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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

How long will they hold in case of an ally betrayal? In the unlikely event of having crazy Islamist dictator with imperial ambitions as the God Emperor of Turkey?

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Aren't most/all airplanes, missiles, etc... operated by the Turkish military from the U.S.?

Doesn't the U.S. have the capability to disable them remotely?

No, the US doesn't export its armaments with any sort of remote disabling functionality, who would buy arms like that?

Actually it should be a simple as expiring whatever API key the jets use to communicate back to the US-based control servers. So when it POSTs to a StartEngine endpoint or whatever, it wouldn't start.

You're joking, right?

Lol.

No government would buy unreliable weapons.

No government could guarantee the reliability of purchased weapons. It is already known and been demonstrated that sabotaged arms will be bought.

What if they came with an Enhanced PROMIS Contract that guaranteed their reliability and lack of back doors and trojan horses?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw

If web developers ran wars the world would be a safer place.

Apart from war machines communicating through HTTP, I can't help but giggle to the thought of such a dialog:

- I repeat, the enemy seems to be not responsive. - What, you already killed them? - No we came with a bigger force but their layout didn't change. I don't think they're war-scale.

Joking aside, there's nothing making HTTPS inherently less secure than any other secure channel out there, right?

(disclaimer: I'm a web developer)

Yes it does. The US nuclear weapons have PALs, and although they're not remote disabling functions, they require special codes, which are not given to the host country for arming them.

After WWII we Brits sold cracked Engima machines internationally. You need to assume a foreign power would be willing to try and sell you equipment with backdoors. If they reasonably believed you wouldn't be able to spot them, or change actions if you did.

I remember this in the news, and again during the first Irak war (the stories were that the U.S. were asking France for the "code"), hence my question:

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11152/can-exocet...

As purchased supplies? That would be disasterous for the industry, no?

With current cad/cam systems I think it is possible to design a not bad Katusha analog in a weekend. And produce a couple in the next week. 20-30 of those build in secret could deliver a nasty first blow.

I'd have to look it up online, but while they used to import jet fighters from the US, Turkey builds similar F?? fighters and also drones like the Heron and other tools. But as a NATO member, I don't think they'd have a problem getting gear from third parties.

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