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."

Comments

Is that for real?

[those.numbers]

Well, that's completely reasonable (note the sarcasm). It's insane to believe that we're even trying to withhold the code. I mean, would you buy a tv from a neighbor if they kept the remote? Chances are they'd hit the mute halfway through a Farscape rerun.

Re:Is that for real?

[Austerity Empowers]

You can use them against anyone but us. And uh, anyone else we don't want you dicking with.

This is a good reason not to offshore defense technology.

Re:Is that for real?

[w42w42]

The best explanation I've read is that they cannot adapt their weapons for use on the JSF w/o Lockheed/US Govt help. It has nothing to do with the US being able to *turn off* their JSF's.

I've also read that the French giving the Brits more than they were asking for with the design of their new carriers notes a possible side deal, that being them buying French Rafale's. If this is the case, the JSF issue has already been decided, and what we're seeing here is simply public posturing. Never seen a politician do that before :-)

Re:Is that for real?

[Stephen Samuel]

I'd say it's more like buying a car from your neighbour, and his crackhead son gets to keep the alarm control that runs a kill switch for the motor and can pop the locks on demand.

I mean, it's not like there's any real proof he'll use it (besides, he's in rehab right now and he's got a crush on your daughter), but....

Re:Is that for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Is that for real?

[drgonzo59]

Or, would I buy something as critical as an operating system without having access to its source code...oh...wait, nevermind.

Re:Is that for real?

[modecx]

If that's the deal, this ordeal has got to be mostly bullshit. All US/Europe/Japan fighters use NATO armaments, and it's my understanding that most every US armament that's designed to be carried by a fighter should also be compatible with any NATO fighter that has the avionics to support it, be they Gripens, Rafales, Eurofighters, Mirages, whatever. JDAMs, AMRAAMs, and AIM-9 missiles were all developed with NATO cooperation, it would be surprising to me if each weapon was built to support only one aircraft. And then in another way it wouldn't be very surprising to me, what with all the polotics.

The UK is an ally--since they're bringing so much money to our (remarkably depressive) economy, we should give them the code for any auditing or modifications they wish to undertake, AND we should help them solve any problems they perceive with the deployment of these aircraft, and just be done with it.

Re:Is that for real?

[NecroPuppy]

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?

Re:Is that for real?

[Wyatt Earp]

They would need the code to change the aircraft's envelope for various weapons. I was reading in an industry magazine about the software for the F-22. It's about to be upgraded so that the Small Diameter Bombs and 500 pound JDAMs can be dropped from the internal weapon bays in supersonic flight. Right now they can drop them both, but only at subsonic speeds.

So if the RAF had JSFs and say down the road wanted to use some new anti-armor weapon like the sucessor to Brimstone, they'd have to be able to change the fight software for them.

Re:Is that for real?

[eericson]

Defenseindustrydaily.com had a pretty good article on the situation with the UK involvement on the JSF B variant and how it ties into their carrier project. The real driving force behind the Rafael deal is the French military. The short version is that since Dassault hasn't been able to find any export customers for the Rafael, the incremental cost has been driven up. As such, they want to find another customer in order to keep the production lines open longer. (Plus it means additional commonality between their carriers)

I don't see the RAAF or Royal Navy choosing the Rafael, it's half a generation behind the JSF and it also means having to add catapult and arrestor gear to their next gen flatop.

Re:Is that for real?

[Hrshgn]

It's Rafale, not Rafael.

Re:Is that for real?

[slashbart]

Hi our little Space Station project. Maybe your project isn't mission critical, but mine is at least pretty high on the list.
:-)
Bart

Re:Is that for real?

[Runefox]

Actually, the British Royal Air Force is probably planning to use the same armaments as the EF-2000 is primarily going to use - The MBDA Meteor for BVR combat, and the AIM-132 ASRAAM for short. It would only make sense to use a common armament across all operational aircraft, and having the F-35 carry Sidewinders while the EF-2000 carries ASRAAMs would be fairly costly. However, I can see both the JSF and the Typhoon using Sidewinders and AMRAAMs during the early introductory stages, as they're "tried and tested" weapons. As more Meteors and ASRAAMs are put into production, Europe as a whole will see the Sidewinder and AMRAAM/Sparrow phased out.

So, again, it would be costly for the RAF to stock both ASRAAMs and Sidewinders, or both AMRAAMs and Meteors when they only really need one from each category - More likely the ASRAAM and Meteor. If they're not given the source code to the systems on the JSF, they won't be able to adapt newer versions of the missiles to the weapons system.

Mind you, work is supposedly underway (as it's still in development anyway) with regard to fitting the Meteor into the weapons bay, since it's supposed to work out of the box, and I believe that the ASRAAM is already programmed to work. Problem is, if any new armaments or radically different variants come along (think AIM-9B versus AIM-9X and you get the picture), the RAF has to call on Lockheed Martin / US. Govm't to program it. Either that or contract with Microsoft for Automatic Windows Update for the JSF's OS.

So they're really getting a raw deal the way things are, and asking for the source is definitely within reason. It's not as though the source code would then be leaked onto the internet for script kiddies to make their own next-gen fighter jets out of or anything.

Re:Is that for real?

[Bloke down the pub]

If the security at the manufacturer is as good as the Department of Homeland Security's, I guess it will be all over teh intarwenbs within a week or so anyway.

For the third straight year, the Department of Homeland Security -- which is charged with charting the federal government's cyber security agenda -- earned a grade of "F" for computer security

Re:Is that for real?

[Mutatis Mutandis]

Weapons are by no means that standardized. Britain, France, Germany and some other NATO countries still develop their own missiles, and also various electronic and intelligence-gathering equipment, which is equally important.

The USA doesn't really like NATO weapons programs unless it can supply the weapons itself; its attitude is fundamentally protectionist and contains a lot of "NIH" syndrome. It has, for example, pulled out of the development of the ASRAAM missile and substituted its own AIM-9X.

For the UK, not having the source code might not only mean that it cannot integrate its own weapons, but also that it cannot sell its products to other JSF users. For example, ASRAAM has been sold to Australia for use on the F-18E. If JSF is a closed system, the USA could lock out any such competition and force buyers to purchase everything from US suppliers.

If that sounds paranoid... US officials have occasionally admitted that one of the goals of the JSF programme, at least it multinational aspect, is to drive other suppliers of combat aircraft out of business and ensure for the USA a monopoly on the supply of advanced defence equipment.

Of course one of the other reasons is to make foreigners pay some of the bills for US weapons development. The system is charming: participating nations have to pay a large fee upfront for allowing their industry to compete for JSF contracts. Then they are sold downrated equipment that is not as capable as the F-35 as operated by the USAF, USN and USMC (if it ever gets that far). One of the reasons the UK wants the source code, I assume, is that it wants to ensure that its aircraft will not be downgraded too much. (Nobody would take Washington's word for it... not any more.)

For the UK, JSF will be a bad deal. If the two planned RN large carriers are indeed completed, there is no real reason left to buy the F-35, and the British government may indeed be looking for a way to cancel its commitment to JSF.

Re:Is that for real?

[Jesus_666]

The UK can always ditch the JSF in favor of the Eurofighter. Maybe it won't work as well for them as the JSF would have, but OTOH the Eurofighter is not a security risk capable of crippling the RAF.

Re:Is that for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

An Americanized Su-27 Flanker would be a damned good aircraft (agile fighter, low-radar signature, long range, can carry a massive bomb-load), and the Russians will sell them very, very cheap (about 8 million each if I recall). Don't underestimate Russian aircraft. As fighters go, only the F-22 is ahead them, mostly due to stealth technology (at like 190 million each!).

Re:Is that for real?

[PC-PHIX]

So let's assume that the US does cough up the source code rather than risk losing the sale.

Just like if I gave you the code behind my website or program so that you could have peace of mind and/or integrate other systems with mine.
Check it, recompile it and compare it... Satisfied? Good. Sale goes ahead.

Sure, it does everything that it is supposed to according the owner's manual...

.....It also has several undocumented features that allow me backdoor access, remote control and /or streaming statistics, GPS co-ordinates. You get the idea.

The key here is trust. Can they trust the US to document the complete inner workings of the aircraft they are buying? Maybe.

If it is a matter of national security, should you be buying your weaponary and vehicles from another country as opposed to developing everything domestically? The answer of course is yes - if you want to share in a good concept and for your defences to be as good as theirs.

But unless they can be absolutely sure the source code provided is complete or unless they plan to recompile the known code that they can trust and overwrite the current version installed on every piece of equipment, they are going to end up having to trust them (the US) just as much as if the source code isn't given up to begin with.

This is one of the ultimate privileges and power of being the creator or programmer of a piece of technology. Lawsuits for contradicting a disclosure agreement of some sort are nothing against what that control is worth.

If you can't live with that, then I agree, "This is a good reason not to offshore defense technology.".

Re:Is that for real?

[JerkBoB]

Does that include the skin lute?

*ka-thud*

That was your lame joke falling flat on its face. A lute is a stringed instrument, dumbass.

Re:Is that for real?

[SatanicPuppy]

_I_ compile from source and compare the binaries. I can't imagine there is no one in the whole British airforce who isn't equally paranoid.

By the way military equipment usually works (which is to say it is factory configured for about 20 seconds, then continually tweaked for about 40 years), I can't see any way in which an educated consumer (e.g. the Brits, who are capable of doing upgrades, etc, rather than some tinpot dictator out of S.America who is lucky if he has pilots who can fly them) could get by without having the source code. That's like selling them without an owners manual, and technical documentation.

Re:Is that for real?

[MechaStreisand]

HIGH radar signature, sir. It wasn't designed with any LO requirements in mind, seeing as it was designed back in the 80's. Other than that, yes, it is a great aircraft, if it is equipped with decent avionics. It's worth pointing out, though, that the EF Typhoon is also a superior fighter, as it is LO and simply a much more advanced design.

Re:Is that for real?

[JediTrainer]

Since you can't *give* the Canadians weapons

Right. And when Canada buys weapons from another country we get used pieces of crap that nobody else wants. We don't buy new - we take the mothballed junk.

Re:Is that for real?

[Politburo]

Who mods up these ridiculous analogies? Does this make any fucking sense? Analogies are supposed to make things clearer by comparing them to a scenario the audience is familiar with. Is anyone here familiar with a neighbor with a crackhead son and an engine killswitch? Anyone?

Re:Is that for real?

[Jesus_666]

Apparently not, but there are plans for optional thrust vectoring, which might give the Eurofighters STOL support.

Re:Is that for real?

[tremor_tj]

That's what they thought when they took the gun off of the F-4 as well.

Re:Is that for real?

[cmdr_beeftaco]

They should do more than give the software to the Brits they should open source it. I want a flight simulator running the exact same code the actually fighter runs. When the aliens come I will drive my RV to a desert airbase, jump in one of these bad boys and use it to inject a virus into the aliens mainframe causing it to self-destruct. That is the power of open source.

Re:Is that for real?

[TigerPlish]

That's the kinda thinking which almost killed us in Vietnam -- "The Dogfighter Is Obsolete"

What rubbish. There's always a time when it comes down to a knife-fight.

And if it comes down to that, better to have a light, quick, agile platform with a big fast gun, and not some porcine, overweight "missle fighter".

Re:Is that for real?

[GmAz]

Dogfights are obsolete as long as missles are infinite, and you have god mode on.

Re:Is that for real?

[VagaStorm]

First off all; I dont think parent tries to be funny, so stop the mad moding.

Second; I think many /. readers relate better to cars, remote controled alarms and crack heads than they do to high level politics and advanced military equipment.

Third; Even I find it rather rude comparing the us military to a crackhead. In some contries embasies are tourtched over cartoons, good knows what this could result in :p

Re:Is that for real?

[Mutatis Mutandis]

Yes, the Soviets routinely did this as well. Strategy aside, they were always paranoid about espionage and unwilling to export their latest equipment for fear that it would fall in the wrong hands. Besides, they would also sell on a large scale to third world nations, who would find it difficult to maintain the most advanced equipment.

