By Robert Farley
The latest breach in the F-35 program has come out of Australia, where a subcontractor reportedly lost unclassified data on the fighter (and the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft) to a sophisticated hacking operation. The Australian government does not seem overly concerned about the incident, and the data does not apparently disclose anything particularly critical about the program. Nevertheless, the breach illustrates the new reality of how military technology spreads around the world.
States have always had to worry about the theft of their military technology through espionage. States have also long understood the tensions between exporting military technology and maintaining a technological edge. Any weapon sold to a customer, or built in combination with a partner, has the potential to expose fundamental weaknesses or technologies to opponents. States resolve this problem by refraining from selling their most advanced tech, or by placing severe restrictions on the handling of that technology. The United States famously acquired numerous copies of Soviet MiG fighters from former Soviet trade partners, to give one example of how the process can fail.
Unfortunately, increasingly severe problems of technology management are baked into the modern defense industrial cake. While defense industries were historically slow to adapt to the trans-national turn in corporate capitalism, in recent decades they have decisively moved in the direction of greater integration. Indeed, the development of a globally integrated system of technology transfer has sometime been cited as one of the causes for the massive advantage that Western technology enjoyed over its Eastern bloc counterpart towards the end of the Cold War. This process has only accelerated as defense budgets have declined, forcing national defense giants into collaboration with one another.
https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/what-does-the-latest-f-35-data-breach-teach-us-about-defense-industrial-espionage/
