this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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The problem here is that any serious debunking of the myth basically goes the same way; "No, that's stupid, no one would do that."
It's the proving a negative issue. The internals of the F-35 are not something that anyone is at liberty to discuss, so anyone who wants to wildly speculate about what could be in there is free to make up whatever they want, and anyone in a position to prove them wrong is legally unable to do so.
But the idea simply does not pass the sniff test. You're talking about handing these weapons over to advanced nations with access to serious technical know how, and just rolling the dice that none of them ever discover it before you get a chance to use it. And that's assuming the idea is even plausible. It's not like you can just ping this thing like a fucking router. It's not flying around advertising its IP address. It was built to be a stealth aircraft; that means, among other things, removing all extraneous external communications. And there's literally no reason to connect any part of the critical software to the external comms and every reason not to, given that the US' enemies are pretty damn good at cyberwarfare. That would be a crippling vulnerability for a weapon system like that.
Basically, the reason no serious commenter believes a killswitch exists is because we simply do not build combat aircraft in a way that would allow a killswitch to exist.
But please feel free to show me an actual quote from someone with serious defence tech credentials saying otherwise. So far, I've not seen any.
Would they be updated by sneakersnet, then? I guess that would make sense, but the only difference is that it would take slightly longer for data to arrive.
It is a negative issue, so the only thing to consider is how plausible it is. It would be easy for them to push a malicious update, I assume that's not in dispute?
Try to think about what you're actually describing. It's one year from now. Tensions between the US and Canada have steadily and rapidly escalated. US troops are massing on the Canadian border under the guise of "training exercises"... And some guy in the RCAF is like "Shit, better not forget to run that new firmware update that the Americans pushed for us, and absolutely no one else." Is that the scenario we're envisioning here?
No, in that situation we just wouldn't do an update. I'd be more worried about a backdoor that's triggered by not updating for an extended period, maybe along along with a few other hints, and was actually made with the possibility of the Iranians capturing an F-35 in mind.
More like, it's a year from now and Trump decides to take his ball and go home, so he directs the NSA and DIA to build an update that will brick planes which aren't parked in one of his favoured countries, after a delay of about a month to ensure he gets as many as possible.
At which point you would roll back to the previous firmware, because of course we're going to keep copies. This sounds like a horrifically ineffective plan. We're certainly better off having fifth gen fighters with that incredibly minimal risk attached than we are with fourth gen fighters that are completely outclassed.
And again, if we're at the point where potential hostilities are close enough that a one month timebomb could matter then we're at the point where we're not loading any software the US sends us.
The far more meaningful risk here is that they can simply stop giving us new parts and software updates. That's actually a real and valid concern.