Selling high-tech defence equipment has always been as much about creating a dependency relation as about making money. (This much fighter jets have in common with cheap inkjet printers.) When you sell someone an expensive jet fighter, that country becomes dependent on you for training, spare parts, maintenance, and upgrades. Not just until the next version of Windows comes out, but for the lifetime of the aircraft, which is now as much as 30 to 40 years. A $25 million jet fighter without appropriate support is almost scrap metal.

Of course it is possible to go without support for some time. When Sadat kicked his Russian advisors out of Egypt, the Egyptians briefly considered fitting their MiG-21s with Rolls-Royce engines (would have been nice) before they bought Western equipment. More recently, Iran has been able to maintain US jet fighters in an acceptably operational condition without (officially admitted!) US support, but it clearly has not been easy and no doubt cost a frightening amount of money.

Re:Is that for real?

[Kaychsea]

How about a recovering alcoholic president with borderline alcoholic daughters?

Australia wants it too!

[narkotix]

linky

We can fix it!

[SEWilco]

Gee, give us a few jets and we'll get right on writing Open Source Software for them...

Re:We can fix it!

[Comatose51]

I hate to be around when the emacs vs. vi and/or KDE vs. Gnome flame wars erupt. This time, it's going to be a literal flame war.

Re:We can fix it!

[Y-Crate]

"Gee, give us a few jets and we'll get right on writing Open Source Software for them..."

And the first time a pilot requests a feature, you guys will sigh heavily, roll your eyes and tell him there is a free terminal running emacs that he can get to work on immediately if it's so important. ;)

Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

Well after 1776 and 1812, can ya blame America for a little fail-safe? /tongue_in_cheek

Re:Come on

[eclectro]

FTA "...as [the planes] could effectively be "switched off" by the Americans without warning."

Actually it's not that the British doesn't trust us or that there is a failsafe, it's that we would accidently turn off their planes.

Personally, I don't think we should turn over the source code, because then the British would see that it runs on a Playstation 3.

Re:Come on

[general_re]

Plus hey it's 6am

No it isn't. Don't be pulling that GMT bullshit on me, mister ;)

Re:Come on

[zippthorne]

the US didn't exist in 1776.

Loss of service

[Sduic]

"...as [the planes] could effectively be "switched off" by the Americans without warning."

I wouldn't want to be the pilot when that happens. :-)

The real reason.

[gklinger]

America's reticence to hand over the source code has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with embarrassment. Why? The plane's control software in Visual Basic.

Re:The real reason.

[jd]

You sure? I thought it was in C#, with the GUI in BASICA.

The F-22 Under GPL!

[flyingrobots]

Maybe they'll post it on Sourceforge ;)

Re:The F-22 Under GPL!

[Sartak]

You must have misunderstood. The F-22 is licensed to the JPL.

Not quite an alarmist reason for the software

[Anonymous Coward]

With all that code, they don't want to buy this plane and then find out that it'll cost them a SIGNIFICANT amount of money later down the road to integrate a new weapons system or sensor onto the aircraft. The US can't 'turn off the software', the software doesn't have a 'Windows Activation'-style system to tell it whether it can run the aircraft or not!

Nuclear reactors

[ghoul]

I wonder if India is insisting on the source code for the control software for the new nuclear reactors to be sold under the new nuke deal. If not America could switch off the reactor control at any time and nuke India without even having to launch missiles

Re:Nuclear reactors

[StandardDeviant]

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).

Command Navigation Program

[Swifti]

More info about the Joint Strike Fighter's navigation software here.

No order yet

[El Cabri]

I don't think that the UK has ordered any JSF yet. What they did is pay part of the development costs, in return for the promise of a share of the industrial pie when the plane enters production. Their high level of financial participation was also supposed to buy them some input in the specification and some sharing of classified technologies, but the Americans largely didn't carry out that part of the deal, which has provoked transatlantic tension lately.

The JSF is supposed to equip the RNs future carrier ships around around 2015. However as a response to the US Congress looking at cancelation of plans for a Rolls-Royce engine equiped version of the JSF, the British have hinted that they could very well start developing a naval version of the Eurofighter Typhoon, or even consider the already operationnal naval version of the French Rafale.

Re:No order yet

[gurudyne]

"US Congress looking at cancelation(sic) of plans for a Rolls-Royce engine equiped(sic) version"

Not quite. There are two engine versions right now. The primary version, F135, is by Pratt-Whitney. It uses Rolls-Royce LiftFan (c) components for the F-35B STOVL. After the first several dozen engine/fan sets, GE was supposed to be able to bid with its F136, which has slightly greater RR partnership with the core turbojet and still uses RR LiftFan components. In other words ALL F-35B aircraft will use the LiftFan components.

RR gets a large slice of the engine pie regardless. It is just slightly larger with the possible GE participation. One of the ideas here is with a competitor's version as an option, there can be a bidding war in the taxpayers' favor.

And, until they mount bayonet lugs on the F-35B pitot tube, it won't really be a close ground support aircraft.

Folks, the Cold War is over

[ross.w]

If the USians are going to play this type of game, maybe we should buy from the Russians instead?

Australia bought French at least once (Mirage III) and the last two times we bought US (F111 and F18) we got totally done over. I don't know why we keep going back.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[aussie_a]

the last two times we bought US (F111 and F18) we got totally done over. I don't know why we keep going back.

Probably part of the FTA. Wouldn't surprise me.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[ross.w]

Well I can't call you an American 'cause then I'd offend the people in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc.

They're part of America too you know.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[j. andrew rogers]

I don't know why we keep going back.

Probably because the US has an aggressive R&D program that routinely produces superior combat aircraft systems. In the case of Australia specifically, they also get access (being old steady allies) to really fancy avionics and electronics packages which have no peer in the world of weaponry. The airframes and powerplants are extremely good too.

The airframe and powerplant is only modestly important in modern combat aircraft, though the US is very good at this type of design. The real selling point to countries like Australia is that they get more advanced versions of the software, electronics, and sensors -- the parts responsible for lethality and survivability to a very large extent -- which are one of the real strengths of US military R&D. The US will sell stripped down fighter jets to just about anyone, but they are very selective about the avionics as that is where the real capability lies in modern combat aviation. JSF is being sold with some very slick capabilities built-in; not quite F-22 level, but pretty close in many respects. Nobody else is selling anything comparable, and the closest competitor is the Eurofighter.

Australia buys US aircraft because the US is willing to sell it very advanced avionics and electronics for those aircraft. The US has no competitor at the very high-end of the quality/effectiveness market, which for military purposes is pretty important, particularly if you are a non-populous country like Australia that cannot rely on quantity to make up the difference.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[dorkygeek]

Hehe, USian fits you damn well. You don't seem to know the slightest bit outside your little world, do you?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan_MiG-29:

Many pundits such as the Federation of American Scientists recognize that in an individual match-up, the MiG-29 is potentially better than the F-15 Eagle or F-16 Falcon.

Russian fighters are indeed pretty good!

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[Moofie]

Russian AIRFRAMES are superb. Russian engines are pretty OK, but not as reliable, and much more labor intensive to maintain. Russian avionics are crap. If you don't know how these facts impact an air battle, you don't have an educated opinion on the subject.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[c6gunner]

Heh, sure, if by "individual matchup" you mean what the indian airforce did when they "won" a competition against US fighters: basicaly designing the exercise to prohibit the use of advanced avionics or missiles with a range in excess of the ones available to the Indian airforce.

What your highly vaunted "pundits" are refering to is the fact that the MiG-29 has flight characteristics and capabilities which meet or exceed those of comparale US fighters. What they fail to mention is that fighters are these days simply platforms for electronics suites and a payload. The days of fighters swooping around locked in a dog-fight-to-the-death are long gone. Anyone who attempts to engage the US ariforce in that type of combat will survive just long enough to realize just how stupid they really are.

Ofcourse, the other important consideration for any NATO country looking to buy a fighter is interoperability. Buy an F-18, or the new JSF, and you're gauranteed to be able to work side by side with the major players. Buy a MiG and you'll be relegated to the airforces version of KP duty.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[TubeSteak]

The US has no competitor at the very high-end of the quality/effectiveness market,

Ummm... the Ruskies?

I'm sure they'll get around to developing a stealthy aircraft one of these days. And when they do, it'll be able to land on a dirt strip w/gear up not destroy itself.

The F-35 just got downrated in it's stealth capabilities & now countries (UK, Aussies and others) are saying "WTF, why should we buy that when it can't even compete with the Sukhoi Flankers.

Here's the article I read a few days ago It's on the end of page 1 & beginning of page 2 that they explain why exactly the JSF is going to suck.

The airframe and powerplant is only modestly important in modern combat aircraft, though the US is very good at this type of design.

Actually, everyone and their cousin is worried about the sole engine design for the new F-22 and F-35. The military types think it'd be a disaster if Pratt & Whitney is the only company that sells a suitable engine. GE & Rolls Royce have a joint program to design an alternate turbojet and they're lobbying hard to maintain their funding.

So, I'm sorry to directly contradict you, but the powerplant is absolutely critical. So critical, that the DoD is willing to pump billions into making sure there is a completely separate engine design that can be used. Not to mention that if you read the linked articles above, the F35 got downrated because the airframe design is less stealthy when you're looking up the exhaust.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[killjoe]

"The days of fighters swooping around locked in a dog-fight-to-the-death are long gone. Anyone who attempts to engage the US ariforce in that type of combat will survive just long enough to realize just how stupid they really are. "

Isn't it funny that the only people who realize this are Al Quada? Osama is waging a long term war of attrition by making america spend as much money as possible while spending very little on his part (he has publicly said this is his strategy). Osama is waging a long term war like the one he waged in Afghanistan against russia.

I guess the whole idea of missilies, fighter jets etc have become moot hasn't it. The next bomb that explodes in the US will not come from a missile or a fighter jet. It will simply be in the trunk of a car or planted in the basement of an important building.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[TubeSteak]

The days of fighters swooping around locked in a dog-fight-to-the-death are long gone.

People are pissing all over the F-35 (another JSF stealth fighter/bomber/everything) because it can't go toe to toe with the SU-35.

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.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[killjoe]

Houses burn all the time, lots of houses burned down in my city, two in my neighborhood alone.

If I lived in a country in which no house had ever burned down since it's founding then I would not buy fire insurance.

So tell me, who is going to be attacking Australia? Who is going to attack them from the air so that the aussies break out their new shiny fighter jets and smite them. The kiwis? the philipinas? the south koreans? the balinese? The fighting fijians?

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[j. andrew rogers]

The F-35 just got downrated in it's stealth capabilities [google.com] & now countries (UK, Aussies and others) are saying "WTF, why should we buy that when it can't even compete with the Sukhoi Flankers.

The F-35 was designed from inception as an exportable combat aircraft. It is the replacement for the F16/F18, does not have all the features and capabilities of the F-22, and is intended to be "strippable". On the other hand, it is a lot cheaper than the F-22. It can properly be placed somewhere in between Cold War era combat jets (F14/F15/F16/F18) and the current state-of-the-art (F22).

As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication in the high-end electronics/software/sensors that pretty much make or break a combat aircraft today. The Russians are not producing anything better than western Europe these days, and are slipping further behind because they cannot afford to spend the kind of money required to keep up. A Sukhoi Flanker would be dead right around the time it even knew it was being engaged. The only comparable jet to the F-35 is the Eurofighter platform, though the capability mix is different.

While I understand why the F-35 was developed, it is kind of an ugly and unremarkable jet. It is still very capable, particularly with the smashing avionics/software the US can put in the thing, but was never designed to be the "ultimate" anything. Of course, the F16 has a similar history but turned out to be an extremely successful combat aircraft.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[lbrandy]

Here's the article I read a few days ago It's on the end of page 1 & beginning of page 2 that they explain why exactly the JSF is going to suck.

The airframe and powerplant is only modestly important in modern combat aircraft, though the US is very good at this type of design.

