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UK Demands Sourcecode for Strike Fighters
An anonymous reader writes ""The UK has warned America that it will cancel its £12bn order for the Joint Strike Fighter if the US does not hand over full access to the computer software code that controls the jets"
Lord Drayson, minister for defense procurement, told the The Daily Telegraph that the planes were useless without control of the software as they could effectively be "switched off" by the Americans without warning."
linky
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
It is for real. Unfortunately, the current administration seems to feel that it does not have to abide by its agreements in letter or in spirit. It's kind of the Darth Vader thing: "I'm altering our deal ... pray I do not alter it further."
This arguement with the UK has been stewing for sometime, and I think the UK is right to pull out. Canada is the only country with an ITAR waiver at present -- to the best of my knowledge. Since you can't *give* the Canadians weapons, it is a largely meaningless agreement in their case. And the Bush administration probably wouldn't give the software to the Canadians either (although they might hire them to help write it).
Once the agreement for joint American-Japanese development was reached, Washington had a change of heart. It refused to give, to Tokyo, the source code for the fly-by-wire computer program that controls the flight of the F-16.
The following summarized the American hypocrisy in 1985.
1. Washington did not want Tokyo to develop its own, possibly superior, weapons system.
2. Once Tokyo agreed to work with the Americans on the weapons system, Washington wanted to ensure that Tokyo would not have access to critical technologies: e.g. fly-by-wire computer algorithms.
That attitude from the 1985 is alive and well in 2006 -- in the form of the current dispute between Washington and London. Washington seems to want its allies to be permanently dependent on American weapons technology.
What kind of BS is that?
Both London and Tokyo should ignore Washington's hypocritical position and should promptly lock Washington out of English and Japanese fighter-aircraft development. Once Washington sees that both the English and the Japanese can develop fighter aircraft that is actually superior to American jet fighters, then Washington will treat London and Tokyo as allies on equal footing.
Right now, Tokyo is deliberating on the fighter to replace its aging F-4 Phantoms. Hopefully, Tokyo will not succumb to American pressure and will design a 100% all-Japanese interceptor.
Let us not forget the lesson learned in the Falkland Islands incident. Britain demanded unlock codes for missiles that the French sold argentina.. brits disabled argentina's exocet missiles and all that.
_ involvement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War#French
People are also worried that these planes won't be able to win against 'new' planes. The Ruskies have been sitting on the designs for the SU37 and SU47 because they haven't been able to find anyone to buy it from them.
The next Gen of Sukhoi fighters are going to be every bit as mean as anything the West turns out, and they'll probably have better flight characteristics too.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I do not disagree with this in general; the demise of many things have been prematurely anticipated. However, most of those things *did* eventually meet their demise, albeit not on the timelines of the prognosticators. The analog to this is armor. The US is field-testing several weapon systems now that will obsolete all types of mobile armor for the foreseeable future -- the operating parameters are such that no normal molecular material of any type can withstand the weapons as a matter of physics. Armor/anti-armor has been an arms race for a very long time, but it looks like it will be settled shortly. The US military research is dealing with the situation by switching strategies: rather than carrying armor that is worthless anyway, develop active defenses that can intercept incoming weapons so that you do not get touched. And so it goes on.
The reality for combat aircraft is that beyond-visual-range (BVR) weapon systems have become so advanced and so effective today that dogfighting really is largely dead when using these systems. Note that the US has very advanced BVR capability, most other countries are still seriously limited in this regard and so would be dogfighting quite a bit in their conflicts. The US saw the future as it developed the first effective BVR guided missile systems, but the platforms at the time could in no way deliver the future that they were seeing. Several decades later that future is actually here as originally envisioned, as the lethality and effectiveness have incrementally improved. Slow evolutionary steps.
Speed, range, situational awareness, and seeing the other guy before he sees you are crucial capabilities. The F-35 primarily exploits US capabilities in the last two categories for its advantage, which provides a huge amount of bang for the buck in modern warfare. Systems like the F-22 have a remarkable array of really excellent capabilities, but it costs a lot of money to produce a combat aircraft that is that good in so many dimensions that may be effectively preempted by other capabilities in practice.
It may in fact be reasonable.
When a military branch funds any program, especially an ACAT I, ACAT II, or ACAT IA program, it has to decide what data rights it needs.
The data rights it is allowed by law to purchase depends, in large part, on how the program was funded.
For Unlimited Rights, the government must have funded the entire development effort of the item, and then they can do whatever they want with it, including give it to other contributing nations.
Under Limited Rights, where the contractor has funded the effort entirely, the Government is prohibited from sharing the information with anyone outside the US Government.
With Restricted Rights, which are similar to Limited Rights, the software may have even further restrictions, such as a limited number of systems it may be installed on.
And finally, there is Government Purpose Rights, which happens when the contracted firm and the Government have jointed funded the development of a program. Under this data rights type, the Government is allowed to use the technical data for Government purposes as described in limited rights and for other purposes such as competition, but not for commercial applications. Government purpose rights are automatically effective for five years and revert to Unlimited Rights upon expiration of the five-year period.
There have been multiple programs where the wrong type of rights were purchased, sometimes because the contract was written badly, sometimes because there were mistakes made about what rights were needed.
This article doesn't go into that kind of depth, so it may be a case where the lead contracting authority (Again, the article doesn't go into who that is. It could be the Army, Navy, Air Force or Marines) messed up, or it could be JITC issue.
Yes, I work for the government these days. Can't you tell?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
There's huge, huge, huge differences between a nuclear power plant and a nuclear weapon. Nuke plants are not and will never be capable of the same level of destructiveness as a bomb. This is not to say that a meltdown doesn't release very crappy pollution, but it's not an explosive on the same level as a designed weapon.
(The specifics of why X != Y far overflows the capacity of the /. comment system. Suffice to say that even if the isotopic mix was right [it isn't, not by a loooooooooong shot], the configuration of a plant is all wrong in an area where tolerances are quite intolerant. [More info than you could ever want to know here.])
Probably the absolute worst that could be done with remote software would be a chernobyl-type event. And that assumes the target country's engineers blithly accept any plans given to them without taking a single look at fail-off safety measures (i.e. plant shuts down when critical failures occur rather than heating up further like the soviet design did). More likely you'd have either a minor three-mile-island type thing or a passive shutdown (no lights, but no harmful releases either).
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
In the 1960's pressure from the US caused the cancellation of the british TSR-2 programme. The government cancelled the TSR-2 and ordered F-111's.. which were then cancelled a few years down the line. A total fiasco.
Similarly, all the plans and prototypes for the TSR-2 were destroyed.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
The economy has limped along over the last 6 years. IYR, When bush first came into office, they made some quick adjustments to how unemployment, and the economy is calculated. They said that it was a "truer" measure of the economic health. It was not. It was designed to make things look better than what it is. And BTW, there are pockets that do well, as in every econs (during a depression, forclosure experts boom relative to normal time). Housing is a good one that was doing good due to the very low interest. Most of the other segments that are not real estate or federal spending related related, have limped along. And with the high federal and trade deficits it is hard to believe that we will make it back to where we were say during the 80's, let alone what we had in the 90's.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.