Forum: F-35 Lightning II

Please see the link below:

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5AO01F20091125?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=11617

A few questions come to mind: How will this decision affect Britain’s commitment to the program? How might this decision affect commitments from other participating countries? Does this decision force participating countries to depend too heavily on the US for support? How might this decision affect potential export sales beyond those already committed to the F-35?

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Elite 1K Joined: May 05, 2009 - 10:31 PM Posts: 1020

Buyers have been 'beware' of this for some time and have haggled over it in the past. Former Oz Defence Minister and Federal Opposition Leader and now Oz Ambassador to US - Kim 'Bomber' Beazley - boasted in his Federal Parliament farewell speech that the ADF hacked into Hornet codes when they were denied. However I would acknowledge that is now a long time ago (for some). A lot of hoohaa is generated about the JSF everytime someone farts in the development cycle. It is getting silly. Smile

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22451478-2,00.html

Australia 'cracked top-secret US jet fighter codes' By Don Woolford AAP September 20, 2007

"KIM Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes while he was defence minister in the 1980s. "We spied on them and we extracted the codes," Mr Beazley told Parliament during his valedictory speech today.

Mr Beazley, who was defence minister from 1984 to 1990, said that when he took over the job he soon learned that the radar on Australia's Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region. In other words, Australia's frontline fighter could not shoot down enemies in the region."

Personally, I think it will have very little effect. As most JSF Partners or likely F-35 Export Customers have little choice.

USMilFan wrote:

Please see the link below:

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5AO01F20091125?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=11617

A few questions come to mind: How will this decision affect Britain’s commitment to the program? How might this decision affect commitments from other participating countries? Does this decision force participating countries to depend too heavily on the US for support? How might this decision affect potential export sales beyond those already committed to the F-35?

First off it does not look like there have been to many complaints about it in public. I would have thought that we would have heard from some British government official by now if this was a serous issue.

Frankly I don't think they have much to stand on. For a 2 billion dollar investment UK industry gets about 15-20% of every F-35 produced. Conservatively that's 30 billion dollars in business that could have been given to Boeing, Spirit, Honeywell, etc. There was never any promise to release it and there is quite a bit of downside to doing so.

Let no one istake the fact that BAE is a competitor. giving them the souce cose is like giving them the keys to the castle. They could short cut a lot of code development by pirating some of the existing F-35 code. Further how do you control and maintain a stable version of the code when you have multiple vendors making multiple changes independent of one another.

I tend to agree with Thumper. I haven't heard any British officials complaining - just fanboys and journalists looking for a story. I don't believe that this is a surprise to anyone.

I don't think anyone's going to have much of a problem, and if they do, they can just go to LM; after all they ARE our allies, and we should be willing to help them as much as they should be willing to come forward if they have a problem. Really, 8 million lines of code can pretty much tell you everything the jet can do, and that's obviously not something you want out "in the wild" so to speak. From what I have read and conversed (with members of this forum), the source code is in C++, Java, and Ada. Now, it is not impossible to get some source code out of the software, the other countries might try disassembling it for example. But for all practical purposes it IS impossible, because there won't be enough time and money to sift through so many lines, which by the way won't come out nice and neat in the original coded language but in assembly. Each line in the original code has probably more than one processor operation tied to it. If you manage to disassemble the software (big if), you're going to get an assembly language version of what you're trying to do, and each line corresponds to precisely one instruction, so multiply 8 million by at least two, and that's the number of lines more or less you have to contend with. Software disassembly is not impossible but it is very very difficult.

Enthusiast Joined: Apr 23, 2009 - 08:44 AM Posts: 97

Tinito_16 wrote:

I don't think anyone's going to have much of a problem, and if they do, they can just go to LM

Slight correction here.

On FMS the IP is owned by the USGovt - LM in absolute terms under FMS own squat. LM can only release what the USG elects to release, and the USG will only release ITARs or similar rated material through various executive releases some of which are external body managed. eg Congress in some instances.

Forum: F-35 Lightning II

US to withhold F-35 software code