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Europe and Canada Are Finally Saying No to the U.S. F-35 Stealth Fighter, Motivated By a Desire For “Strategic Autonomy”
(nationalsecurityjournal.org)
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Well, there's the very real possibility of having to fight the americans, who install kill switches and make everything proprietary so you can't make your own parts.
So, go without planes, or pay your most likely military enemy for the privilege of going without planes?
No credible expert believes that the US has any kind of "kill switch" in the F-35, for the record. Such a system would be almost impossible to completely conceal from the engineers who would have to maintain these planes in service and the risk of that being discovered and instantly tanking the entire project would far exceed any benefit. Remember, the point of the F-35 was to arm the whole of NATO with a single attack fighter. The US benefited plenty from the project as it was, they didn't need to install kill switches, and back under Bush and Obama there was zero motivation for them to do so. People forget how long projects like the F-35 take. They didn't just start building this thing yesterday. The plane first entered production in 2006, and that was after a lengthy design and development phase stretching back well into the nineties.
The concern is not that there might be a "kill switch", but that the US insists on controlling the supply of firmware updates, which would represent a serious risk in its own right, not in a "planes falling out of the sky" way but definitely in a "We can continue to upgrade our planes while locking you out of upgrades" way. It's the sort of thing that, if applied over a decade, could create a serious capability gap between the US and anyone else with the F-35.
NB: To clear up another point of confusion, it is very specifically the firmware that the US controls. Everyone can make their own parts, but they have to load US firmware onto those parts. This another reason why it would be basically impossible to conceal a kill-switch; everyone has the full technical package, they know what's in this thing. Even a tripwire hidden in the firmware would still need some means to be remotely activated, which would be very obvious. This is a stealth plane, all forms of communication in and out are very, very tightly controlled. You can't just slap an extra radio in there.
A kill switch strawman implies crashing the plane in mid air. It is fully 100% confirmed that every single time you turn the plane on, your plane talks with Lockheed Martin in order to obtain permission to turn on. Israel, by coincidence, is the only country allowed to bypass this permission loop, with a special version of the F35.
Any country not a slave colony of the empire would demand the same ownership functionality instead of disguising their colonial tribute with useless military hardware.
Citation needed.