Don't believe the hype. Time after time in aviation history has shown that every time "dogfighting" was supposed to be dead, and designs were advanced, that it wasn't quite as dead as they thought, and people died because of the mistake.

There is a reason that the F15 and the F22 were designed the way they were... to learn the lessons from Korea and Vietnam with the sabres and phantoms. Never underestimate the importance of speed, either. When you are faster, you control the engagement. You can run at any time, and they cannot.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[Don_dumb]

I guess the whole idea of missilies, fighter jets etc have become moot hasn't it.

My guess is, that isn't the marketing line Lockheed Martin, Boeing and BAE Systems are going for right now.
These big deals are as much to do with employment as they are, defence.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[killjoe]

"I'm not saying they would invade, but two countries that come to mind with the potential to attack are Singapore and Indonesia."

Are you an aussie? Let me presume for a while that you are.

You are paying taxes, if it's like most other european countries you are paying hefty taxes. So is it worth paying all these taxes to get new fighter planes just on the off, off, off, off, off chance that singapore will attack you in a manner which will neccesitate the use of fighter planes to defend yourself?

In the US we spend money on the military because we wage war every election or so. We love war, we engage in it constantly, and as a result lots of people hate us and want to kill us. Australia is not like that as far as I can see. Sure howard has his nose up GWs butt like blair does but that's more of an exception then a rule.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[digitalchinky]

I wouldn't be so quick to say the russians are not producing good product, one example is the slotback radar in the Mig 29 - it is easily as good as anything built in recent times by any other country. (I'm an ex ELINT weenie so I can speak with some knowledge on the subject)

The Russians are as good as anyone else. This whole stealth thing is rendered fairly useless by using multiple ground receivers in ones radar system anyway.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[j. andrew rogers]

Time after time in aviation history has shown that every time "dogfighting" was supposed to be dead, and designs were advanced, that it wasn't quite as dead as they thought, and people died because of the mistake.

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.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[10Ghz]

The real selling point to countries like Australia is that they get more advanced versions of the software, electronics, and sensors -- the parts responsible for lethality and survivability to a very large extent -- which are one of the real strengths of US military R&D.

When Finland bought F/A-18's from USA they were the top-of-the-line planes back then (and they are very, very good even today). Now, fighter-aircraft have a system which transmits data between the plane and the ground and integrates the plane in to the greater whole, and the Hornet is no exception. One of the first things we did was to rip the US-designed system out, and replaced it with a Finnish design, for the sole reason that the US system was just plain inferior.

The US has no competitor at the very high-end of the quality/effectiveness market

Europe and their Eurofighter Typhoon? Like it or not, that is a VERY capable aircraft. F-22 might be a bit better, but F-22 also costs a lot more. And according to the only pilot that has actually flown both, they are neck and neck. He does say that F-22 has supercruise, but The Typhoon has it as well.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[j. andrew rogers]

This whole stealth thing is rendered fairly useless by using multiple ground receivers in ones radar system anyway.

Very true, for first generation stealth technologies. By most accounts, the US is currently using a third generation stealth technology that bears little resemblance to early capabilities and shares little engineering -- arguably apples and oranges. It is easy to dismiss US stealth capability, but the US has an unparalleled amount of (highly classified) institutional knowledge on stealthy design that spans many decades which continues to evolve rapidly. In practice, US military design tends to prove competent and with very few weaknesses that did not occur to the designers.

A few different countries are producing UWB radars of a type similar to current versions common on existing US aircraft, which have a lot of really nice characteristics. I expect the F-35 will use a similar type of radar, at least on the export versions, and I would assume the US has a lot of capability for dealing with this type of radar given their experience with it. The F-22 is rumored to have a radar that is a generation ahead of these systems which has some spectacular properties, a nearly ideal implementation of the concept.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Why does Australia need such high power weaponry anyway?

Have you SEEN the size of those cane toads?!

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[dbIII]

Australia buys US aircraft because the US is willing to sell it very advanced avionics and electronics for those aircraft

It's a lot simpler than that - as the obsolete and no longer manufactured submarine torpedo deal which required the Australian submarines to be modified showed. In a lot of cases it's just simple political pressure from elements of the US government to buy things from specific US companies even when some of the competition are other US companies.

As for the UK wanting the software - there's a story purported to be true that the US radar system used in a destroyer in the Falklands war tagged an incoming missile as friendly because it was made in France and it didn't show up on the radar display. Useful feature in an exercise - but not when Argentinians are sinking your destroyers with them.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[Wyatt Earp]

Not so neck and neck.

Here is the quote by the only pilot who has flown both.
In March 2005, United States Air Force Chief of Staff General John P. Jumper, then the only person to have flown both the Typhoon and the Raptor, talked to Air Force Print News about these two aircraft. He said that "the Eurofighter is both agile and sophisticated, but is still difficult to compare to the F/A-22 Raptor. They are different kinds of airplanes to start with; it's like asking us to compare a NASCAR car with a Formula 1 car. They are both exciting in different ways, but they are designed for different levels of performance".

  Gen. John P. Jumper, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff, flew the Raptor faster than Mach 1.7 without afterburners on January 13, 2005. The absence of variable intake ramps may make speeds greater than Mach 2.0 unreachable, but there is no evidence to prove this. Such ramps would be used to prevent engine "flame-out", which is caused when too much air extinguishes the engine's "pilot light", but the intake itself may be designed to prevent such flame-outs. Former Lockheed Raptor chief test pilot Paul Metz says the Raptor has a fixed inlet. Paul Metz has also stated that the F-22 has a top speed greater than 1600 mph (Mach 2.42) and its climb rate is faster than the F-15 Eagle. This is due to the fact that the F-22 is one of the few western aircraft with a thrust to weight ratio significantly greater than 1:1. The true top speed of the F-22 is largely unknown, as engine power is only one factor. The ability of the airframe to withstand the stress and heat from friction is a key factor, especially in an aircraft using as many polymers as the F-22. However, while some aircraft are faster on paper, the internal carriage of its standard combat load allows the aircraft to reach comparatively higher performance with a heavy load than other modern aircraft due to its lack of drag from external stores.

Not "neck and neck" but different aircraft for different roles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_2000s_f ighter_aircraft#DERA_study
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurofighter_Typhoon

In March 2003, during a combat training flight, 1 F-22A went against 5 F-15C Eagles. During the exercise, the F-22A shot down all F-15's without being damaged

In addition, the F-22 has a superior radar to the Typhoon in the Raytheon and Northrop Grumman AN/APG-77 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar

Typhoon's powerplants - 2× Eurojet EJ200 afterburning turbofans, 60 kN dry, 90 kN with afterburner (13,500 lbf / 20,200 lbf) each
Raptor's powerplants - 2× Pratt & Whitney F119-PW-100 turbofans, >35,000 lb (160 kN) each

Raptor's warload - It is estimated that internal bays can carry about 20,000 lb (10,000 kg) worth of bombs, and/or missiles. Four external hardpoints can be fitted to carry weapons or fuel tanks, each with a capacity of 5,000 lb (2,000 kg), albeit at the expense of stealth. Maximum gross takeoff weight: 80,000 lb (37,000 kg)

Typhoon's warload, all external, four BVRAAMs and two IR AAMs. Maximum gross takeoff weight: 21,000 kg (46,300 lb), "austere air-to-ground".

In early 2006, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Hecker, commander of the 27th Fighter Squadron (FS) at Langley commented to Jane's Defence Weekly (18th jan. 2006) that: "We killed 33 F-15Cs and didn't suffer a single loss," he said. "They didn't see us at all." after an exercise with 8 F-22's in Nevada in Nov. 2005. In that exercise, a group of 4 F-22s assaulted a simulated air-defence network of SA-10 and SA-12s, they opened a hole in the network so that B-2, B-52 and B-1s could come in, then another group of 4 F-22s engaged F-15Cs and defeated them 33 to 0.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[10Ghz]

Not so neck and neck.

Well, yes:

"One advantage of having flown the Eurofighter, General Jumper said, is that it allows him to get first-hand knowledge of technology U.S. allies use and to see how America's handiwork stacks up. He said he believes the two aircraft are running neck-and-neck, but America must always be vigilant to ensure it stays on the cutting edge of aviation technology."

So he clearly disputes your claim of "they are not neck and neck". What you are doing is that you are looking at some paper-specs. He has actually flown both. Have you flown either of them? No? Then what makes you the expert on this field?

Here is the quote by the only pilot who has flown both.

I don't see any indication of "F-22 is better than Typhoon" in that quite. I see him saying that they are two different planes with different design-goals, so comparing them is difficult.

In March 2003, during a combat training flight, 1 F-22A went against 5 F-15C Eagles. During the exercise, the F-22A shot down all F-15's without being damaged

Two F-15's tried to ambush Typhoon during joint exercises. The Typhoon outmanouvered them both and shot them down. Of course, it wasn't 5:1 engagement, but it was an engagement where the F-15's started from behind the Typhoon, and the Typhoon-pilot didn't even know that they were planning to ambush him.

In addition, the F-22 has a superior radar to the Typhoon in the Raytheon and Northrop Grumman AN/APG-77 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar

Of course you can find individual mareas where F-22 is better than the Typhoon, and vice versa. Typhoon has superior man-machine interface and the AA-missile being developed for it is clearly superior (faster, longer range, more agile) to the AMRAAM that is used in the F-22.

What is this, a pissing-match? I quoted a pilot that has flown both. And he said that they are "neck and neck" (of course there are differences, since they have different design-goals). Then some Random slashdotter pulls some specs and claims "no, he's wrong. Just look at the specs!". While F-22 is usually placed before the Typhoon in AA-effectiveness, it should also be noted that F-22 costs over twice as much as the Typhoon does (F-22: $152M, Typhoon: $74M)

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[Anonymous Coward]

>As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication

Just for the record, the F-35 is essentially a licence produced version of the russian Yakovlev Yak-141 fighter plane!

The original Yak-41 supersonic VTOL fighter interceptor plane had two prototypes that broke all world records for VTOL jet aircraft in 1988 with Mach 1.8 speed, but the demise of USSR stopped its funding for series production for small aircraft carrier ship use. In circa 1992-1994 the plane was redesigned by Yakovlev bureau as Yak-43 to feature land-based fighter-bomber functionality and dihedral sides for almost stealth level low radar-observability to compete in a state tender for the next-gen russian military aircraft. This is its outline of the Yak-43:
http://www.aviation.ru/Yak/Yak-43.jpg

It was disqualified for higher costs compared to traditional runway-based derivants of the Sukhoi-27 family and so only a static prototype mock was made of the Yak-43.

In 1995-1996 the Lockhead company purchased for several hundred million dollars of cash the blueprints, parts and technology of the Yak-41/43, including the revolutionary swivel afterburner turbojet engine.

They reworked the plane somewhat (replaced the vertical lift-only turbojets with a huge cardan-driven lifting fan), added more stealth and started to call it the USAF X-35 prototype. It won in comparison against the fat Boeing X-32 Mantaray plane and became designated as the F-35, but it is still essentially the russian plane. Credit is due where it is due.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[1u3hr]

So tell me, who is going to be attacking Australia? Who is going to attack them from the air

Look at a map for God's sake. Do you notice a large archipelago just over a narrow strait? A nation with 10 times the population of Australia that has invaded neighbours several times in my memory. They could ship troops over by the million without a strong air and naval capacity to stop them. If Muslim fundamentalists came into power it could get very hostile overnight, considering our PM has sent out trops into Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention putting tropps in East Timor when it seceded from Indonesia (that was the right thing to do, though it pissed off the Indonesians).

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[xtracto]

No, they are part of North America.
The United States of America has America in it's name. Canada doesn't, Mexico doesn't, Brazil doesn't, Argentina doesn't. TTBOMK, no other country has "America" in it.
Mexico has a definite claim to be aggrivated when "we" simply call ourselves the "United States". But, guess what?
We got there first. "We" were the United States for 34 years before Mexico was. So, in the spirit of "first come, first served": stuff it, Mexico. As a gesture of friendship, though: how about we rename That State which bears a part of your name?

