The US is ending support for Ukrainian F-16s, but there is a way out — online.ua

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).

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.

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.

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.

Sweden as well.

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.

Which is such a bangup job. The F-35 program was predicted on allies being able to buy it. Which they were in droves.

It's weird, but Trump might do irreversible damage to the US MIC. Not out of any principled stance, but because he doesn't understand anything.

The French learned their lesson here and its paying off!

Tusk would be smart to cancel the F-35 order and start buying European weapons. I believe the Polish Ministry of Defense was bought by the US defense contractors. When Russia does invade Poland, not IF, Poland will be in a shitload of trouble trying to get spare parts to keep the US shit rolling and flying. At least FB Radom is not compromised, their Wz. 96 and VIS 100 are well built.

That doesn’t make any sense, at least to me, as you’re in the EU, so any tariffs placed on the EU are placed on Poland.

I get the analogy, but it’s more like you have an old version of the software that can’t defend you against the newer fancier stuff. Continuous cat and mouse game.