What stops arms exporting countries from putting a kill-switch on their military hardware?
In: Technology
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.
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