MMmm that depends where you live I guess.
I am from Mexico and America is and always have been a continent, no, we do not feel aggrivated when you call youserlves the "United States", as it just describes a property of your country.

Sadly, I have to tell you that the problem with your country is that it does not have a name, see, the name United States of America comes from as you said being one of the first countries formed by "uniting states" and it was made in America (the continent).

The North Amercia and South America split was just made up by the USA, in a kind of elitist way but, again North and South are just properties (in the north emisphere and south emisphere.

So you are right, America is a name, it is a name of the continent, that is why (living in the UK) I usually refer to people from the USA as darn... as that as "people from the usa", usually I would call them "gringos" but a lot of people do not understand.

Of course it all ends in how your government wants you to know, as, you will swear that North America and South America are two different continents because you saw it in your basic school but then again who do you thing is in control of that?.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[rtechie]

I'm not saying they would invade, but two countries that come to mind with the potential to attack are Singapore and Indonesia. Within Australian defence circles, Indonesia is looked at on a daily basis. Also Singapore has a defence budget that makes our GDP look like pocket change

Indonesia, in addition to being battered by natural disasters, in currently fighting 2 (or is it 3?) civil wars. In fact, Australia recently invanded East Timor. Singapore is effectively a city-state that spends 1/4th as much money on defense and has 1/6th the GDP of Australia. The Singapore enonomy is totally dependent on trade and would collapse after a FEW MONTHS of blockade. Really, this is ridiclous. It's like claiming Hong Kong is going to invade Japan.

Australia (like Europe and the United States) faces little real threat from foreign agressors, and that includes China. The real threat is internal instability.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[candiman]

Australia maintains its current fleet of F-111s because they are the only things around with the legs to fly from Aus, bomb Jakarta and return without refueling.

We buy American hardware because they are our number one military ally and it is all about standardised hardware in the field. If our allies are flying/driving/firing apples we don't want to be flying/driving/firing oranges.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[InfinityEdge]

Of course it all ends in how your government wants you to know, as, you will swear that North America and South America are two different continents because you saw it in your basic school but then again who do you thing is in control of that?.

Um, I swear that North and South America are seperate continents because THEY ARE DIFFERENT TECTONIC PLATES!

Do you not believe in tectonic plate theory? Even without tectonics, North and South America are seperated by water on all sides (with a little help from a canal), that alone should warrent seperate continent status. Maybe you think Africa and Eurasia are one continent. Maybe you think there is no such thing as continents. Tell us the truth, are you an Intelligent Drifting proponent? A flat earther? An anti-continental? How do you define "continent" such that North and South America are one?

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[skribe]

Singapore has a defence budget that makes our GDP look like pocket change.

Oz Military expenditures - dollar figure: $16.65 billion (2004)
Sing Military expenditures - dollar figure: $4.47 billion (FY01 est.)

-- CIA Factbook

Must be the new math.

Re:Folks, the Cold War is over

[xtracto]

I am curious to know how much anger you have towards Europe and Asia being different continents. If you feel like talking down, at least treat everyone equally. Any excuse to berate the USA gets boring to me, and eventually makes alot of US citizens who may be on the side of your cause bored also.

C'mon world. Everything we do and every action we take is hated and deemed wrong. If we are always wrong, why bother trying to be right? Why should we care what you might think? Might as well just fuck 'em all, they are gonna bitch anyway.

You got me wrong, I do not hate people from USA, I have pretty nice friends over there and some of my relatives also live there (and have family). Really, people is not bad, similarly people from China or Sudan, India etc is not bad, I have a good friend (who just finished his PhD) that is from Sudan. My girlfriend boss is from Iran (and yes, he even teased her about the football game) and is really nice.

I repeat, what I have repeated again and again, I hate USA government. I really do, I really hate how are they pushing to [blo][fu]ck their immigrants when they do all the work that even black people do not like doing (apolgies go to Afroamerican people, these words are from the quite-less-than-lucid Mexican president... darn GWB and Fox are both cowboys, but that is another story).

If I am right there was a march some days ago in Chicago, darn even the employers of these people helped to drive them to the march place. Even the USA farmers are against these regulations because WE PROVIDE CHEAP HAND WORK.

Come on, some of you shurely have a latin or mexican maiden who cleans your house and washes your clothes every day no?,

You may get very angry at her because she did something wrong, but you should live in the UK for some time without that commodity and you will begin to appreciate that. I have lived in UK for almost 2 years and I miss to have a maiden that cleans all my disaster so I can just do what I like and forget washing plates/cleaning house etc.

Maybe Ballmer was right

[rsborg]

When he said that the Microsoft way was the "American way"... I mean, lets look at the facts:

• The US always says "trust us", and then acts in a manner to prove why you shouldn't... just like some folks from Redmond.
• The US is all about coercive power... kind of like a coercive monopoly we all know.
• The US built it's fortune from land stolen from the Native Americans... just like Microsoft built their fortune on someone else's code.
• The US spends a vast fortune spinning each bad thing that comes their way, and never admitting they did any wrong... because to do so would look weak. Sounds very familiar indeed.

Ultimately, this proves one point... you should never trust any group to do the right thing... not the US, not Google, or Microsoft, and it was foolish in this case that the UK trusted a US company (part of the US military industrial complex)... there should have been a demand for this openness in the contract and at the first sign of secrecy the UK should have threatened to stop payment.

Source Code Won't Help

[KidSock]

If there was a backdoor in the flight control software, I doubt it would help the UK if we gave them the source code because the backdoor would almost certainly be hidden very well. In fact, the backdoor could be in the compiler in which case they would not find anything in the source code. And they can't recompile the sourcecode with their own compiler because they would have to retest everything.

Re:Source Code Won't Help

[stonefoz]

Bootstraping the compiler first is a must for any security, at least if you don't trust it. if you don't know what your compiler is doing, you don't know much. I'm thankful gentoo makes it much easier that by hand, but cross compiling would almost be a given, so anything that reads the source should work. I'd trust gcc from the original site. I don't know of any "real" crosscompilers that are not opensource. But, the only problem is if it runs wince, I'd ask for my money back.

Re:Source Code Won't Help

[MichaelSmith]

If there was a backdoor in the flight control software, I doubt it would help the UK if we gave them the source code because the backdoor would almost certainly be hidden very well.

They may have to pay a lot of smart guys to go into the code and find out what it does. Happens all the time, I assure you.

In fact, the backdoor could be in the compiler in which case they would not find anything in the source code. And they can't recompile the sourcecode with their own compiler because they would have to retest everything.

A full validation of the system is a good idea every couple of years anyway. I don't see why this shouldn't happen.

A quick test would be to compile the software and compare your executables with binaries from the distribution. It will at least tell you where there are issues.

Don't know why Australia keeps going back...

[inflex]

After the disasters that came with the F1-11 and the F-18, I'm astounded that Australia is -still- going back for another beating. I've got a brother-in-law who works with the F-18's and there's absolutely no end to the 'critical failures' that they're seeing. Given the technical 'superiority' of these JSF's, I'm expecting they'll barely get out of the maintainance hangers. I can't even see a tactical purpose for the JSF in this sun charred, massively open country.

To be fair, after a lot of overhauls and modifications the F1-11 actually turned out to be a good plane, the F-18 on the other hand...

Re:Don't know why Australia keeps going back...

[lbrandy]

I've got a brother-in-law who works with the F-18's and there's absolutely no end to the 'critical failures' that they're seeing. Given the technical 'superiority' of these JSF's, I'm expecting they'll barely get out of the maintainance hangers.

To be fair, after a lot of overhauls and modifications the F1-11 actually turned out to be a good plane, the F-18 on the other hand...

Oh, please. I was an engineer who worked mostly on F15s, but I still have enough expertise to call bullshit. You have it completely backwards. The F-111 was a maintence mess and it became obselete reasonably quickly given the changing dynamic.. by the time they finally got their acts together, it was on its way out the door... but the F18? Are you crazy? It's one of the very few examples of major acquisition programs that went off relatively cleanly. The first 18Es delivered met all the specs, on schedule, and on budget. It has a reputation, in the navy, as being the most dependable plane they have. I've heard it quoted that the Hornet has 3x the mean-time-to-failure of any other aircraft they have. The plane was designed to replace the 14 Tomcat and has, as far as I know, exceeded all expectations. It's better, stronger, cheaper to operate, and is less failure prone.

I don't know who your "brother in law" is, but all planes have problems. All planes need to be fixed. They are not simple. They get old, and things go bad. It happens. Considering the F18 anything but a resounding success, however, is incredibly ill-informed.

I can't even see a tactical purpose for the JSF in this sun charred, massively open country.

You can't? How about the fact that the F18E is one the best anti-ship attack aircraft in the world? Do I need to explain to you the tactical advantage of Australia having that capability? How about the fact that it's far superior air-to-air compared with any of the cold-war era relic airplanes that every rogue nation on that side of the globe has? Even China.

Re:Don't know why Australia keeps going back...

[inflex]

The F18's here are having to have total center barrel replacements - mostly because we've used them for roles where the US uses F16/15's. Good case of using the wrong tool for the job.

The F18's precision bombing ability has only been a recent addition in -our- fleet. Perhaps you guys got some better stuff first up.

The F18 has insufficient range, speed or strike power to make it ideally practical here in AUSTRALIA. A little different no doubt in the US.

The F18 isn't really suited for independent action across our gulf to areas such as Indonesia, even more so now with our "opponents" having purchased the Sukhoi's

The JSF, with about 2000km (vs F111's 6000km) range falls a bit short too. We're a big and SPARSELY populated country here and we don't have the budget to realistically put a nice squadron of JSF's at every bay.

Basically, Australia is trading its independence ability in and leaning more on the US to support us in the military role.

Mostly, I'd say it's more a case perhaps of politics causing poor choices, than the planes themselves being implicitly bad.

Feel free to browse over - http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-FAQ-2005.html

Re:Don't know why Australia keeps going back...

[drew]

It didn't look to me like he was complaining that the F-18 was a bad plane. It looks to me that his comments were more along the lines of "Why does my government keep buying planes that aren't capable of doing the jobs we need to do?" And while I'm not too familiar with the US/AUS weapons deals, I would say that if I went to buy a car from a car dealer, and he sold me completely the wrong car for the job I told him I needed to do, then I would think twice about going back to the same dealer the second time. (On the other hand, if I didn't tell him what I needed the car for, or told him the wrong thing, then I suppose I have no one but myself to blame.)

Nice to see...

[Black Parrot]

Nice to see how much confidence we inspire in our closest allies.

Small wonder our enemies don't trust us.

Re:Nice to see...

[jimicus]

Small wonder our enemies don't trust us.

If they trusted you they wouldn't be your enemy.

You'd be insane not to allow for doing that!

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know? Is it impossible to believe that the US government might want a safety net for modern weapons that deactivates them if they don't receive a signal targeted to the plane's serial number every hour while in flight, with said signal broadcast by satellites with worldwide coverage....GPS perhaps?

I'm a US citizen but not particularly a fan of how our government does business, but if I was in charge of hardware with such potential damage in the wrong hands, I'd insist on some sort of controls like that, even on what stays under US control. What if one of those nutjobs Americans who fought alongside the Taliban instead enlisted and become a pilot, and then flew off course on a mission in the Middle East and handed the plane over to Al Qaeda? Even if it needed special codes to make the weapons work the plane itself would be a pretty dandy weapon flying at Mach 3 into a nuclear aircraft carrier or Saudi oil refinery.

Re:You'd be insane not to allow for doing that!

[Goth Biker Babe]

Hey, I think the Brits want it so that they can shut down US planes...

In the first Iraq war we lost far more to US forces that the Iraqis. I notice that for the second war they trained your guys in "how to recognise your allies".

And what about the common folks

[nicolas.kassis]

Well, the British military wants to have the source code to there software. I guess we the common folks should do the same and require our software to be open and free from what ever device the coporation have inserted into our software to control us.
Nic P.S Oh well I'm way too political for 12:45 pm. I should probably shut up.

