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U.S. Refuses to Hand Over Fighter Source Code to UK
orbitalia writes "The UK is heavily involved in the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter program) but has recently considered abandoning the project because the US refuses to share the source code. The UK had intended to purchase $120 billion dollars worth of aircraft to operate on two new aircraft carriers, but is now seriously considering Plan 'B'. This is likely to be further investments in the Eurofighter Typhoon project." From the article: "It appeared that Tony Blair and George Bush had solved the impasse in May, when they announced an agreement in principle that the UK would be given access to the classified details on conditions of strict secrecy. The news was widely seen as evidence that the Prime Minister's close alliance with the American President did have benefits for Britain ... 'If the UK does not obtain the assurances it needs from the US then it should not sign the Memorandum of Understanding covering production, sustainment and follow-on development,' the MPs insisted."
The EuroFighter is a much more advanced fighter anyway. The JSF is the US Military just trying to "Cut Costs" by consolodating which seems to be what most of the military is doing. Pretty soon a tin can will do everything from cook a meal to shoot off a nuke
If that does't work, there should at least be a LGPL version, right?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Every country involved has been told the same thing. And more importantly, all co developers are PROHIBITED from installing their own avionics.
The Joint Strike Fighter is the F-35. Much less stealth, much lower price, and likely just a little below the EuroFighter, in my opinion.
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
The UK doesn't have any F-117's and never will. Anyway, the JSF family of planes are intended to replace a number of others:
F-35A: F-16, A-10
F-25B (STOVL): Harrier, F-18
F-35C: F-18
By using a set of three planes that are mostly the same instead of half a dozen completely different ones it should in theory lower costs in terms of a better economy of scale on the planes and their parts and a lower cost of training for pilots, mechanics, etc.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
The US government is really just too embarrassed to hand over the source code since it's all in Visual Basic 6.
A few pointers:
1) The F-117 has no air-to-air capability. It also has a rather small payload (basically 2 bombs), high maintenance costs due to early technology and is (generally believed, though I think it is still classified) to be a subsnoic jet, in other words, slower. Stealth isn't everything. Also, as it only fills the one role, it is less economical than an all-in-one type aircraft.
2) Uh... since when did anything other than a super-precision ground strike become unpopular politically? The U.S. has certainly used "dumb" bombs in many campaigns, including Afghanistan and Iraq, to good effect under certain conditions and on certain targets. JDAMs - much more economical than laser guided munitions - are also quote popular and while they aren't as accurate, "close" is often good enough, assuming they're fired under certain conditions, of course. Furthermore, this particular aircraft is capable of using laser-guided weapons.
3) You know, there are areas without civilian populations present where Close Air Support could still be a concern... like, say, the mountains of Afghanistan perhaps? Or in the middle of nowhere in the Iraqi desert? Or hundreds of other battlefields? Not every battle in the future will occur in third world cities, you know.
4) A helicopter with a "chain gun" has a limited operational range and exposes itself to a great deal of enemy fire. Helicopters' armament tends to be lighter than what an aircraft can provide, focusing more on armor-piercing weapons (Hellfire missiles), and smaller weapons more useful against vehicles and lighter targets (rockets, canon, etc.). A strike fighter, on the other hand, can deliver 2000 lb. bombs on a target when necessary, enablig it to knock out, say, a heavily reinforced building or bunker than a helicopter would stand no chance against.
I mean, if you don't like this plane, that's cool and all, but there is still a mission out there for it.
I love the dept. line for this one. The UK is reading the "EULA" first, and that's why we're threatening to cancel a multi-billion dollar order.
After all, would you leave the ability to maintain your air force in the hands of another nation? (And seriously, even if the order goes ahead, would the US seriously expect the UK to honour some contractual agreement not to install working software in its military aircraft?)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The sad thing is that it has takes three years and almost 3,000 coalition deaths for the military authorities to acknowledge this.
Single battles have gone over 46,000 or 51,000 even... small scuffs can raise several dozen or even a couple hundred. 3,000 is quite a low number for a few months of occupying a country.
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You're crazy. The AK-47 is indeed a fine weapon, but every time somebody toting one engages our forces, they get shot/killed/blown the hell up.
You're comparing light weapons to aircraft? Rather have that, you say? How about you shoot at me and miss because your weapon, while reliable, doesn't have the accuracy to hit me from any farther than maybe 300m, 50m if you shoot like an average Iraqi. (It's reliable because of the tolerances built into the bolt mechanism but that makes it far less accurate. Marines have to qualify at 500m.)
