Bayou Man has a very interesting take on where the future of combat fighter production is going. Read it here. His view of what the NSA scandal may mean for allies buying the F-35 is beyond interesting. Is this one of the reasons why the Pentagon is so desperate to sell the airplane? Combat be damned, its all about intel?
The US already has the ability to monitor and "disable" F-16s it exported via sattelites, most notable example being Pakistani F-16s, so this is not a new feature on the F-35. The US will be getting flight data and real-time diagnostics data on every F-35 via sattelite links, as well as sensor feeds.
ReplyDeleteThis is why the US is stressing the operation of F-35 among its allies, because the US could remotely collect sensor data from every F-35 in flight.
Unfortunately such a system is vulnerable to snooping and hacking unless there are iron-clad security features. Last we knew, they had found vulnerabilities in the system and were working to fix them in the F-35 Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS). But progress on ALIS has even been worse on the major F-35 software.
DeleteThe information from ALIS ties in with the Performance-Based Logistics (PBL), the F-35’s ambitious, new fleet management system. It is an integrated acquisition and logistics process for buying weapon system capability, and the plane can't fly without it.