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.