US Army scraps $1B Iron Dome project after Israel refuses to provide source code
timesofisrael.com
timesofisrael.com
Our military is correct in not purchasing something that they cannot fully vet. The shocking part to me is that Israel truly thought they could make the deal work without providing something that could be vetted.
So they wouldn't like designers of its adversaries to know how to fly shells to avoid it.
> The radar of our Hornet could not identify most of the aircraft in this region as hostile—in other words, our front-line fighter could not shoot down people who would be the enemies in this region.
> I went to the United States and, for five years, it was up hill, down dale and one knock-down drag-out after another with Cap Weinberger, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. I tried to get the codes of that blasted radar out of them. In the end, we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves
[0]: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....
But US doesn't provide source code too. Many defense deals with India could not proceed because of US denying transfer of technology [1]. Especially with F-16s. Which is why India decided to buy Rafale. I am sure this is how every country would like to operate anyways.
[1]: https://www.defensenews.com/air/2016/09/08/us-air-force-tech...
[2]: https://theprint.in/opinion/f-16-never-stood-a-chance-to-be-...
SAAB understands this. They are offering source code with their Gripen deal for the upcoming India fighter jet procurement. I'm not 100% sure, but I'm assuming that neither Boeing nor Lockheed Martin are planning to offer that.
I hear this was a key reason for why Brazil went with SAAB Gripen rather than Boeing F-18. (The "official reason" was that Snowden revealed US spying on Brazil, as if that was news to Brazil...)
(Basically, it's designed with that as a top goal. Be simple/cheap to work on.)
Traditionally, I think the primary reason to buy US fighter jets at very high prices compared to the non-US competition has been that you also expect to get some amount of military protection back from the US worth much more (like 5-10x more) than that investment. Trump has turned this scheme upside down. We thank him for this.
(I also happen to think it may end up being a good thing for the US. It's cutting off a lot of the money supply to the US military complex. Isn't that a good thing?)
One of the better side effects of Trump is that the world has gained by finally stepping away from US reliance... American hegemony is no longer.
Yes he did. No doubt about that. 3 Billion USD worth arms deal is definitely not the true potential of the Indo-US Strategic Defense Partnership though. It can be so much more! But it is a good start. It can be sped up if US can relax its norms in relation to transfer of technology.
The Rafale deal which India signed was a 7.87 Billion Euro deal [1]. India is going to modernize its defense capabilities this decade and this is the right time for the United States to relax its norms if it wants to be a major player. Especially with Make in India being given a thrust in Defense sector.
[1]: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/et-explains/rafale...
I think Trump succeeded in that. Other than that, I don't think he succeeded at anything, if you can call that a win ;)
So it's really not hard to understand why countries would be interested in the Gripen because they can own it outright and do with it what they please even if it's inferior to US weapons because the US weapons they'd be going up against aren't flown by the US but by other countries with similar restrictions on them.
Not shocking at all imo. The Israelis have shown an extraordinary amount of chutzpah over the decades in their dealings with the US. They are of the belief the US is the real benefactor in this "special relationship".
>But US doesn't provide source code too
The US is effectively paying for the development of Iron Dome [1]. Requesting source code is completely warranted, in fact I would go further and demand the source code if Israel wants the US to continue funding the program
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-approves-225-million-in-...
Israel has a special relationship with the developed world.
The UK and Australia are close allies too, but Israel is quite small (geographically the size of New Jersey) and only about 8 million - the total population of California's bay area, and surrounded by countries that often times are at best neutral. Israel has a strong incentive to win and maintain US friendship.
it's a weapon. Even if the logic that was running it was flawless, you'd still want to see whether or not someone else has access to a function to give them control, or self destruct, or whatever.
In other words : I don't think that it has to suggest a flawed system, it could also suggest other 'government subversion', like hidden functionalities.
Everybody else has basically a black box of code given to them in terms of code for the aircraft.
/s.
I’m pretty sure if a country were to do this now, they would also have plans to sabotage the effort
This is a great example of the pot calling the kettle black.
The US routinely denies access to the source code of military hardware that is sells to its allies.
I can't blame Israel, given America's track-record of weaponizing all vulnerabilities.
I also can't blame America.
Without secure computing nobody can know whom to trust.
Israel is right behind them in this regard.
Making our own parallel version is probably also worth it so that in the exchange of source code between the two countries it doesn't fall through the seam and get stolen or something, but that's just my armchair general opinion.
There are still people who believe congresscritters read (or even AUTHOR!) their own bills, because they say so and that these kinds of handshake agreements between countries are purely popaganda (re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22507605).
Israel has actually never done anything for the US. Israel actually sunk USS liberty and killed American soldiers in the hope of pulling america into a war (by pretending it was someone else). LB Johnson was also involved but that still doesn't make Israel an ally of US.
So here's litmus test, what other country would accept a US request to not retaliate to ballistic missiles fired at them. So maybe Israel is US's only ally.
So that was perhaps the context for the Liberty attack. And it could have triggered WWIII.
Number of reasons:
1) History. Us Germans tried to exterminate all Jews (and thank God we failed), while the USA and Great Britain, the colonial power of Palestine, fought against Germany. It made sense that after WW2, Israel was founded as a "safe haven" for Jewish life, backed by USA/UK.
2) Israel is the only real democracy in the entire region. Yes, Netanyahu has attacked democratic institution and basic democratic decency, but still: Israel is and likely will remain a democracy, a democracy allied to the US right in the region where the biggest oil reserves are.
3) While Israel does have their own weapons program, they are a good customer of US arms. Some of their budget is actually paid by US Congress, but well, as long as the end result is that Israel uses US weapons and the people employed in the districts of the Congressmen approving these deals keep their jobs, there is no real problem.
