Today I stopped by StrategyPage.com, my new favorite news site for military news, and I encountered this story about the Israeli governments plans to buy F-35's and F-22's from the US govermnet. Currently they are irked by the US governments reluctance to release the source code for the computers on-board these planes, particularly the F-22, the US's newest and coolest multi-tasking plane.
This reluctance of the US is totally understandable and justified, the software is an enormous part of what makes these planes efficent and effective weapons. It's not something you want leaking to people you might have to engage in battle someday.
However, I'm utterly baffled by Israel's trust of the US hardware. The computing hardware in a modern fighter is deeply embedded in the system, and essential to nearly everything it does. It probably has hundreds of custom chips (ASICs, Application Specific Integrated Circuits) for which there is no source code. Their function is (or can be) fixed when they are manufactured, and the only way to figure out what the do for sure is to take it to a lab, strip the top off with some nasty chemicles, and then use an electron microscope to map the circuits. Then you have to spend god-only-knows-how-much time reverse engineering the circuitry.
Knowing how sneaky the US military can be, I would be not only very surprised, but also very disappointed if they have not used hundreds of the dirtiest, underhandediest and nearly undetectable uber-hacker tricks to ensure that the fighters we sell abroad today are utterly incapable of acting against our will tomorrow, regardless of who is flying them.
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