, I’m sure a lot has changed since 2013, but there have been numerous breaches since then, so it’s silly to think they haven’t conducted similar espionage operations in more recent years.
I highly doubt that. The initial development phases of these things are so expensive and complicated. They probably dont change even a single screw unless it is absolutely necessary. All the replacement parts and repair training would be wasted if they constantly changed stuff.
Hardware wise, I doubt much, if anything at all, has changed. But software and firmware most certainly has been updated. Part of what makes these platforms so powerful is their anti-radar, auto-targeting, and auto-identification capabilities.
Having an actual functional f-35 to train against and have for testing countermeasures against would be very helpful though.
China isn’t an ally of Europe. This would also be damaging us.
imagine if China did ally with europe though, they could put russia under their thumb within a year and eurasia would become the sole world power
Conquer and divide Russia? Everything west of the Urals gets to join the EU, and everything east can uhhhh remain rural Russia, ally with Mongolia and China?
Hey if normal people are willing to do it with printers, I’d expect countries led by those people the same with their fighter jets