Indonesia’s top defense official says that Jakarta will acquire at least 42 Chinese-made Chengdu J-10C fighter jets, marking the country’s first non-Western aircraft purchase deal.

Indonesia’s top defense official said Wednesday that Jakarta will acquire at least 42 Chinese-made Chengdu J-10C fighter jets, marking the country’s first non-Western aircraft purchase deal.

Defense Minister Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin told reporters in the capital, Jakarta, that Indonesia would soon buy fighter jets from China as part of a plan to modernize its military. Analysts said the deal could touch regional sensitivities and have geopolitical implications.

The plan to buy the J-10s was first disclosed last month by defense ministry spokesperson Brig. Gen. Frega Wenas. Local media had reported that the Indonesian Air Force was still reviewing the Chinese-made fighter jets to ensure their acquisition would effectively strengthen Indonesia’s air defense capabilities.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      Because you can’t “program it to not attack China”. That’s such a wildly vague statement and system goal as to be essentially impossible to fulfill.

      You can degrade or impair or disable certain systems in response to specific stimuli (e.g. a “kill switch” transmission/signal [that is itself a bit of a misnomer]) - like for instance, activate a radio beacon to diminish stealth (counterplay: wire cutters), or to offline external system integration/datalink (counterplay: none, it’s proprietary, closed source and largely classified), or any other number of things. It’s generally pretty hard to completely offline/mission-kill an airframe electronically (outside of an EMP, and even that’s not guaranteed when you’re talking about hardened, mil-grade components), because they’re specifically designed to be extremely resilient and fault-tolerant.

      Source: I worked in defense aerospace earlier in my career