Nothing to see here

[lhoriman]

Lockheed's chief scientist, Dr. Gaius Baltar, stated last Friday: "There is absolutely, I repeat, absolutely, no way that the Joint Strike Fighters could be shut down with a software instruction".

Future upgrades

[csirac]

Aircraft have lifespans measured in decades.

It is inconceivable that a country would buy combat aircraft and expect to use its stock-standard factory installed avionics, weapons systems, sensors, etc. unmodified for 25 years.

Australia has been burnt badly in the past cost-wise with the F-111 and F/A-18 hornets with respect to the USA failing to even think about the transfer of necessary intellectual property that would allow our own contractors to take on upgrade projects.

Instead, we had to use expensive US defense contractors (Boeing? Honeywell? Raytheon? I forget).

AFAICT the F-111 turned out to be a nice plane, but keeping it and the hornets up-to-date could have been MUCH cheaper if the USA weren't arseholes about it all.

Someone's been watching Battlestar Galactica...

[surfcow]

There goes our secret plan to take over England.

Drats. Foiled again.

I never understood the F-18 thing

[caitsith01]

When we could have had the vastly superior F-16 or F-15. It's not like we need the naval capabilities of the F-18.

The US is scrapping their Tomcats, maybe we should just pick some of those up on the cheap.

In any event, I think you will find the JSF program participation is more to do with the AUSFTA and related political maneuvering and less to do with any inherent characteristics of the plane.

Re:How SPECIAL is the UK to the US?

[El Cabri]

They don't absolutely need these planes to be V/STOL since they are to be used on their future, full-size carrier which, unlike their existing mini-carriers will be able to operate any kind of naval jet like F/A-18 or Rafale M provided they are fitted with a catapult.

The design of their future carriers is already supposed to be largely shared with that of France's second carrier which is supposed anyway to operate Rafales. So the decision to dump V/STOL would simplify things actually.

Smoke screen?

[Rank_Tyro]

I can think of no real reason other than research and development for this attitued. The UK would need the source in order to develope new weapons systems, and to intergrate current weapons systems onto the aircraft.

  Modern fighter/bomber aircraft are extensivly intergrated. The flight controls, the radar, navigation and cockpit displays all interact with each other in order to put munitions on target.

It is more likely that the UK wants to be able to develope new munitions without having to pay the USA in order to get a new weapon online. I can also understand that the Brits might not want to buy all of their munitions from the US when they can develope and manufature their own.

It is an entirely resonable request to make. F-18s F-16s F-4s are sold throughout the world, and even built under licence by foreign governments. I don't remember hearing that any of the software associated with those programs was being denied to the end user.

As long as you have the required diplomatic connections, a production license, and an end user certificate, it becomes your airplane. There may be some bs reason about the stealth technology but that is more hardware than soft ware.

I can't help but think that this is political posturing in order to get something else

Re:Smoke screen?

[csirac]

I don't remember hearing that any of the software associated with those programs was being denied to the end user.

Wrong, Australia was burnt with both the F/A-18 Hornet and F-111.

A Big Deal: Australia's air combat capability:

There are a number of lessons to be learnt from the experience of industry involvement in the F/A-18 program...

... A further significant hangover from the F/A-18A program was caused by the unsatisfactory handling of technology transfer and of intellectual property. Australia had expectations that, as a consequence of our large capital outlay, significant technology relating to manufacture and support of the aircraft would be transferred to Australia and access would be granted to software source code. Australia's expectations were not met, although when considered against our ability to usefully exploit the software code they may have been unrealistically high. Perhaps the core of the software issue was our lack of access to the source code needed for a full understanding of the aircraft radar, and an inability to reprogram the electronic warfare system in accordance with Australian requirements.

Countries generally want to be self-sufficient, or at least don't want to be trapped into being dependant on others.

Also important is that instead of the government allowing native defense contractors to take on upgrade projects, we are forced into using (expensive) US ones. So that expense goes into a black-hole, it doesn't stimulate our own economy or develop our own aviation industry.

This is not comparable to desktop software at all.

As far as real security goes

[stox]

Having all the source code, and being able to trust it, is only one facet of what is needed. Unless you can trust the entire tool chain, all the code embodied in silicon, etc., you can not fully trust the system. This brings up an interesting issue. Systems are geting so complex, there is simply not enough time to audit them to build real trust.

Folks, the War of 1812 is over

[theshowmecanuck]

Actually Canada is part of the Americas. Specifically North America. But we're not part of the United States of America. We are not Americans. You probably just offended a tonne of other Canadians by saying we could be considered Americans. We define what we call ourselves, and we don't consider ourselves Americans, even though they are our closest friend, are our neighbour, and we are the worlds biggest trading partners ($US1.5B to $US2B/day).

Now that said, I personally don't get too worked up over others trying to call me American, but I do want to correct them. I actually like America... I lived in Missouri for 5 years (hence 'theshowmecanuck' for the 'show me' state), and wouldn't have stayed there that long if I didn't like it. But I am Canadian, not American. Mind you, there are some Canadians who forget the 'War of 1812' ended 192 years ago, and do get quite upset over being called American (or anything else American). I don't get it myself. We have differences, but who doesn't.

Watching Too Much StarTrek?

[Black Copter Control]

Of course, if the USA Military didn't have the idea before this, they do now.

"OK, Kahn. Here it comes....."

My opinion

[5plicer]

IMO, it is perfectly reasonable to demand the full source code for a critical system, such as a jet, where bugs could possibly kill people.

Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[reporter]

The current dispute between London and Washington is similar to the dispute that arose between Washington and Japan over the development of Japan's first indigenous fighter, the F-2, in the 1980s. At the time, Washington adamantly objected to the idea of Tokyo developing its own fighter aircraft without participation from American defense companies. Following years of exaggerated fears of Japanese hi-tech domination, Washington feared that this new fighter would be superior to anything that American companies could develop. So, Washington wanted access to the development program. Tokyo relented, and Washington basically forced Tokyo to use an existing American fighter as the basis of the development program.

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.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Yaztromo]

Following years of exaggerated fears of Japanese hi-tech domination, Washington feared that this new fighter would be superior to anything that American companies could develop.

The history of the US doing this goes even further back than the 1980's. Well, at least as my grandfather told the story.

My maternal grandfather was a mechanic on the Avro Arrow project here in Canada, which, as the Wiki article quotes, was "...the biggest, most powerful, most expensive and potentially the fastest fighter that the world has yet seen...".

Now my grandfather was a consumate story teller, and certainly told his share which held dubious claims, but he had also done a number of remarkable things in his lifetime, and was long a very close follower of politics, so it was sometimes hard to differentiate between what was true, and what was just a good story.

Still, the way he told the tale, a major reason why Canada cancelled the Arrow program was due to pressure from the US, which didn't like the fact that Canada had developed a significantly more technologically advanced interceptor than the US contractors were able to develop. According to him, it was direct pressure on Ottawa from Washington to kill the project and instead buy a huge number of BOMARC missles from the US that brought on the end of the Arrrow programme.

Looking at the Wiki article, he may not have been that far off. The BOMARCs were purchased as soon as the Arrow programme was cancelled, and the US did pressure Ottawa to cancel the programme (although perhaps not for the reason Grampa cited). The engineering talent from Avro was quickly poached off by the US Government for the US space programme. Most experts believe that this single act set Canada's long advanced aerospace industry back by decades (during WWII, for example, it was a Canadian company that started making planes with standardized parts, so they could easily be interchanged).

Sadly, the BOMARCs were eventually phased out because they were expensive and completely ineffective. The Arrow could have been re-purposed, or even re-designed, but even this was not to be -- for reasons never explained, all of the plans for the Arrow were destroyed, alone with all of the working prototypes. The Canadian Government poured all of that money into the Arrow, and didn't even bother to store the blueprints for future use or defense research.

Whether it was my grandfathers "keep Canada down" conspiracy theory, the "interceptors aren't useful in the age of nuclear missles" official line, or a combination of the two, the end result has been the same: the BOMARCs sit in a warehouse in North Bay (last I heard at least...", the great bulk of which were copletely faulty and worthless, and we lost a symbol of national pride, and perhaps worst of all, lost some of the greatest brains behind our aerospace industry of the 1950's that put us at the forefront of aerospace research.

As an interesting aside, some years ago my grandfather showed me the some of tthe specially designed tools that were created to work on the Avro Arrow which he kept in his garage. He passed away nearly 5 years ago, and I have never been able to find out what happened to those tools (and am not sure if I could identify them anyhow -- the one I remember looked like a long piece of metal rod with a hook on the end, which could be easily confused with any number of metal rods he had in his workshop). If they could be identified and separated from the rest of his old tools and bits and pieces from over the years, they probably belong in a museum somewhere (heck, so far as I know, the rods he told me were "tools" could very well have been "parts", such as control rods of one sort or another).

Yaz.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe we should harken back to the mid 1940's when the British were developing a jet engined plane to exceed Mach 1... Washington suggested a joint venture, and Britain agreed. Once Britain had sent them all their research and plans Washington decided it'd didn't want to do a joint venture anymore, but thanks for doing all the research. Then followed by chuck yeager breaking the sound barrier in a plane that looked strangely like the British one.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Venik]

I fail to see any similarity between the F-2 dispute with Japan and today's siatuation with the F-35. Brits and the US have been involved in numerous joint aerospace projects for many decades. One of the results of such joint work was the most successful VSTOL fighter to date.

Regardless of why the UK wants source code for the F-35 - be it the fear of backdoors or weapons integration tasks - for the amount they invested in this project the Brits are entitled to get the complete package.

Without Britain's participation and without its 135-unit order the price of the F-35 will skyrocket. The UK is the only Tier 1 partner on this project. Withdrawal of the UK from F-35 development and procurement will delay the project and would likely scare away the remaining smaller partners, like Norway, which is seriously considering pulling out of the JSF consortium.

Most importantly, however, should the UK go through with its threat to drop F-35, the plane's export prospects will be destroyed. The F-35 will become another limited-edition fifth-generation fighter a la F-22.

I find it hard to believe that the US reluctance to share the source code with the Brits is solely due to export control concerns. There has to be more to it than just red tape.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[hernick]

It has been a while since anybody other than the USA had the top fighter plane. You claim that either Britain or Japan has the ability to build a twin-engine fighter superior to the F-22 or a single-engine fighter superior to the F-35; I think you're wrong.

Current American fighters have had decades of research put in them. It cannot be denied that the American aeronautical industry is years ahead of Japan's. The Japanese do not have the ability to design and build a rival to the American planes, nor would they attempt to antagonize Washington in this manner.

As for the British, they might be able to contribute to a pan-European fighter development project, but Britain no longer has any significant national aeronautical design and construction facilities. It merely hosts parts of the European aircraft industry, which could not operate solely in Britain. And Europe doesn't have the military budget to develop fighters capable of matching the American birds.

Maybe Europe alone can build a match for the F-22, in a 10-15 years, but by then the USA will have something better. So, if neither Japan nor Europe can do it, is there anybody who could develop fighters superior to the American ones, before the USA has a chance to improve theirs and secure their top spot?

Yes. A European-Russian-Ukrainian alliance with a few hundred secure orders from financial backers such as China, India, Pakistan and Japan. Only then could they start a program to develop a fighter that will be unmatched, the top fighter out there. And in ten years, maybe they'll have succeeded.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[CountBrass]

The US did something similar with atomic research: took all the work the UK had been doing on the understanding they would share the result (the A-bomb) and then refused to.

What constantly amazes me is. given the way the US constantly screws its allies is that a) it still has any and b) the UK still has the fantasy that we have a "special relationship" with the US: the only special relationship we have is the one where we bend over and drop our trousers on demand.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[CAIMLAS]

"What kind of BS is that?"

Weapons - mainly to countries in Europe, Japan, Australia, and other "western" countries - are the largest export from the United States. Mainly in the form of things like munitions and expensive multi-billion dollar airplanes and ships, but small arms are also in that factor.

