US President Donald Trump's team has ordered the termination of vital support for F-16 fighter jet jamming equipment that Ukraine has. What is important to understand is that this could deprive the Ukrainian Air Force of its most important air countermeasures.
Is it just me or does europe really need to partner on building defensive tech. Why are we all buying american jets when their capabilities are quickly weakened when the wrong president is elected and cuts support.
They absolutely do. Imagine if the US invaded Greenland. The Danish (and European partners) F35s would be switched off for sure.
They can’t switch off the F-35’s. Countries can absolutely load their own mission program. They just aren’t allowed to by agreement. If that agreement becomes useless for whatever reason then the country can just load it themselves.
If there does not exist a kill-switch there are still so many things they can do. Here is an interesting read on the subject https://www.byteseu.com/812441/
Yeah but there’s a Gulf of difference between Afghanistan and Ukraine. There’s other countries that manufacture spare parts and have maintenance experience willing to help. Ukraine also has a technological sector of it’s own. Afghanistan was completely dependent on the US.
Don’t get me wrong, we shouldn’t be here. Trump is a fucking idiot asshole. But Ukraine shouldn’t be panicking yet.
The sad thing is, this would be a completely hysterical thing to say like 10 years ago but now it’s a serious consideration.
Electing this dickhead once is a blip but doing it twice in a row indicates that the american voters actually want this, which is deeply troubling for Europeans (and the rest of the world).
Bush junior’s first term was a blip. His second one should have been enough to look for other partners.
Most of the American voters were too fucking stupid to realize the consequences of what would happen when they stayed home instead of voting or supported the orange Putin stooge that’s made of turds.
Republicans have been attacking and damaging the public education system ever since I was born.
The problem is also that the us has proven it can’t be trusted. 50% of the population can at anytime vote a complete nutcase into office.
There is no way back from this even if by a miracle, there is another election and democrats win.
The world is moving on from the us.
Yeah, even if we elected rational center left leadership for the next few decades, it would take 30 years to be trusted again and we’ll still never recover our previous position of responsibility.
*think they want
Which american politicians get elected has almost nothing to do with the policy preferences of the american electorate. It’s such a propagandised celebrity contest with billions in dark money astroturfing in various ways, I doubt the average voter is making an informed decision.
It’s certainly classified info, but I sincerely doubt the F35 has a kill switch.
If you have a kill switch on a weapon, that means an enemy can potentially disable your weapons.
One can argue that only export models would be equipped with a kill switch, but that puts the US in the position of potentially having Allied planes disabled remotely, leaving the US as the only air support in a conflict.
It’s far more likely that the US would simply discontinue parts and software updates, leaving a former ally scrambling to maintain their sudden white elephant fleet, while the US updates their own software to better manage fighting an identical aircraft that they know the exact technical specs of.
It’s also worth remembering that a bunch of the electronics in the F35 were developed by BAE Systems. If we really got to the “trying to sabotage the planes sold to allies” stage, America’s F35 fleet would be fucked too.
Note: Iran still uses F-14 Tomcats.
Possibilities for implanting a logic bomb are endless, but there are still no case reports about an US-originating plane becoming remotely disabled.
(Russians would absolutely like to listen to a message which accomplishes that, meanwhile allies would definitely want ot change encryption keys on any plane which is supposed to receive that. I also don’t think that military planes will accept unencrypted messages. And their communications subsystems are separate subsystems, which can be disabled or replaced.)
Meanwhile, in a hypothetical doomsday scenario, Danish F-35s would land (or be unloaded from a container) in China, and be greeted with cheers, red banners and golden confetti. Damage to the US would far exceed anything that Denmark could do by firing something.
Note: these are scenarios which are not supposed to happen, but dramatic loss of trust among allies can actually result in that - if country A backstabs country D, there is nothing that really prevents D from betraying A to C.
France says hi
Sweden as well.
Yips, in Europe we probably need to decouple essential ( software) tech asap.
I’ve been saying this for 20 years. Proprietary software creates a dangerous dependency that takes away freedom and increases cost.
Now we see the ultimate downside to sacrificing freedom for convenience.
I said this to a few people and you can suddenly see the realization that their entire digital life is completely dependent on America and is now being called in question. It should of been before because of anti-trust, not following local regs, or taxes. But it was inconvenient.
Don’t know how far it can goes. IP blocks, MAC address blocks, DNS, Root Auths? There is basic stuff that is meant to be international, but is unduly American. America going to break the internet trying to use it for dominance? If you don’t want responsibility, or act responsible, you lose the power that responsible gave. If American fucks this position up, they will never have it again.
True.
The masses like convenience until it isn’t anymore. Nothing can be done, but pay the price and move forward at this point.
Also noteworthy, is that this " critical dependency " was strategically pushed as well ( part of the NATO deal so to speak). Although, many don’t want to actively speak up about it (lemmy post)