What stops arms exporting countries from putting a kill-switch on their military hardware?
In: Technology
What makes you think they don’t?
It’s a pretty common practice, particularly with GPS ubiquity.
It’s harder to get customers if you can remotely disable the weapons. You lose the trust of your customers.
it depends what it is they are exporting. if it’s small arms/etc than it’s going to cost more to add hardware to disable that AK-47 than the actual cost of manufacturing the AK-47. if it’s something like a fighter jet or destroyer than yeah it can be done. but just keep in mind, that any country that takes possession of some technology like that is going to disassemble/reverse engineer it. so most likely, it’ll be found unless it’s super well hidden. and for things like software, once you have access to the hardware, you can install your own software.
If you do this, other militaries will simply stop buying from you.
In addition, if it is hardware based, other nations can always find ways to remove it.
It’s honestly easier, with advanced weapons, to just make them reliant on you for parts for maintenance. Things like fighter jets require very specific parts that are often built to tight tolerances – a lot of nations buying them can’t fly their planes for long if they piss off their supplier.
In practice it isn’t feasible and unreliable. How do you trigger the switch? As others have said, if it’s by remote, the remote can be jammed. As others said, your customers lose faith and don’t come buying from you anymore. The important thing I want to add is that the US, for example, doesn’t just sell weapons to foreign powers in a purely capitalist, competitive market sense – we sell to allies. You undermine that relationship if you intend to sabotage them. And kill switches are sabotage. If it were remote, for example, what is stopping any other power from disabling those weapons, perhaps the enemies of our allies? As someone pointed out, presume it’s geo-sensitive – what would happen as the political landscape changes? Borders move. Aid, offense, and defense are called upon in different locations. You put a kill switch in a machine that’s location sensitive, and suddenly that machine is needed there – it won’t work.
The US sold F-14s to Saddam Hussein, back when he was an ally. Last I heard, they’re still grounded inside Iraq, not because we sabotaged them, but because we stopped supplying parts for their maintenance when the political tide changed. Ostensibly they could have reverse engineered the parts, but for some reason they didn’t.
How do you send a signal to it? With a radio that can be jammed?
How do you power the radio? With a battery that runs out?
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