It would be both economically and militarily unwise to do otherwise, that's what kind of BS it is.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Skinkie]

You probably forgot to mention that the resources (Marshall Plan) could only be spend in the USA. So there was a big benifit for the US economy aswell.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Bombula]

Hopefully, Tokyo will not succumb to American pressure and will design a 100% all-Japanese interceptor.

I can only assume you're talking about the long-awaited development of veritech fighters.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Runefox]

There already is, or at least, was, a superior fighter to the Raptor and JSF, developed by Russia ten years ago, but probably never to see the light of day. It's called the Su-37 Flanker, and it outperforms the F/A-22 in every aspect but stealth.

A modified Su-35, it has no angle of attack limitation, and its thrust-vectoring nozzles, in addition to its unstable integral triplane layout, allow it to perform maneuvers that allow the aircraft to, for a moment, literally fly backwards in controlled flight, and can outmaneuver any Western fighter, including the projected/declassified performance ratings of the F/A-22, in close range combat, as seen in the Farnborough air show in 1996. It has a forward pulse-doppler array radar and rearward-facing radar as well, and as such can target and fire upon targets at its six o'clock with rearward-facing missiles. It also has advanced infrared sensors that can most likely target and track an F/A-22 in supersonic flight (since it would light up like a christmas tree to IR due to air friction).

So while the USAF stresses BVR combat, and do it well (though most situations don't allow BVR engagements, especially without AWACS), the Russian design bureaus favour supermaneuverability, and do it well. Besides, if the USAF really thought that BVR combat was all that was required to survive in the air, why would they equip their F/A-22 with a cannon, short-range missiles, and thrust-vectoring nozzles? The long and short of it is, close-range air engagements are far from history. The USAF knows it, and so do the Russians. While the Russians are allies, they provide exports to countries that could oppose the USA, and therefore this kind of technology should not be taken lightly, even if it isn't out there yet.

After all, the thought that technology and technological superiority could win air wars was what almost decimated the US Navy fighters in the Vietnam war, where their F-4 Phantoms didn't have internal guns - But rather relied on missiles, which are limited in supply and have a good chance of missing. Rules of engagement also required visual confirmation before firing, and the Phantoms were almost completely slaughtered by the North Vietnamese MiG's and their cannons, only finding reprieve when gun pods were fitted to their aircraft.

Anyway, fortunately for the F/A-22, it's not looking like Su-37's will be along any time soon, unless an export market opens up. Even so, I wouldn't call the F/A-22 or F-35 infallible, and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't take global collaboration or a decade of research to top it. The F/A-22 is already a dinosaur of an aircraft, having been in development since 1986. It's not the glorious alpha-and-omega of the aircraft world, and it has its share of problems, not the least of which is payload limitations due to the concept of carrying only internal stores (external stores would allow the aircraft to be detected on radar). And if any 'opfor' nation were to build an analog of the Jindalee Over the Horizon radar system, conceiveably every US stealth aircraft would be rendered useless.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the US had a vested interest in 'bailing out our butts', at least in WW2: the US armed forces had absolutely no chance of defeating the Axis powers single-handed, and indeed had sat on the fence regarding their preferred victors in that war until the last possible second. Had the Japanese not forced the issue by bombing Pearl Harbour do you honestly think the US would have entered WW2? The truth is that the war was almost over by the time the US joined the Allies, and even then their contribution was nowhere near as great as your history books would have you believe. The US helped bring WW2 to a swifter end, but didn't alter the ultimate outcome in any way.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[rpjs]

But the packet switched networking technology which underlies TCP/IP was developed by the British Post Office in the 1960s.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Anonymous Coward]

Harold Wilson, Memoirs: 1916-1964 (1986)>>

Lend-Lease also involved Britain's surrender of her rights and royalties in a series of British technological achievements. Although the British performance in industrial techniques in the inter-war years had been marked by a period of more general decline, the achievements of our scientists and technologists had equalled the most remarkable eras of British inventive greatness. Radar, antibiotics, jet aircraft and British advances in nuclear research had created an industrial revolution all over the developed world. Under Lend-Lease, these inventions were surrendered as part of
the inter-Allied war effort, free of any royalty or other payments from the United States. Had Churchill been able to insist on adequate royalties for these inventions, both our wartime and our post-war balance of payments would have been very different.

The Attlee Government had to face the consequences of this surrender of our technological patrimony, but there was worse to come. Congress had voted Lend-Lease until the end of the war with Germany and Japan and no longer. When the European war ended, most people expected the conflict with Japan to last for another year or so. The atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima ended that assumption. Almost within the hour, President Truman, unwillingly no doubt, but without any choice in the matter, notified Attlee that Lend-Lease was being cut off. At that time it was worth £2,000 million a year. There was no possible means of increasing our exports to the United States to earn that sort of sum. Britain was in pawn, at the very time that Attlee was fighting to exert some influence on the postwar European settlement. The only solution was to negotiate a huge American loan, the repayment and servicing of which placed a burden on Britain's balance of payments right into the twenty-first century.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Maybe Europe alone can build a match for the F-22, in a 10-15 years, but by then the USA will have something better.

Yep, the US technological advantage today is at least a decade. That's why I recorded the film on my VHS VCR last night, and I'll be tootling off home in my Austin Metro at the end of the day to play Doom on my state-of-the-art 80386 PC.

Still, at least my job's safe: my group writes the core software for a major US corporation, and as long as they have to make sure we can't take our bang-up-to-date 1990s skillsets and use them to benefit a British company, they can't fire me! I'm sure the same is true of all the major defence companies in the region, who only supply their technology to the US military and would never dream of offering it to our own as well, or even instead.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[nickos]

"there is only one special relationship in Washington, and that is with Israel" - one of Blair's advisers as quoted in "The Accidental American"

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[surprise_audit]

So, in fact, Microsoft are simply following the good example set by their Government?? Hmmm...

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[Lumpy]

What constantly amazes me is. given the way the US constantly screws its allies is that a) it still has any and b) the UK still has the fantasy that we have a "special relationship"

and people wonder why people and other countries hate us to the point that when i travel abroad I wear a "I Love Toronto" and other Look he's canadian eh? clothing. Hell being from michigan I sound like a kanuk already. Now if a friend can get me that fake Canadian drivers license that I can keep in my wallet when overseas I will feel better.

Americans are hated because we heppily allow our government to screw everyone else on the planet for our own gains.

The only real allies we have anymore are there for 2 reasons. A) they are as corrupt as ourselves and want in on a piece of the action. B) My government has threatened them in one way or another than they do not dare change their relationship status.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[tmortn]

Very good points. The Russian Mig and Sukoi designs are very very capable fighters. In fact one on one they may well be the best figters in the world. Heck with the 37. The Mig-29 and Su-27 were both capable of the full range of acrobatics you describ in the 37 they just did not have the directional thrust ability or tri-plane config.

But when you start talking one on one there are many capable fighters in the world and I would argue the US designs hold no particular advantage and in fact with all designs except the F-16 probably hold a general disadvantage. The Euro Fighter and Rafale are both highly capable designs and the top level Mig and Su designs are as well. Proper training is the key then. Stick comparable trained fighters in those planes and they will have an odds on chance of winning a one on one engagement with anything. The next key then becomes the overall air power system. And that is where US dominance lays. The US supremacy is almost entirely wrapped up in our air control system as a whole. Nobody else does cordinated air power as well as we do. AWACS is the heart of it and why BVR today is not what BVR was in Vietnam. Pilot training comes next and last comes the technology.

The F-22 and JSF designs are not particularly impressive performers in terms of one on one dogfighting, they are adequate and thrust vectoring does a great deal to overcome their bulk that has arisen from internal warloads and stealth aerodynamic dictates. JSF in dogfight trim might be able to out turn an F-16 but only with directional thrust. Retrofit a similar capacity to the F-16 (which has been done and would be much cheaper) and its much more manouverable than the final JSF design. The advantage of the new US designs relies entirely on the stealth aspect. IE highly visible but un-reachable active search radar in AWACS vectors the US planes around in such a way that they can deal with threats before they know they are there.... not just BVR. Actual chase into ideal 6 o clock firing position to visually id an enemey before they even know they are there and then have control of any resulting engagement before it even begins for the other pilot.

If someone neutralizes stealth then the US designs are in a heap of shit in a matchup against a comperable air power. But then.... who is comperable any more? About the only time any single nation could claim higher capable numbers any more would be when just facing our naval assets. If we have access to forward deployment of air force assets then we are kind of head and shoulders above anyone other than a full NATO turnout or China. Russia fields only a shadow of its former strength.

AWACS, super cruising, AMRAAM, decent air combat manouevering capacity and highly trained pilots is a pretty devestating combination if all the pieces of that puzzle are there. The weakness of the US system lies in the fact we probably could not currently sustain a major air war level of munitions expenditure for very long and if someone could force us off our game plan... IE contest control of the skies (AWACS deployment) then we would be hurting in an old school scrap for control of the sky. The current thought is that with the next gen design if we got reduced to that then stealth would proove an advantage in dogfighting.

In other words, the US designs are all about winning the fight before you even get in knife range and even when they reach that stage they are far from uncapable. That is just not their top design priority. If they are right about that advantage then the designs are everything they have said they are. But to date there has not been a real test of it. Knocking down the excuse of an Air Force that Iraq had in Gulf War I dosn't really count and thats about as close as we have come to a modern air combat war (and that was before any of the designs were in production). Yes they had numbers, but they had shit for training and almost zero air born radar capacity. We knocked down their command and control system in the first wave and at that point the Iraq air f

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[kiwimate]

Oh please. Do we even need to remind people that the US took their sweet time in getting to the wars? (Quick test: ask the average American when WWI and WWII started, and watch a shocking number of them get it wrong because they date it from when the US got involved.)

Especially WWII. The UK (along with other members of the empire like Australia and New Zealand) pretty much held off the opposing forces singlehanded until they were at breaking point before the US finally deigned to get involved. Because they'd been going it alone for the last several years, England was broke by then and, yes, desperately needed an infusion of funds.

But it was by no means a one way street. Example: one of the conditions from the US was that England had to turn over all the enriched nuclear material they'd been generating in their own plants, so that the US was now the only one with sufficient quantities to build more bombs.

Please don't cheapen the massive sacrifices made in terms of lives lost by England, Australia, and New Zealand in both world wars. It's not a great stretch to say that those countries did much more than their fair share in the first half of the 20th century to ensure a world in which all free nations could prosper, and that they were the leading defenders of freedom at those times. We still remember Gallipolli...

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[PMW]

Although the Arrow is a super-popular plane with many people, the myths about it gets blown a bit out of proportion and reasons why it was cancelled are complicated.

Realistically, it isn't clear the US government really had a policy, particularly for or against, the Arrow. On one hand, there were some who wanted BOMARC to be used instead (and the poster is right that BOMARC was a failure). On the other hand, the US Military:
* Provided test equipment and support for the development of the Arrow (a B-47 bomber was provided to test an engine.)
* Offered to donate a fire support system when the original planned ASTRA system fell apart.
* Offered to pay for several Arrows for the RCAF in order to keep the program running.

IMO the reasons it was cancelled was that:
* It was a really expensive project & plane. The most expensive project Canada had ever done and the most expensive interceptor in the world. Realistically that was the wave of the future but the Canadian government got sticker shock.
* The project wasn't done when it was cancelled. The designers would, of course, tell you the Arrow would be perfect yet nobody, the politicians in particular, could be sure. Realistically, actual performance/cost numbers were still uncertain.
* Nobody else seemed interested in buying it (due to cost).
* Everyone had gone "missile crazy" in the 50's 60's. Many people seriously suggested that airplanes would soon be obsoleted by missiles. That turned out to be BS but it was widely believed. Early versions of the Mirage & Phantom fighters didn't even carry guns (much to their detriment) this was so widely believed.

In any event had the Arrow been completed and used it probably would have been more expensive than anticipated, wouldn't have worked as well as web-advocates claim, would have never seen combat, and would have been retired as a beloved part of Canadian aerospace history.