Have fun with that while I'm calling in air support and deciding whether I want to just kill you or to drop the entire building you're in.
This will give you the idea.
~ some jarhead
Oh, and I'm pretty sure the Seals "submerge" themselves every once in a while. Marines? Well, we never get near water, right?
The entire reason they want the source code is to ensure that the US government can't arbitrarily disable their planes when they disagree with their use or conflict with US interests. A reasonable concern given the state of US politics, foreign policy, and state of the US moral compass.
Just one Canadian's opinion.
Sadly without this agreement the UK really should simply say no to any involvement, however I would suggest that the UK will still splash out anyway. The entire US/UK Special relationship is pretty much a myth anyway and more to the point it has been regarding foreign policy matters for a long time, placing even more dependence on the US in areas of defence is a bad idea.
There seems to be (in the UK at least) a memory lapse within political circles, that the US has in the past simply not stood with the UK.
The Lack of US support during the Falklands war, and outright opposition to the Suez crisis, should show that the UK cannot rely on US military power to support the UK's own operations and aims, and nor should it. The US will always look after itself, it will only take action when it feels its own perceived interests are involved or if there is sufficient domestic political pressure to do so, and the UK really should follow suit. Frankly that is a sensible position for any nation state to take. The UK governments current position of "follow the US's lead wherever it is demanded" is downright treasonous.
The UK needs to continue to maintain forces, equipment and any other capabilities independently or with allies as long as the UK is capable of maintaining the same, in the absence of their allies. It would be foolhardy to rely on the US (or France/Germany/Italy etc..) for equipment, parts, support, or armaments in the case of war, especially if any of those allies were opposed to the conflict.
The one thing I do feel that is surprising with this scenario is that the US will happily sell the aircraft to the UK. I would have assumed that any sensitive information about the aircraft would be available from the aircraft itself, which of course presents the question as to whether there are either surprises in the software that would give the US any advantage in the unlikely event that these aircraft were used against them. Although ignoring that (slight conspiracy theory) surely it should also raise questions about the quality of the software.
Anyway, I see no reason why the UK cannot simply continue to work on its own or with allies who full trust the UK, rather than be treated as an interloper or a poor cousin by the US.
I'm among the first to bash the services for huge projects that grow seemingly out of control, especially aircraft and ships, while less glamorous things such as individual soldier equipment gets short shrift. However, these systems are not designed, tested, produced and fielded overnight. Just because we have air supremacy in both of the current combat theaters does -not- mean that we will in future conflicts.
Can anyone imagine the reaction if in a future conflict, US ground soldiers get killed en masse because close air support is unavailable because we cannot maintain at least air parity? The outcry would be an order of magnitude above the body armor / armored HMMWV debate of a couple of years ago.
This is not just about source code. In a system like that software, hardware and system integration are inseparable. You either give no information or have to give it all. These are the crown jewels of the platform. Revealing them also reveals any number of critical points for interested adversaries: thrust and manoeuvrability limits, reaction times, counter-measure schemes and logic, EMC-characteristics etc. all of which can be used to find weaknesses and design weapon systems to be more effective against it.
Also, since the UK is only conributing 10% of the development costs, its no wonder the US isnt keen sharing. Usually with mil-tech you only give a bad, incomplete user manual to the client so he can barely operate the thing and then wait for him to pay more for extra features that are already implemented by disabled in software or simply undocumented. You never ever allow the client to have exact specs, schematics or software which would allow him to reverse-engineer and develop his own extentions and applications to it.
Here in Finland we bought old C-model F18 Hornets. When the first upgrade cycle came, the US told us of these new fancy secure ground-to-air datalinks and avionics for combat close formation flying they wanted to sell us. We just told them we had developed our own by then, thankyouverymuch. But that was because the platform was getting old and most of the stuff in there was already open knowledge with multiple nations having purchased them years ago. Also with old-gen mil-aircraft there are a lot of avionics standards which were developed and adhered to during the cold-war to easy manufacturing, lower cost and allow inter-service operations. These JSFs will probably have special new-gen custom avionics to do with flight and weapon control, targeting, radar, stealth, communications and electronic warfare that the US definately wants to keep wrappers on.
