Dogfight : F35 vs F16

[shift8]

NO WAIT! I HAVE IT FIGURED OUT!

The F-35 must be some kind of ingenious monetary ruse! We have successfully tricked the Chinese into investing into our horrible plane! The plan must be to wait till the Chinese are financially committed, then switch and build licensed copies of the Su-35 for ourselves! Amazing!

 

[GScholz]

Hold on a second, you virtually called me a conspiracy theorist and now you say you don't know? ... Yet you make yourself out to be a massive expert on this, and then talk down to me because you think I'm a conspiracy nutjob.

I think I flat out called you and many others here conspiracy theorists, multiple times, starting on page one. No "virtual" about it. And no, I do not make myself "out to be a massive expert on this". As I've stated earlier in this thread:

I have no "opinion" of my own of the F-35. How can I? I have nothing to do with it or any reliable info... except that the pilots who fly it like it. I trust their opinions and defer to them.

I'm choosing to believe the people who actually has the knowledge to make an informed opinion on the F-35. You and others like you prefer to believe in the ludicrous theory that all these pilots and officers from 10 different air forces are all lying so they can get the dubious honor of risking their lives flying a bad war plane. That's a massive conspiracy and unless you can prove it it is just a theory. Q.E.D.

[DaveBB]

History repeats itself due to the uninformed.  Iraq was a repeat of Vietnam, and the F-35 is a repeat of the original F-111.

[shift8]

History repeats itself due to the uninformed.  Iraq was a repeat of Vietnam, and the F-35 is a repeat of the original F-111.

1) Yes but not in the manner you think. Simplistic lesson learning leads to simplistic fixes.

2) No it was not. This is a perfect example of overgeneralizing said "repetitions"

3) Not even remotely.

[nrshida]

I have no "opinion" of my own of the F-35.

Do you think it's good-looking or ugly? 

[GScholz]

I think it's somewhere in between actually. It's bland I suppose. The B-model looks awesome doing its VTOL thing, but that's about it. Fortunately (or perhaps regrettably) war is not a beauty contest. Quite the opposite in fact. It's about death and destruction, and inflicting it upon the enemy in the most ugly and underhanded way possible.

[icepac]

If the chinese were able to snare any information on design, it looks far more like they might have done so with the YF23 than any other plane.

[GScholz]

[DaveBB]

I don't want to brag, but me, Shift8, and Gscholz all served in the same unit together. That's how we know so much about the F-35:

[GScholz]

You may claim membership in that exclusive club, but I actually know very little about the F-35. The people who do know a lot about the F-35 all speak very highly of it. That's my point.

[Vulcan]

I think I flat out called you and many others here conspiracy theorists, multiple times, starting on page one. No "virtual" about it. And no, I do not make myself "out to be a massive expert on this". As I've stated earlier in this thread:

How can you call someone citing well known, well publicized facts a conspiracy theorist?

Someone who dispels such facts to put their own opinions in front of the facts IS the conspiracy theorist. YOU are the conspiracy theorist, you need to take a long long look at the mirror and judge yourself honestly.

I work in the IT industry, specializing in network security. At the time I was working as a contractor/consultant for government organizations. The RSA and subsequent Lockheed hacks were of massive impact to us.

[GScholz]

Neither "well known" or "well publicized" makes a fact. If it did then "chemtrails" is a fact. Your work in the IT industry is irrelevant, unless you work for LM that is, and you don't.

As for me being a conspiracy theorist... Exactly what conspiracy am I theorizing about?

[Vulcan]

You can stick your fingers in your ears and sign lalalalalalalala all you like but it's still true:

Yesterday, at a subcommittee hearing attended by just half a dozen Senators, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer made a blunt admission: The military’s most expensive program, the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, has been hacked and the stolen data used by America’s adversaries. Under Secretary Frank Kendall didn’t say by whom, but the answer is almost certainly China, a cyber superpower whose People’s Liberation Army Air Force has recently rolled out some suspiciously sophisticated stealth fighter prototypes of its own. The Russians also have skilled hackers and “5th Generation” stealth jet programs, but they’re not suspected of such direct copying, at least not yet.

“I’m confident the classified material is well protected, but I’m not at all confident that our unclassified information is as well-protected,” said Kendall, the Under Secretary for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. “It’s a major problem for us…. What it does is reduce the costs and lead time of our adversaries to doing their own designs, so it gives away a substantial advantage.”