Re:Similar to USA-Japan Technology-Sharing Dispute

[ralphclark]

"USAian" is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek term frequently used on Slashdot to denote US citizens. America is a pair of continental landmasses and "Americans" would therefore include Canadians, Mexicans, Chileans, Argentinians and everybody in between. Or so it has been said.

Falkland Islands

[JeffSh]

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War#French_ involvement

They're right. Do we care? If so, then what?

[eagl]

The issue is very valid. The question is twofold - Is the US willing to fully share ALL of our military technology with any other country during a period of relative peace (even as strong an ally as the UK), and what price are we willing to pay to keep our most advanced military capabilities to ourselves? Security vs. the budget. A military expert will say that it's stupid to spill all your secrets to ANYONE because mere knowledge of a capability is enough to allow an adversary (or potential adversary) to begin defeating that capability. A budget planner will say that without sharing the technology with partners who will share the program costs, we can't afford to build the hardware so those capabilities would remain purely theoretical (worthless).

Maybe it's better to do the basic research ourselves but not go that final step to building the hardware until we actually need to use it. This seems to happen a lot, holding back expensive upgrades and hardware purchases until a conflict kicks off, then funding/fielding the new stuff immediately as the budget expands when a conflict arises. But the JSF is such a massive project, it may not be possible to back-burner the program as a US-only effort. That means we may have to compromise some very unique capabilities in order to be able to actually field them ourselves. Tough choice.

Can't blame the JSF partners for playing hardball though... The JSF is almost entirely software driven as almost every single system is operated via a touch-screen interface instead of traditional switches, so not having the source code means that when something breaks, fixing it is somewhat more problematic than replacing a defective hardware switch. If you don't have the code, you have a really expensive flying Xbox that could quit working without warning and can't possibly be repaired.

You can't even replace busted hardware without the required software, because the hardware is all operated and tested via software. You can't just flip a switch to test the radar, because the switch is controlled by the computer which (should) report system status and troubleshooting data if it quits working.

A sensible approach would be to distribute an export version of the software, but I'm pretty sure that the original contract did not include parallel-but-equal lines of code development. To duplicate a multi-million-line codebase at this stage in the program would be cost prohibitive. You'd think they would have thought of this before... Like 15 years ago...

sendmail model could work

[mr_burns]

We could do like sendmail and have the version we have for the US fighters and the version we give to our partners.

GPL would actually work really well for the partner version. We already set terms in our contracts about who arms can be re-sold to or a right to first refusal. And GPL says you only have to reveal source to people you distribute to. If we hold partners to only releasing source to those they distribute to, the security through obscurity knobs are placated while the partners have an open codebase they can collectively hack on.

This helps everybody involved. Our partners can imporve upon their investment and more eyes fix bugs faster. And the hawks in the US can settle their nerves because they can choose to participate in the partner codebase yet still have their 'commercial' version to fall back on if they all of a sudden don't trust the open version.

The clincher of course is controlling who the planes and associated software are distribited to. You can't put a genie back in a bottle. But then again, if source being leaked breaks the security of your product... it was never secure to begin with.

absolutely sane thing to ask for

[nickgrieve]

absolutely sane thing to ask for

Its a weapon of war, so if your going to use it when it counts, and not just a few flybys at an air show, then your going to be at war. Who knows what state of war that will be, it could be a few sorties to bomb a wedding party or two, or it could be full nuclear MAD, lines of communication could be down, satellites down etc etc...

If you can't update an modify the software when you need it, those planes could be as good as craters in the runway.

Sounds reasonable - take the Israeli example

[horacerumpole]

As far as I'm aware, the F-15I (the Israeli version of the F-15) has its entire software built in Israel. I heard that all versions of F-15's have at least some of their systems built by Israeli sub-contractors.

You can take an example from the commercial world - I worked for startups which had to put their source code in escrow as part of pilot agreements with Fortune-100 companies.

So I don't think it's unreasonable or even extra-ordinary for the Brits to want the source too. Just prudent.

Re:Assembly???

[general_re]

Probably C++, but perhaps Ada.

Always Ada. Invariably Ada. 90-95% of it is in Ada, I'm sure, with only a very, very few well-delineated and tested exceptions. Ada is DoD standard, and they'll hang up on you if you call with a proposal that involves something else.

Leaked bit of source code

[jjustus]

if enemy.shot_down
cockpit_announce("Top Gun!");
kill_count += 1;
if kill_count > 5
cockpit_announce("Killing Spree!");
end
end

Mohammed and the Han

[cnflctd]

There are half a billion muslims of uncertain stability just to their north, and on hop further, a largish empire thats churning out killer machines at ever increasing rates.

The Ausies should pony up for a few hunter-killer subs while they're at it.

Re:Mohammed and the Han

[skribe]

After the June 4 riot was suppressed, we have been thinking about how to prevent China from peaceful evolution and how to maintain the Communist Party's leadership. We thought it over and over but did not come up with any good ideas. If we do not have good ideas, China will inevitably change peacefully, and we will all become criminals in history. After some deep pondering, we finally come to this conclusion: Only by turning our developed national strength into the force of a fist striking outward--only by leading people to go out --can we win forever the Chinese people's support and love for the Communist Party.

From the perspective of history, the reason that China is faced with the issue of living space is because Western countries have developed ahead of Eastern countries. Western countries established colonies all around the world, therefore giving themselves an advantage on the issue of living space. To solve this problem, we must lead the Chinese people outside of China, so that they could develop outside of China.

Would the United States allow us to go out to gain new living space? First, if the United States is firm in blocking us, it is hard for us to do anything significant to Taiwan and some other countries! Second, even if we could snatch some land from Taiwan, Vietnam, India, or even Japan, how much more living space can we get? Very trivial! Only countries like the United States, Canada and Australia have the vast land to serve our need for mass colonization.

- Selected quotes from a speech made by Chi Haotian, Minster of Defense and vice-chairman of China's Central Military Commission. As reported in the Epoch Times.

If true it is at least disturbing.

Not really...

[Space cowboy]

From the article you link to:

As France had recently sold Super Entendard aircraft and Exocet missiles to Argentina, when war broke out there was still a French team in Argentina helping to fit out the Exocets and aircraft for Argintinean use. The French team continued to assist the Argentines throughout the war, in spite of the NATO embargo and official French government policy. [2] ... and Argentina did (after all) use Exocets to sink British ships. I don't necessarily blame them - we were at war with them, and killing them just as happily! But it caused a *lot* of anti-French feeling in the UK at the time.

Simon

Re:Not really...

[Cyno01]

Because otherwise the Brits have loved the French for, oh the past thousand years....

Re:Not really...

[Noryungi]

If you have to criticize the French, you should at least pick a different subject. Here is the beginning of the Wikipedia article -- and I can confirm most of it, since the cooperation described was well known in France at the time:

French president François Mitterrand gave full support to the UK in the Falklands war. As a large part of Argentina's military equipment was French-made, French support was crucial. France provided aircraft, identical to the ones it supplied to Argentina, for British pilots to train against. France provided intelligence to help sabotage the Exocet missiles it sold to Argentina. In her memoirs Margaret Thatcher says of Mitterrand that "I never forgot the debt we owed him for his personal support...throughout the Falklands crisis". Sir John Nott, who was Secretary of State for Defence during the conflict later acknowledged: "In so many ways Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies".

Sad to see traditional knee-jerk anti-french feelings are alive and well on /.

Re:Funny you mention the F-18

[lbrandy]

The U.S. is ditching all their F-15s and replacing them with F-18 SuperHornet

This is infact completely false. F-15Cs are being replaced by F-22s. At least that's the plan, but no one inside the airforce is convinced that's going to happen in the foreseeable future. The F-15Es (Strike Eagles) have not been scheduled to be replaced, at all.

The F-18 is a medium level fighter that's meant to be cheap and easy to maintain. It's accomplishes a unique mission, but it can't really touch the 15s and 16s as far as lethality is concerned.

Pretty common practice

[kbielefe]

This is a pretty common practice. At my job we are required to frequently go through quite a rigorous process to make sure nothing sensitive to U.S. national security makes it into exported source code. Actually delivering compilable source costs a lot extra, is specified in a contract, and comes with training and a compile/test environment.

Re:I do: it's obvious.

[inflex]

Well, I for one have no problems with the "convict" heritage - something rather unique if nothing else.

I'd love to see a lot of the US TV shows completely axed from our stations, sure it means we'd be left with little more than ABC SBS and Neighbours, oh well, not like that's a bad thing (okay, Neighbours we can axe too).

I don't have a problem with the US per`se (sure, I have problems with their behaviours and politics etc - but every country has issues), I have a problem with Australia trying to become the next state in the US.

We're Australia, we should be proud and happy of that.

Backdoors in military hardware are foolish

[Opportunist]

I mean, be serious. Imagine there's a shutdown backdoor in the plane software (or whatever) that allows remote controlled shutdown. Key question: What if that code falls into enemy's hands?

And it WILL. No matter how tight security is, there are human beings who know the necessary details. Think it's hard for (insert terrorist group or anti-US government) to shell out enough money to convince someone to betray his country? They only need to find ONE person willing to trade patriotism for money. Take your average politician and it's even rather cheap.

Do you think the US government is stupid enough to let something like this happen? Ok, let me rephrase that question: Do you think a company who wants to make deals with the feds in the future would actually build something like that? Because one thing's for sure, even if the gov demands a backdoor in their planes, once it gets out (not if, when), who'll be the one to blame?

So the claim that they need to know if there's a backdoor is a frontend for the real threat: That they'll be forced to use US weapons and ammo on those planes, too, because they cannot adapt their tools of destruction to the controlling software without knowing how it works. And if you actually plan to do something with your shiny new military hardware other than showing it off, that's where the real costs are hiding.

Similarly, the TSR-2

[MROD]

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.

Re:Similarly, the TSR-2

[Alioth]

The TSR.2 prototypes were not all destroyed - two of them are on public display (I've seen the one at Cosford, I think there's one at the IWM in Duxford too).

Re:Similarly, the TSR-2

[Chris Mattern]

> Similarly, all the plans and prototypes for the TSR-2 were destroyed.

No, the Conservative government in 1981 actually considered reviving it. There was some consideration of necessary upgrades (including the use of carbon fiber composites in the construction), but it was dropped fairly quickly. Still, I don't see how they could've even begun to discuss it if they didn't have the plans.

Chris mattern

Re:Similarly, the TSR-2

[Mutatis Mutandis]

This was at a time when the development programmes for advanced combat aircraft (and other military equipment) were successfully expanding into truly phenomenal cost overruns. The TSR-2 development cost estimates first doubled, and then tripled. The F-111 was so attractive to the UK government because its estimated unit price was about half of that of a TSR.2.

Of course, the UK had no monopoly on cost overruns, and McNamara's pet project went through the financial roof as well. The F-111 became even more expensive than the TSR.2 would have been. The TFX project that produced the F-111 tried to be all things to all people, actually rather similar to today's JSF project, and predictably it failed to do that. (You can easily guess my opinion of the JSF project.) The F-111B version for the US Navy was cancelled outright.

Besides, both the TSR.2 and TFX projects were arguably too far ahead of their time. The F-111 did not become a really effective combat aircraft before its first generation of pilots had retired, and its fragile 1960s electronic systems replaced by more modern and reliable ones. There is every reason to assume that TSR.2 would have suffered from the same problem.

Re:They're right. Do we care? If so, then what?

[Tonttoro]

The plane without the software should be a lot cheaper too.

The F-35 is a carrier launch vehicle

[mosb1000]

An F-15 could also probably kick the ass of an F-35, but it's hardly a fair comparison because the planes serve different purposes. Now, if you want to compare the SU-35 to the F-22 be my guest, but there's no mystery as to why a larger, heavier fighter can best a smaller, lighter one.

What he knows...

[drgonzo59]

The CIA taught him. So blame the CIA and the US government. They specifically taught the "freedom fighters" the advantages of car bombs and the art of war of attrition. Bin Ladin is sort of the the American prodical son, who came back after all those years, ... except that he had a bomb in his pocket.