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Yes, even the ones that can't walk yet. One problem is the troop numbers are far less than the operation in Kuwait and there have been a lot of situations where the best of a bad situation was to shoot everything that moved, and it's easier to count unknown dead bodies than spotting live insurgents first. Unfortunately this turns others against the army and there is this new situation of a seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers. What to do? The British couldn't work it out in Iraq with comparitively bigger forces and a similar technology advantage in 20 years but that doesn't mean there is no answer. The nationalists still see it as a puppet government - if we can work out why that could solve some of the problems. They've had sixteen years of war that sent Iraq into the third world and a long war with Iran before that that drove the nation so broke they invaded Kuwait to do a bank robbery on a national scale - a few more bombs alone are not going to stop them.
Prime Minister Blair, you could just give us some fighters so we can write open source code for them.
Modern weapon systems can win wars.
Modern weapon systems do not occupy the country, soldiers do. Occupation is required if you want a friendly regime to take power. Anytime you have a foreign army occupying your streets, there's going to be deaths on both sides. Take away the AKs and give them sporks and you will still see people on both sides die.
The sad thing is not the nearly 3,000 coalition deaths but the estimated more than 650,0000 civilian deaths (or 2.5% of their entire population). To downplay that is insulting to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis suffering.
But the thing that puts Americans over the edge is the deaths of their troops? I don't quite understand that logic. Can someone be so kind as to explain that?
EOR (End-of-rant)
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
We have to step back and ask ourselves another question, "Why go to war at all?"
There comes a time when all diplomacy has failed and there is no other choice. The hand has been dealt and the bluffs, raises, and calls have all been made and it is time for one side or the other to lay their last card on the table or else concede defeat. The appeal of last resort to combat and the use of lethal force is the basis for our entire society and thus it remains, for those who elect the way of war, available to us today as the oldest and most final form of dispute resolution. Why go to war at all? Because the other guy refuses to relent and says, "I will see you in hell before I accede to your demands" and it is important enough for you to risk life and limb to get what you want. Admittedly, not many things are that important, but some things are worth fighting for and always remember that he who can destroy a thing controls a thing and that includes our fellow man.
I don't care if you're a liberal, conservative, libertarian, communist, fascist, moderate, or anything else. Regardless of your political beliefs, it has to be admitted that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had nothing to do with justice, freedom, or "weapons of mass destruction". They were merely done to exert increased Western geopolitical influence in central Asia. A major part of this is to counter the ever-growing power of China, but also because of the extensive energy supplies available in the region.
I would characterize myself as a right of center Republican with Libertarian sympathies and I disagree. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, misguided and ill timed though they may be, were most certainly about justice and freedom and, to a lesser extent, WMD and the president has said as much. Should we not at least on this, his beliefs, take him at his word? You can disagree with his decisions and his convictions, but the President thought that war was the only option remaining with a reasonable possibility of actually achieving these goals. You can disagree with that too, but that it is what is great about democracy...we have the right to disagree and make our voices heard. It is because of this freedom that we seek to liberate others because the President believes, as I do, that the best probability for long term peace lies in democracy and freedom. When I say long term peace I mean the kind that President Kennedy spoke of following the Cuban Missile Crisis,
"What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time."
We do not fight to occupy and oppress or to steal natural resources or to subdue and destroy merely for own security. It is indeed unfortunate that certain people, namely Osama Bin Laden, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and all who support the mission of terror have decided to force our hand in these matters, but we are not likely to achieve the sort of lasting peace that Kennedy spoke of when there are men like this loose in the world bent on the ultimate destruction of our way of life.
Now I know that you will argue that they fight us because they say that they want us out of the Middle East and I take them at their word that they do indeed want us out of the Middle East, but what do you suppose that they will do when we are gone? Will they be satisfied with the restoration of the Islamic caliphate, the oppression of their women, and the brutal imposition of Sharia law or will they turn their eyes next towards Europe and ultimately the United States? Is it fair to our children and grandchildren to allow this menace to grow and sustain itself in the Middle East in exchange for a
"... and then all our vipers suddenly when dead, it was like someone threw a switch..."
... contingency plans. Especially the current crop of loonies.
I don't blame the brits at all. I certainly wouldn't trust the US military not to make
Its interesting, I have read that the US actively tried to dissuade the UK from its plans for an invasion as there was a belief that it would cause problems for the (US supported) military dictatorship that was running Argentina at the time, the US hoped that there could be an alternative solution, one that could be acceptable to both the UK and Argentina, - with both giving ground. Remember that they US officially remains neutral as to the sovereignty of the Falkland islands.
That is hardly giving "loads of support", but it was appreciated. My point is that the US felt it could not outright support the UK, as it had interests in the region, and those interests were at least of equal importance as the UK.
