It’s Trump and his administration that may be the real ‘kill switch’
It’s pretty juvenile, some of the current conversations about the so-called “kill switch”.
That’s the red button Donald Trump is supposedly able to press, in order to bring all the superfighter jets bought at great cost by America’s allies crashing to the ground.
So great is the distrust and suspicion of the Trump administration that Canada and Portugal are having second thoughts about buying F-35s.
And the Pentagon has been working overtime to reassure existing and putative customers that the F-35 stealth fighter jet has no “kill switch”. Honest.
In its attempt to bolster everyone’s faith in America’s wares, the US defence department and defence industry is helped by a dose of common sense, as well as a prominent aviation blog.
The Aviationist wrote on March 10 that the US software upgrades are important but not essential to the F-35’s performance. It said: “The F-35’s reliance on US-provided software updates makes the weapon system really vulnerable. Software upgrades, managed by the US, ensure optimal performance and security, but withholding them would leave the aircraft operational, albeit with outdated capabilities”.
Fair enough. Think of it as an iPhone 6 plus (with the iPhone 7 veering towards that status). Basically, Apple no longer supports devices it considers so obsolete you can’t get them repaired and for which you rarely, if ever, receive iOS security updates.
In time, the phone will become less functional but the loss of capability should be gradual.
So too the F-35?
That said, the point about the “kill switch” fears is the lack of trust in Trump’s America. As Bloomberg columnist Max Hastings has noted: “Today, America’s putative allies are uncertain whether the president is clinically unstable. But they are surely absolutely convinced that his word can’t be believed for more than a day; that his courses of action are irrational; and that he and his associates, JD Vance and Elon Musk, are strangers to truth and every convention of diplomacy, decency and courtesy.”
It’s Trump and his administration that may be the real kill switch.