That's not it at all!

[x2A]

...the americans don't want anybody to discover that they've used chunks of GPL code

Typhoon vs. F-35 vs. F-22

[Savage-Rabbit]

As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication in the high-end electronics/software/sensors that pretty much make or break a combat aircraft today.

What worries most analysts is not so much the capability of Russia to produce an F-35 killer but rather what will happen if China/Russia/India combine to produce a joint stealth fighter project. The resulting machine could conceivably be better than the F-35 and capable of making up it's shortcomings vs. the F-22 by being cheaper to make and easyer to mass manufacture. The idea being that if you can't beat the F-22 technologically use the 'T-34 effect' to swamp forces using the F-22. Now Russia perhaps does not have the economic muscle to mass manufacture a stealth design in a big way but India and especially China do.

The only comparable jet to the F-35 is the Eurofighter platform, though the capability mix is different.

Purely in terms of electronics the Eurofighter is probably better than the F-35. The Trance 3 aircraft with all the frills including thrust-vectoring will be even better than the current Typhoons which lack a large portion of the Eurofighters potential feature set. Another thing is that he Eurofighter can supercruise which the F-35 AFAIK can't. The F-35 does have stealth and it is frequently clamied the Typhoon has none, which, according to one US source is due to an European ability to understand but inablitiy to implement Stealth technology. The first part is a half truth, the Typhoon has low observability features, which will probably lower its radar signature considerably but of course never quite as low as those of the F-22 especially. Also keep in mind that the F-35's stealth is compromized by an inability to carry weapons internally unlike the F-22. As for the European inabilty to produce Stealth designs, I find that claim to be funny. I would evaluate the Typhoon as being better the F-35 but not as good as the F-22.

Who will cry for British if they are screwed?

[Anonymous Coward]

UK follows US like a dog follows its master since so long than they just deserve it. Perhaps one day they will realize that US is only playing its own game and uses others countries when needed.

Look at what happens with India, US is ready to give up Nuclear know hows to counterbalance China increasing power. Very good move indeed to avoid Nuke proliferation! And in few years they will screw Indians as well when they will realize they are also a very fast growing economic threat...

Re:Once Bitten.

[original_nickname]

Nope, this may be partly the case, but it's actually because we didn't bother to train the pilots....

And apparently the ones the we did train now want to leave!

Not really

[WindBourne]

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.

Re:Not really

[InsaneGeek]

Well you go on believing that FUD: We've already made it back to the 90's, I don't think the 90's rate is sustainable at all so I'm expecting a downturn over the next couple of years because we are doing so good it can't be sustained. As for your statement about unemployment figures the change only was for federal employee's benefits affecting only an extremely small fraction of the number. The random sampling method continues today, let me let snopes.com school you on your FUD: http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm On the economy, let me just copy and paste what I did on another forum back in November (which is why some of the numbers are a little older than a couple of months but still less than a year, and we've gotten even better since then)

ftp://ftp.iza.org/charts/PDF56_e.pdf
For the past 3-4 years the US has had the highest GDP growth of: germany, france, italy, japan, canada, UK & EU in general

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/47/35326565.pdf
From OECD standardized unemployment rates, July of 05 we have a level of 5.0, less than Germany (9.3), less than France (9.7), less than Italy (7.8), less than Canada (6.8), only UK (4.7) and Japan (4.4) have a lower one.

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/ CurrentInflation.asp
For about a year we've been hovering at around 3% or so (up and down) inflation, which is the same it was before 9/11. You'll note around 9/11 Greenspan dumped a whole lot of cash into the economy & China picked up it's output significantly decreasing inflation to some of the lowest rates it's ever been (~1 percent). Greenspan only lately has been saying that our economy has been doing so *good* that our growth rate is starting to encourage those inflationary items, so he's started gradually raising the interest rate to start removing dollars out of the economy to slow it's growth rate down. Classic example of a Phillips curve. I think greenspan should probably start getting more aggressive on it as our economy has been going so *good* that we need to stop it from turning into a beast like it did in the 2000 where we get another big bubble. Right now it ain't sky high, it's nowhere near sky high, under 1-2% means our employment level isn't doing well and pressuring it down, over 5% is high, over 10% is sky high (look to the 70's).

So we have a higher GDP growth rate (rate our economy is expanding/contracting) and we have one of the lowest unemployment rates. Our unemployment rate is at a level that is lower than almost every other country in the world. Our inflation rate is increasing but it's still very reasonable, but the government does need to start pulling money out of the economy because we are doing so good we are starting overheat it. The govenment needs to start becoming more miserly with our money: spend when the goings bad and save when the things go good to reduce the major peaks and valleys. Unlike you, from all the things I see as economic indicators that I think our economy's been doing *so* good that we should be expecting a dip here in the next few years as part of the general up/down cycle, and we should start pulling money out of the economy.

Re:Not really

[Politburo]

The last time the unemployment methodology (as measured by the Current Population Survey) was significantly changed was 1994. The survey was instituted in 1940. The 1994 redesign only tweaked some definitions of unemployed vs. out-of-workforce.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is made up mainly of career statisticians and economists. While the Administrator is appointed by the President, the Bureau is rigidly non-partisan and its methodologies are public and open to criticism and change.

Licence agreement?

[babbling]

I wonder if the licence agreement has a clause stating that if you don't agree, you can return them for a full refund.

Maybe the UK could get money back for the fighters they have already bought.

Re:Licence agreement?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Why not just return the missiles? Saves on postage and packing, and has a very low rate of vendor complaints afterwards. ;-)

Re:What econoomy are you living in?

[Warg! The Orcs!!]

He didn't say the economy was depressed, he said it was depressive.....

Bit of politics....

[supersnail]

Could be that us Brits are deeply uncomfortable with any deal involving the US at the moment.
The current US adminisration is deeply unpopular in Britian with almost everyone except Tony Blair.
Now Tony is on the way out the US is losing its British cheer leader.
None of the potential new leaders see any politcal adavantage in a "special" relationship with the US, to the extent that even a closer alliance with the hated French is the now prefered option.

Considering centuries of mutual hate and loathing there is between the Glorious subjects of her Brittanic Majesty and the unwashed garlic chewing frogs it is one of the great acheivments of the Bush dynasty to get the US rated below the French in British public perception.

As well noted.

[jonbusby]

As well noted the US has a history of thieving other countries technology on the pretence that they're going to "share" the result. If I remember rightly (although I cant find any information to back this up) they asked to see alot of our development files on the Eurofighter, saw what brillient research we had done, and stole it to produce parts of the F22. Still if they share the source code on this maybe things will change. I wonder what its written in anyway!

Re:Once Bitten.

[AndrewHowe]

So there's a bunch of Apaches in a shed and no-one wants to fly them? Errm... I'm up for it, where do I sign up? What are the hours?

Re:They're right. Do we care? If so, then what?

[cgenman]

A military expert will say that it's stupid to spill all your secrets to ANYONE because mere knowledge of a capability is enough to allow an adversary (or potential adversary) to begin defeating that capability.

Or an ally (or potential ally) to defend the shortcomings of your existing weapons technology. Like, for example, american-made rifles that can't hold up in sand.

I don't buy the whole secrecy-gives-you-a-bettery-military theory. I tend to think that secrecy allows contractors to be lazy, thus ensuring that when we really need it the military just isn't what we expect it to be.

Maybe it's better to do the basic research ourselves but not go that final step to building the hardware until we actually need to use it.

The problem is that ramp-up times are tough. If you need to send planes into North Korea next week, or Alabama by tomorrow, you need experienced pilots and ground crew. Not only that, but you need the planes to have already been built, rather being furiously glued together as fast as Northrup can go.

Usually the "panic response" of building up capabilities after a conflict begins is simply remorse over not having started earlier.

If you don't have the code, you have a really expensive flying Xbox that could quit working without warning and can't possibly be repaired.

Militaries tend to look at planes as an investment, and try to keep them running for years by upgrading their capabilities, finding alternative suppliers, etc. If you have the plane, you have, for example, the physical capability to modify it to work with any arbitrary weapons system you may want it to within reason. However, without source code the process of modifying the software to work with said additional capabilities is somewhere between dangerous and impossible.

Re:Once Bitten.

[original_nickname]

Apparently the pay is less than £60k a year, too, so the pilots are leaving!

link

Re:To be fair

[infinite9]

I understand that the UK negotiators say that the US administration is sympathetic to our case but that they don't think they could get the necessary waivers passed by Congress. Presumably Congress is worried we're going to use these aircraft to reconquer Ireland or something?

The article I was reading a few days ago said that it was the pentagon that was the problem. I guess the current situation allows the UK to ask for the codes if needed, and that it would certainly be granted, but that it takes something like 20 to 30 days for the request to go through. The royal navy/air force obviously feel like they need to be able to act faster than this. This is all completely ridiculous. I can't imagine why anyone in our government would want to withold any kind of military technology from the brits.

I heard an Aussie RAAF F-18 pilot say...

[Shanep]

in a documentary...

That parts of jet fighters that the US had sold to other countries can be controlled remotely. He claimed that the US could disable the fire control computer of an enemy jet fighter from a US AWACS for example. Anyone know any more about this?

I've also heard that a certain big American corp that makes lots of things, including crypto hardware, puts backdoors or weaknesses in their products to be sold to other countries. Why on Earth would nations like some of those in the middle east and other nations less friendly to the US, buy computerized military hardware from the US!? Seems crazy to me.

Re:To be fair

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

We are at peace with the Brits; We have always been at peace with the Brits. =)

Australia?

[nickco3]

.... like most other european countries you are paying hefty taxes

Dude, that's Austria

Brits with our tech?

[stlhawkeye]

I'm wary of giving the Brits that code. This is the same government that bought Westinghouse, the private storehouse for American nuclear technology, and then turned around and sold it to Toshiba which is going to leverage the technology in China.

EEEK!

[twitter]

You seem to have understood the meaning of the phrase "joint strike".

Recompile??? (was:Is that for real?)

[soren42]

So, basically, you're suggesting the Gentoo Strike Fighter or GSF. If I read at least part of your intentions correctly, you imply that every foreign buyer should essentially:

emerge fighter-software

on every piece of imported equipment.

Re:Recompile??? (was:Is that for real?)

[Iron E]

"Compiling"? You must be joking...

pilot@JSF T=0900 $ emerge missile-launcher

Calculating dependencies... done!

!!! Error: the weapons/missile-launcher package conflicts with another package;
!!! the two packages cannot be installed on the same system together.
!!! Please use 'emerge --pretend' to determine blockers.

pilot@JSF T=0902 $ emerge --pretend missile-launcher

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[blocks B ] engine/thrust-control (is blocking weapons/missile-launcher-1.0.3-r9)
[ebuild U ] misc/landing-gear-0.7.14-r2 [0.7.14-r1]
[ebuild N ] weapons/missile-launcher-1.0.3-r9

pilot@JSF T=0905 $
Broadcast message from radard (Fri Mar 16 09:05:31 2007):

WARNING: left aileron destroyed by enemy machine gun fire!

pilot@JSF T=0905 $ eject

Re:To be fair

[skogula]

Always been at peace with the brits? Who was it that burned the Whitehouse around 1813.

Re:To be fair

[wiredlogic]

the Brits

you mean Airstrip One.

Yes, ITAR is annoying

[default luser]

It's thanks to lovely things like ITAR that I can't even CALL CANADA to get tech support.

Like many defense companies, we make use of many Dy-4 products (now owned by Curtiss-Wright). The only problem? Dy-4 is a CANADIAN company.

So, in order to get tech support with Dy-4, I have to go through a specially-designated contact who has an export license for just this sort of thing. This wouldn't be a problem, except he is the only person with said export license, and has to serve all sorts of people.

I can't even EMAIL these people about a technical issue without someone holding my hand, even if I know it's not critical information.

Re:Assembly???

[general_re]

Quite so, but it's still more or less a de facto standard for avionics. And for this project in particular:

http://archive.adaic.com/docs/reports/ajpo/transit ion-support/html/3.htm