The US is ending support for Ukrainian F-16s, but there is a way out — online.ua

The sad thing is, this would be a completely hysterical thing to say like 10 years ago but now it's a serious consideration.

Electing this dickhead once is a blip but doing it twice in a row indicates that the american voters actually want this, which is deeply troubling for Europeans (and the rest of the world).

It’s certainly classified info, but I sincerely doubt the F35 has a kill switch.

If you have a kill switch on a weapon, that means an enemy can potentially disable your weapons.

One can argue that only export models would be equipped with a kill switch, but that puts the US in the position of potentially having Allied planes disabled remotely, leaving the US as the only air support in a conflict.

It’s far more likely that the US would simply discontinue parts and software updates, leaving a former ally scrambling to maintain their sudden white elephant fleet, while the US updates their own software to better manage fighting an identical aircraft that they know the exact technical specs of.

They can't switch off the F-35's. Countries can absolutely load their own mission program. They just aren't allowed to by agreement. If that agreement becomes useless for whatever reason then the country can just load it themselves.

I've been saying this for 20 years. Proprietary software creates a dangerous dependency that takes away freedom and increases cost.
Now we see the ultimate downside to sacrificing freedom for convenience.

Which is such a bangup job. The F-35 program was predicted on allies being able to buy it. Which they were in droves.

It's weird, but Trump might do irreversible damage to the US MIC. Not out of any principled stance, but because he doesn't understand anything.

That doesn’t make any sense, at least to me, as you’re in the EU, so any tariffs placed on the EU are placed on Poland.