A widespread concern is what would happen to Dutch weapon systems if the Americans were to withdraw completely as an ally. For example, Dutch F-35 aircraft are dependent on American software updates. Yet, Tuinman isn’t particularly worried about this.
“The F-35 is truly a shared product. The British make the Rolls-Royce engines, and the Americans simply need them too.” And even if this mutual dependency doesn’t result in software updates, the F-35, in its current state, is still a better aircraft than other types of fighters.
If you still want to upgrade despite everything, I’m going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway: you can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone. (Crack it with your own software, ed.)
Except the US has killswitches hard wired in. A fusible link, irreversibly bricking it based on signal from the mother ship.
Where is the support for this? I believe they would but as I understand it they cut cloud services, not core functionality.
It is a long standing rumour. Not just in these in a lot of their gear. I believe it.
It’s also rumoured, going way back over 20 years, that the us has kill switches in a majority of the world’s computers.
I remember working with an old dude 10 years ago who pointed at the CPU in a computer and said “the government can turn that off whenever they want”. He died of COVID so take his quote with what value you want.
Wow if its rumoured it must be true