I’ve seen a few articles now that US fighter jets have kill switches in them, so the US could just render them useless for anyone they’ve sold them to.
Is this true? It sounds insane to me, I’ve always assumed that countries that buy these jets have full control over them. It’s a gaping hole in your defence if you don’t.
“kill switches” don’t make any sense. Nobody would buy weapons knowing they had one, so you could only use it once before your export market tanks.
And why on Earth would you program weapons that deactivate upon receiving a signal? Obviously this would suck if our adversaries (who are all technically sophisticated) learned how to alt-ctrl-del our allies’ equipment.
The counter to that is why would you let anyone have a weapon they could use on you. There is no particular reason it had to be the US that turns, it could be anyone.
Because they’re paying you money for it?
If you don’t sell your planes to them they will just buy from someone else. They will still have planes to potentially use against you.
You may as well sell weapons to your allies because the chances they will turn them on you is minimal, and you want money.
Any time you give a weapon to somebody, there is at least one of these two things happening if not both;
You are sure this person is your friend and ally and is therefore no threat to you;
You have a better weapon/the full capability to defend against the shared weapon without fear upon sharing it, thus ensuring your superiority in any potential engagement with what was formerly yours.
In this case, both of these were/are true. Quite simply, the US fleet will remain functional in greater numbers for longer even if it is no longer a reliable ally of global freedom, and the pilots have had far more experience in the cockpit of fully functional vehicles to boot. So even in an engagement where the technology is a literal 1:1 match, pilot skill and experience will absolutely make the difference and the US military knows that.
Selling weapons to people is fine if you’re military is 10x the size of all of theirs combined.
We “can” attack the US, but not a fuck are we ever going to.
The US does not like losing soldiers. It happens, but we hate it. Even if we would win the war, losing a few thousand soldiers would be something we don’t like.
This is something most functional democracies share.