[Southack]

Physical possession of the aircraft would enable any 1st world nation to access and decompile an aircraft's software and firmware.

Thus, the UK is merely floating an official excuse to kill the JSF...something that we've wanted to kill for some great amount of time now.

Let it die. Paying Billions for manned fighters rarely makes sense in this Age.

Even stealth fighters are facing obsoletion now that Israel has fielded video-targeting anti-aircraft missiles (the handwriting is on the wall). Computer software can handle complex image processing now (both visual and infrared). So video missiles can hit the stealthiest of aircraft (because they aren't invisible).

We do still need manned fighters, and we need a few super fighters (that are likewise manned), but we don't need nearly so many variants of fighters as in the past.

So let the JSF program die, and thank the Brits for giving us a face-saving way to kill it.

[Rokke]

"Physical possession of the aircraft would enable any 1st world nation to access and decompile an aircraft's software and firmware."

That is absolutely not true. We regularly export weapons systems with embedded capabilities that are not accessible to the folks we sell them to regardless of their ability to "decompile" the software and firmware they contain. We've been doing it for decades and we are very comfortable with the results. That is all I'm going to say on that subject.

"Even stealth fighters are facing obsoletion now that Israel has fielded video-targeting anti-aircraft missiles"

That is not new technology. It also assumes you know the stealth aircraft is there in the first place. Which is hard to do without some form of radar.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

The brits were some of the biggest pushers of the JSF. They are building two new aircraft carriers designed around these planes.
They were the biggest reason the vertical takeoff version was required.
The brits love the versitility of these planes. They saw it as the next generation of the harrier.
The US marines will also be users of this variation.

[Senator Bedfellow]

Physical possession of the aircraft would enable any 1st world nation to access and decompile an aircraft's software and firmware.

So what? By the time you get done decompiling all two million lines of Ada code to produce a pile of several bazillion opcodes - or if you're lucky, some sort of wacky C program that isn't itself compilable - and then putting all back together into an actually useable form, the plane will be obsolete. This is about being able to integrate their own systems into the thing, which you can easily do if you're provided the source code, and which you cannot do, as a practical matter, without the source, the theoretical possibility of reverse-engineering notwithstanding.