The situation with the Suez crisis is probably better as an indicator of UK and US interests clashing, but the fact remains, the UK cannot trust the US, if the UK's actions are not in the US's interests.
As such, the UK should not be reliant upon the US for any defensive or offensive military capability especially if the US does not trust the UK sufficiently to give the UK access to the software that has any bearing on that capability that
But a soldier from brazil is worth most of all.
That's just the point, isn't it. The outcome of 'battles' is a metric for conventional war, and a bad measuring stick for uncoventional/asymetric war.
One side can claim all the battle victories they want, but if the other side is not fighting battles (nor has any interest in doing so) then the claim of victory is meaningless. How many conventional battles did Geronimo win? Is he revered as a tactical genius because fought on his enemy's terms or because he tied up massive numbers of troops while continuing to raid and elude capture for 30 years?
The greatest mistake the US makes about Iraq (other than being there in the first place) is thinking that it is about battles and direct confrontations, or imagining that once troops are in a town then that town is 'held'.
American troops can raise all the flags they want in all the provincial outposts they want but it will do very little good when the 'enemy' simply melts away, returning sporadically to disrupt supply lines and make actual administration impossible. Raising a flag only means something when the local population recognizes the flag as symbolic of control and submits accordingly. Geronimo did not, Ho Chi Minh did not, and the internecine groups in Iraq do not
As long as the US keeps thinking that this fight in Iraq is about territorial control (particularly when the US military cannot even control Bagdhad), they are destined for failure. The insurgents don't need to control cities. They don't need to win or even fight battles. As long as they disrupt the business of running a military occupation and survive, they achieve their goals. Strike and evade, strike and evade. There's no need to hold any particular ground since they have far more ground on which to hide than the occupier can possibly cover.
And the harder the US tries to hit them, the more collateral damage is done; the more collateral damage, the stronger the insurgent groups are supported. The more support they have, the more sophisticated their attacks become and the easier it becomes to melt away and evade the counterattack (which of course does more collateral damage and begins the cycle anew).
If insurgent groups in Iraq were dumb enough to stand together and fight the occupying US Army head on, of course they would be obliterated. But the situation is far more analogous (though by no means akin) to that of competing gangs -- their real beef is with each other. One or another side may try to use the police (the occupiers or their puppets) as intermediaries to get at their enemy but only as a means to an end, and without trust. The intermediaries are disposable, and subject to attack at any time.
Such is the nature of occupations, and why they rarely work out.
Note: My sympathies go out to all those in uniform in Iraq. I truly believe that the vast majority of you are good people (and those that aren't weren't before they were sent there). You have sacrificed far beyond what you were asked to, and have served well and admirably. I only wish that those who sent you were compelled to learn from your experience, and forced to undergo the same danger and hardships to at least understand and appreciate your stories.
The US army probably loses many more than 4 people a month to accidents in peacetime. The Iraqis aren't defeating the US troops militarily; the US is defeating itself politically.
The smart thing to have done would have been to leave Iraq completely shortly after capturing Hussein, turn him over to be executed, and to let the various Iraqi factions kill each other to their hearts content. Instead, Bush chose to keep troops there "until the nation was stable". Big mistake.
If you're going to forcibly stabilize another country (which I don't recommend), you have to actually be FORCEFUL. That means eliminating whomever opposes you quickly and decisively, shrugging off civilian casualties and international opinion. Right now, the US is trying to do it "nicely", which simply doesn't work. The different factions just laugh at the US soldiers knowing that they aren't authorized to do anything that will really have an effect, or even effectively defend themselves.
Whenever US troops do take a major action, civilians are killed and citizens are horrified. Occasionally a few soldiers get pissed, go crazy, and kill innocents, and citizens are horrified. It's like fighting a small dog. You can easily kill it, but everyone will hate you for doing it. You can try to capture it without hurting it, but you'll get bitten a lot and everyone will laugh their ass off at you.
Of course the British are concerned about not having the code for their military equipment. During the Falklands war they used the holes in the French made missles' soft to disable the Argentine missles. (Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/argentina/story/0,,16477 62,00.html .) They know that power can be used, they are not going to give that power to others to use against them!
Aside from any code with the purpose of fascilitating a "shutdown" of the plane, the code for the radar data processing is what the US is most concerned to keep a well guarded secret. Also, 90% of the code for the F22 is written in Ada. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/air craft/f-22-avionics.htm
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(pause)
"Hello, Mr. Stallman? I understand you have some experience applying political pressure to closed-source vendors, I wonder if..."
