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.

  • vvilld@lemmy.world
    13·
    17 hours ago

    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.

    • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      6·
      10 hours ago

      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.