The bad news isn’t new news: That someone had hacked F-35 subcontractor BAE Systems was first reported six years ago, and just this February Washington Post reporter Ellen Nakashima obtained leaked information naming the Chinese as having compromised not just the F-35 but two dozen other weapons program. Administration officials have been publicly pressuring China to rein in its hacking. But it’s still remarkable that such a senior official would so bluntly admit that US interests have been so directly harmed.

A March attack on RSA's SecurID authentication service has possibly claimed its first big victim: Lockheed Martin.

According to a source speaking to Reuters, unknown hackers have broken into Lockheed Martin's security systems by using duplicate SecurID tokens to spoof legitimate authentications into the network. These SecurID tokens are analogous to Blizzard's World of Warcraft Authenticators: Tiny little keyfobs that display an ever-changing code one must enter to log into a protected service.

Lockheed hasn't issued comment on alleged breach itself, leading only to speculation as to what data, if any, those breaching the company's network were able to acquire. But the plunder could be vast: Lockheed is the nation's largest military contractor, and it undoubtedly has treasure troves of data about existing and future weapons systems as well as information related to the various cybersecurity services the company provides.

Classified information is likely out of hackers' hands: Due to the volume of attacks that these kinds of systems on a daily basis, it's highly doubtful that Lockheed—or any security contractor—would keep top-secret information within reach, should one ever breach the remote access gates.

RSA confirms its tokens used in Lockheed hack
By William Jackson
Jun 07, 2011
RSA Security has confirmed that stolen data about the company’s SecurID authentication token was used in the recent attack against defense contractor Lockheed Martin. RSA has offered to replace the compromised tokens for high-risk customers.

The RSA breach, reported March 17, was the result of what the company called an “extremely sophisticated” attack. The company said that it believed the likely motive was to take data that could be used against defense contractors rather than against financial institutions or to steal personal information.

Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA, the Security Division of EMC, wrote in a letter posted after close of business June 6 that other victims in a recent “unprecedented wave” of cyberattacks, including Epsilon, Sony, Google, PBS and Nintendo, were not related to the RSA breach.

Last week, Der Spiegel published a new tranche of documents provided to the German weekly magazine by the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden. The documents are the first public confirmation that Chinese hackers have been able to extrapolate top secret data on the F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter jet. According to sources, the data breach already took place in 2007 at the prime subcontractor Lockheed Martin. A U.S. government official recently claimed that as of now, ”classified F-35 information is protected and remains secure.”

The fifth generation F-35 Lightning II is the most advanced fighter jet currently in production in the world. Experts have long argued that the design of China’s newest stealth fighter, the J-31, as well as the Chengdu J-20 fighter jet, are in parts influenced by the F-35. Bloomberg reports that the chairman of the Chinese subsidiary producing the J-31 even boasted that the Chinese plane is superior to the American product. “The J-31 will finish it off in the sky,” boasted AVIC Chairman Lin Zuomin referring to the F-35. However, most aviation experts are skeptical of this assertion.

The Snowden files outline the scope of Chinese F-35 espionage efforts, which focused on acquiring the radar design (the number and types of modules), detailed engine schematics (methods for cooling gases, leading and trailing edge treatments, and aft deck heating contour maps) among other things. The document claims that many terabytes of data specific to the F-35 joint strike fighter program were stolen.

You have no idea what you're talking about GS. Just because you worked on military comms means nothing, that is sealed gear. You have no idea what makes it tick. Being able to turn something on and off again does not qualify you in that field.

[GScholz]

I've never claimed it qualified me for anything. You're the only one here trying to pull an argumentum ad verecundiam fallacy. And you're failing.

And none of your quotes actually positively states that anything sensitive was hacked. Do you even read these things before you ripsnort them? Some of them actually say the opposite:

"Lockheed hasn't issued comment on alleged breach itself, leading only to speculation as to what data, if any, those breaching the company's network were able to acquire."

"Classified information is likely out of hackers' hands: Due to the volume of attacks that these kinds of systems on a daily basis, it's highly doubtful that Lockheed—or any security contractor—would keep top-secret information within reach, should one ever breach the remote access gates."

“I’m confident the classified material is well protected, but I’m not at all confident that our unclassified information is as well-protected,”

[Vulcan]