It's not restraint, it's using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Let's contrast the first gulf war with the current one.
In the first gulf war we did not plan to occupy iraq so we flew something like 300 sorties a day dropping an ungodly amount of bombs on the place. We targeted and destroyed all kinds of crucial civilian infrastructure such as bridges, electrical generation facilites, water treatment plants, roads, factories etc. Our goal was to make the iraqis suffer so much that they would rise up and overthrow saddam so we worked very hard at hurting as many common iraqis as possible. As a result of these efforts and the sanctions that followed we killed close to two million iraqis including hundreds of thousands of children.
That was using the right tool for the right job.
In the second war we wanted to occupy iraq so we didn't want to destroy any infrastructure that we wanted to use ourselves so we didn't target water treatment facilities, bridges etc. We wanted to keep saddams palaces so we could move into them and set up shop. Wrong tool for the wrong job. The US military is awesome at killing, destroying, and making millions of people as miserable as possible. It sucks at police work and occupying an angry populace.
Wrong tool, wrong job.
evil is as evil does
Ah, the old "stab-in-the-back" excuses already.
0 1/neocons200701
In the first place, not enough troops were sent to occupy Iraq. Then the Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi Army and ripped apart the Ba'athist infrastructure leaving a lot of *trained guys running around with grudges against the US military. Privatisation of occupation duties plus lack of control (for the sake of "efficiency") has led to rampant corruption - http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n21/harr04_.html This has led to an almost complete failure by US corporations to restore Iraqi infrastructure.
Let's face it, the US Main Stream Media has been controlled and castrated for years now - see the NY Times and it's suppression of the wire-tapping. The US military embedded journalists so as to control them. I see you're polling for control of the internet as well. How much does it take for you to say that the US fucked up? You sound almost like these guys: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/
As for the justness of this war, the sheer number of so-called honest people telling us lies in order to get us to go to war have been astounding. Weapons of mass destruction? Non-existent. Uranium? ditto. Saddam and Al Qaeda? Wrong. In the US, the neo-cons have even gone to the extreme of committing crimes (re: Valerie Plame) in order to justify this war. In the UK, the pressures of this power has forced an honest man to commit suicide. If the need to go to war was that just, why all this pressure?
And I have to say that the current US intransigence towards their supposedly closest ally smacks of, at the least, ingratitude. Brits are currently dieing in Iraq and Afghanistan, paying in blood for a "speicial relationship" which is being revealed as worthless when push comes shove. In contrast, I bet the US would hand the code over to the Israelis in a similar situation.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Yes, 3k Americans should be very important had they been defending their country against a violent invasion. However, in this case it was USA who attacked and should be held responsible for the 650k innocent people they've murdered.
"they don't engage our forces head on anymore. They'd all die and they know it."
very true. As I recall my history there was another army that was absolutely devestating when fought on its own terms. That was the british army in the days of cavalry and muskets. We even built a sizeable empire around it (and our navy). That army even defeated the supposudly unstoppable napoleon.
Then some people in one of our colonies learned to fight us on their terms. As I recall, they didnt march out with flags to meet us like gentlemen on the field of battle, but would ambush us.
The effect was devestating, and that army won. In fact they kicked us back to our own country and declared independence.
I believe its now called the united states of america.
Its amazing how many empires there have been, the greeks, the romans, the british, the french, we have all controlled vast empires through military might at one stage. And we have all learned the futility of relying purely on force of arms to maintain control of foreign countries.
I guess it's impossible to accept that lesson when you *are* the current military top dog. It took humiliation of our army to learn that lesson. I'd rather the US learned it without having to lose any more of its own servicemen.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
To care more about fellow countrymen is indeed a normal human trait, by 200+:1 ratio it becomes an inhuman trait.
No the problem isn't people shooting f16's with ak47's.
The problem is thinking you can use an f16 to shoot a guy with an ak47.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
1956. Suez.
Why do you think the French built the "force de frappe"?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Funding should not have been withdrawn. It plunged Palestine into an impossible situation. The large majority of palestinians who had voted were in favour of a two state solution and Israel's right to exist and that was the climate at the time. Regardless of any private feelings of members of the Hamas government, and I say private because they were publically stating their willingness to negotiate peacefully and were sustaining a ceasefire at the time, they were hardly about to engage in some program of wiping out Israel.
The best approach for the EU and the USA was to honour existing payments. Instead they sent the clear message that the palestinians choice was subject to US approval.
It really makes you wonder if they Israeli government wants a palestinian state, doesn't it?
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