4) Intelligence service cooperation. The Mossad is one of the best intelligence services there is, rivaled IMO only by NSA/CIA.
The second point is also totally irrelevant: the other best ally of the US in the region, Saudi Arabia, is an absolute monarchy. The US never had a problem overthrowing democratic governments to replace them with dictatorships or supporting ferocious dictators as long as they advanced its goals. This talk of democracy as a value to support is just spin to justify attacking some countries, when it suits.
The third point is also irrelevant: Israel receives almost $4 billion is military aid from the US- this proves that the US is an ally of Israel, but again, is Israel an ally of the US?
The fourth point is the only one that barely holds. Yes, the Israeli intelligence cooperates with the US (but also spies on the US at the highest levels: see for example [1]- something that should have been a huge scandal and received almost zero reporting). But one wonders how much of Israeli intelligence helps solving problems that Israel itself has created or that are relevant to the US only because Israel is in the area.
1 https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...
Israel’s relationship with the US is central to all of the international problems and threats the US faces in 2020. Including threatening the US’ own democracy due to unchecked Israeli lobbying in the US and openly combatting anyone who tries to question Israeli actions.
This tired fallacy needs to perish. Israel is not a democracy. Even Israelis' can see this, and its why a third of them don't bother voting - the Israeli people know that they don't have the right to select their leaders in the Knesset. The parties do.
If Israel become a real democracy, its Israeli-Arab population would rapidly change the identity of the country. This is why the fallacy is perpetuated.
Because the US government classifies them as an ally.
According to the official, military experts and generals, they treat Israel as a military ally.
The vouchers are not made available to US allies on the understanding of "our companies will help you develop something, and then you'll share it with us".
That was never the deal. The deal is: "the United States Congress would like Raytheon to upskill in missile defense, why don't you work with them and we'll cover your costs".
Total aid to Israel is around $230 billion for the post WW2 era (primarily in the 1970-2020 time frame). Of that, $34 billion was economic aid.
In the 1970s and 1980s the US was funding the equivalent of 3-5% percent of Israel's economy directly with economic aid (their economy only crossed over $100b in GDP as of 1995; if you go back to the 1970s and 1980s, they had a relatively tiny economy, so that $34b in economic aid was outsized in relation at the time it was being dispursed).
Israel no longer needs the economic aid they used to, so that component has declined to being routinely zero.
Are they worried that by giving the source code to the US it would eventually be leaked to Israel's enemies, perhaps under a Sanders administration?
1) There are flaws in the code that they don't want to reveal to the US (perhaps it doesn't work as they've claimed, or it's more fragile/easily defeated than currently thought). 2) If the code leaked (for any reason), it could open up weaknesses for an adversary. 3) There is something extraordinary in the software, to Israel's benefit, that they don't want anyone else to have. This seems less likely than the other two.
I'm curious why you felt it necessary to add this bit, given the innumerable OPSEC blunders of the current administration.
That administration is the biggest mess I have ever witnessed.
I wonder why some industries (HPC, defence) talk about code as being a discrete countable noun, where almost all other industries talk about code as being an uncountable mass noun.
Example: GitHub and Amazon have code, whereas Cray and Raytheon have codes.
I wonder what 'one code' looks like to them? Is it on function? One line?
I've never heard it used but it seems "one code" would be one implementation of a specific algorithm from the literature -- probably one or a few functions.
Likewise, I've seen agile purists deliver totally broken login screens.
The difference, in my opinion, lies in the software's end goal; software you write for a NASA space flight might kill the astronaut you've met at NASA. Software you write for a login screen won't, as it's not as high stake. You're probably going to put on your head phones, pick a YouTube playlist, scroll through JIRA, and meme around on slack.
We've evolved thousands of years fighting real physical threats, and we have implemented processes to deal with these physical threats in order to survive. A JIRA ticket for a broken login screen just does not trigger the same brain pattern response as your astronaut friend burning to death during orbital re-entry.
good testing is a relevant best practice and increasingly scientists are recognizing this.
Here's one other random example that sounds normal to HPC people and bizarre to most other industries.
"Debugging parallel codes can be incredibly difficult, particularly as codes scale upwards."
Maths retains its s because it's an abbreviation of the plural noun mathematics.
The one place I do see “codes” consistently is Indian blogs/vlogs.
It reads reads to me from the uk as a "How do you do, fellow kids"
Well those people would be missing out because some of the most talented scientists write 'codes'.
I assure you I did not write "codes" nor did the Engineers
Ok.... good for you? Neither do I in academic writing. But many accomplished scientists do. You can look at any HPC conference proceedings right now and see it for yourself.
One machine instruction (e.g. one opcode, three opcodes)
One g-code, a list of g-codes
I have worked across US, UK and Australia and everywhere it is exclusively Indian developers who use the term codes. I still hear it every day and I don't believe anyone brings it up because technically both ways are right.
I think the US would do better developing this kind of system from scratch than buying a weapons systems without source code.
Perhaps this is part of negotation game from the Israelis?
(Give them a few more F35s...)
Surely you don't have to buy two to find out they don't include the source code.
... always check the fine print
BTW, the title should be changed to source code rather than key codes as the article later clarifies
I wonder if it could reduce costly military blunders like marching your troops into artillery fire?
They probably had some great general models where the dome would work anywhere and shoot down any kind of missile but time and money ran out, the code is a sprawling mess, it only works when the batteries are spaced in a very specific geographic configuration - probably Israel-shaped and can only shoot down the specific missiles their local enemies had a year ago.