Sorry about the thread title - I couldn’t express it more clearly within the character limit.
The scenario I am thinking of is:
“Dear proxies/allies/own troops who may be overrun: Here’s nice tanks, anti-aircraft sytems etc. for you to use. By the way, you’ll notice a dialog box coming up every Monday morning, asking for the week’s activation code. Our liaison officer will have provided these codes the day before. This is to make the weapons systems inoperable or at least remove software-based targeting precision in case they get captured, sold to our common enemy through corruption, or (heaven forbid) you and us have had a falling out”.
Is there a known instance of such a technology being developed or implemented? The only thing I can recall reading about is withholding spare parts and training from ersthwile allies.
Don’t knock the value of cutting off of spare parts. Without tracks, a tank is not going anywhere.
There have been rumours that the F16’s provided to Israels neighbours have a kill switch, that they will refuse to lock on to US or Israeli aircraft. No idea how true that is, but I suspect it could be easily overcome by a country with at least some basic electronic industry.
Most arms sales are commercial, for profit, and for obvious reasons most purchaser governments woulld find such a limitation offensive and in attractive. Basic self-respect makes it difficult for a supposedly sovereign government to hand such a degree of control over its defence capacity to a foreign power. So your arms would have to trade at a fairly steep discount to those of your competitors to be even remotely attractive.
You could do it, though, in arms that you were basically giving away to states that unabashedly regarded themselves as client states of yours, and had no pretensions to sovereignty.
This is probably a distorted story about the aircrafts’ IFF (Identify Friend/Foe) system.
This is logic programmed to recognize ‘friendly’ airships, and not fire upon them. It is most common in launched weapons (like missiles or torpedoes), but could be programmed into other weapons like gunbs, I suppose. Each ship broadcasts an identification signal, so that it’s own weapons don’t come back and hit it. Or those fired by others in the squadron. It’s common for ships to change course radically after firing such a weapon, and for the opponents to also change course to avoid the weapon. And current ‘smart’ weapons will change their course to follow the target. With them all changing course, it’s easy to see where your own weapon could suddenly be coming towards you. So it’s best to have it programmed not to attack ‘friendly’ ships.
I suppose F-16’s sold to Israel come programmed to recognize any F-16 as friendly, but they could probably be re-programmed to see only Israeli ones as friendly. Not sure if it would be worth the bother, though.
Well, post- revolution Iran couldn’t use the F-14s the US sold them before their revolution for very long because the US wouldn’t sell them any replacement parts.
Historical not-quite-the-OP factoid : back during the Falklands War the British expeditionary corps, in all other respects so completely outmatching everything Argentina had that Ricky Gervais (quite adequately IMO) described the conflict as akin to holding a midget at arms’ length and repeatedly kicking him in the balls, was nevertheless quite scared of the handful of then-state-of-the-art Exocet anti-ship missiles the Argentinians had secured from the French.
So they went to the French and asked them for all of the missile’s classified specs - effective range, radar signature and tracking algorithms etc… France obliged (and also refused to sell more of them, both to Argentina itself and its friendly neighbours who could have served as buying proxies).
It’s unknown to me whether the French intel on the missiles actually helped in any way (all we know is a few British ships *did *get hit, not how many hits were avoided) but telling the other guy exactly how to beat the hardware you flogged off to the first probably counts as working towards “withdrawing its use”, no ?
The partner countries in the F-35 program aren’t going to have access to its system source code. Obviously, cutting off software updates isn’t the same as shutting down the planes directly, but if a vulnerability is discovered in the software it might as well be.
To be fair, just shipping them F-35s counts as undermining their entire defence apparatus :D.
More seriously and less cheap shotty, I’m not quite sure what would prevent the clients from reverse engineering the hell out of that code anyway. They still wouldn’t get the patches that way obviously, but at best the whole “we’re not giving away our secret source code !” is going to hold them for what, a month ? I’m sure it’s more complex than a video game copy protection scheme, but it’s still not magic unbreakable software code (or invisible, impossible to map microchips for that matter).
It’s just feel-good B.S. for patriotic American consumption IMO.
I don’t know how hard it is to rewrite but it’s not like, say, an F-16; the F-35’s flight control system, radar control system and other software is fully integrated. So you couldn’t just replace the board and code* that runs the weapons systems like you could with an older plane.
*AIUI; I am neither a military aviation expert nor particularly technically inclined.
C4 works wonders on destroying about everything. Even a simple grenade could make a mess in a confined space such as the interior of a tank.
F-111 aircraft had small explosive devices which would fry a lot of the various avionics in the cockpit when ejecting or the aircrew could even do it manually after landing if forced down in enemy territory. You couldn’t depend on the crash ruining all the aircraft avionics on the F-111 as the entire cockpit ejected in a capsule.