which is highly capable but a particularly bad choice for a developing country, especially one that has bad relations with the U.S. Iran showed great ingenuity in maintaining and upgrading the planes as well as missiles for them.
It’s on the order of 10 million lines of code running some very specialized, very complex hardware. The reason everyone was buying them is because it’s even more expensive to develop that on your own but I’d be surprised if there isn’t a lot of reconsideration going on now.
As a simple question, some people say there isn’t a “kill switch” which I’d bet is true in the sense that there isn’t an admin panel somewhere you could just ground Finland with but … how could you be confident about anything in a codebase that large? That’s even before you consider whether, say, the chaotic DOGE cuts haven’t created an opening for Russia or China to find something exploitable even if the original designers didn’t intend it to be.
The purchase of the Saab Gripen by Brazil also included a technology transfer component so the planes can be serviced and kept in shape without being dependent on Sweden. The plane engine is American so apparently they are able to influence sales through this as well as the normal bully/soft power/shenanigans the US use.
From my understanding, Israel pretty much did exactly this; however, I remember listening to a British military expert on Deutsche Welle explaining that when a nation reverse engineers the F-35, it locks them out of a lot of intelligence sharing from the US that keeps the F-35 military hardware functioning versus their opponents (Russia, Iran, China, etc). Keep in mind that as a nation develops new military capabilities, its opponents will react to this and switch up their own hardware/tactics so these updates are incredibly important to keep the fighter jet effective over time. Not as much of a problem for Israel since they have well established and funded intelligence agencies and a local military industry that can do this themselves. Their main opponents are also not as militarily capable as Europe's (Russia) so that probably plays a role as well.
I don't think it's a matter of reverse engineering. What I read indicated Israel paid the vendor for access to the source code, which makes a little more sense.
(the reason given was kind of interesting, involving a prediction that within a decade the stealth technology of fifth-gen fighters might very well be compromised by improved sensor and signal processing technology, and Israel wanted to stay on the pointy end of that)
There was a time when an Ally used to mean something—to be clear, it still does for the most part, despite the US Administration's shift away from its allies toward Russia.
An "Alliance" used to be built on core principles, trust, and alignment, it's not just a fancy word.
So the question is, why would an Ally of yours need to spend resources to reverse engineer technology you're willing to exchange with him, and vice versa?
Looking back, maybe it's not such a bad idea when an Ally shows signs of shifting to an adversarial position against you.
Or because Israel has sold technology to China before against the US's wishes.
Lockheed and its contractors have no interest in betting their intellectual property, nor the US in betting our national security advantage, to the whims of the current administration of whomever buys our F-35s. Therefore the avionics are constructed with robust anti-tampering/RE mechanisms. You can have them, but you can't make more or sell the secret sauce.
Leaks and property theft happen, both internally and on the outside - even the anecdotes of the War Thunder leaks are a good example of it.
With that said, it looks like what's happening is that Europe, Canada, and probably more to come, have no interest in betting their National Security on the whims of one guy pulling the rug on them, as Trump did to Ukraine to appease Putin.
The problem here isn't IP theft - it's about reliability.
The code was written by programmers working in shifts because LM was so late already. Probably easier to just rewrite than try to reverse engineer that crap.
