Chinese Hackers Steal Top US Weapons Designs 395
n1ywb writes "Chinese hackers have gained access to the designs of many of the nation's most sensitive advanced weapons systems, according to a report prepared for the Defense Department and government and defense industry officials,The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The compromised weapons designs include, among others, the advanced Patriot missile system, the Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense systems, the F/A-18 fighter jet, the V-22 Osprey, the Black Hawk helicopter and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter." Also (with some more details and news-report round-up) at SlashBI.
Internet connection (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Funny)
Why is information like this on computers that are connected to the internet?
So that it can be leaked, justifying the costly production of a whole new generation of warmachines.
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Funny)
Why is information like this on computers that are connected to the internet?
So that it can be leaked, justifying the costly production of a whole new generation of warmachines.
Even better, now we don't have to violate export restrictions in order to request cut-rate second source versions of annoyingly expensive gear! Never mind the communists, feel the everyday low prices!
Re:Internet connection (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is information like this on computers that are connected to the internet?
So that it can be leaked, justifying the costly production of a whole new generation of warmachines.
Because it isn't like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or various other countries would want to upgrade their military independently of the US, for their own purposes. None of their weapons designers ever had an original idea, or were the first ones to make a concept actually work in a weapon. And having US weapons data means their could either use the data to incorporate the technology into their own weapons, or use it to defeat American weapons, but they'll never do either because apparently they are lazy, or stupid, or something. None of their weapons are dangerous to US weapons systems, at all.
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Because it isn't like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or various other countries would want to upgrade their military independently of the US, for their own purposes. None of their weapons designers ever had an original idea, or were the first ones to make a concept actually work in a weapon.
That's utterly irrelevant, unless you believe that the same things are true of the US. You're the one who is making a ridiculous assumption about the Chinese (etc.) military and defense contractors, specifically that they suffer from NIH. I doubt they're that stupid. The US wasn't when after VE day it grabbed as many German rocket scientists as it could. You know, the folks who, in addition to their direct or indirect contributions to US military capability, were responsible for the first US satellite getti
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America banks entierly on better intel, computers and electronics.
That's what wins air combat today - if there is some range where you can get missile lock and he can't, you win.
More importantly, as everything moves to drones and electronic warfare moves to the forefront, airframe performance is barely going to matter. I'm far more worried about this leak (if real) because of what is says about the US vs China in terms of "intel, computers and electronics" than because of some potential F35 clone.
Re:Internet connection (Score:4, Funny)
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*ding!* Thanks (parent also) for saving me the trouble of posting this. Give these persons cigars.
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is... a lot of this is about performance. If they create, say, a fighter with the performance of the F-35, then it's a real problem.
Granted, I do remember there being (supposedly) faulty plans during the Cold War that we intentionally allowed the Soviets to get, and when they used it in their pipelines, there were some catastrophic accidents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage [wikipedia.org]
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand, maybe, just maybe, Chinese ingenuity will come up with a way to keep the Osprey from falling out of the sky and killing people (something we can't seem to be able to do). Once they fix that little glitch, maybe we can steal the plans back.
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe that's the real reason for the leaks- so the US can buy cheaper Chinese knockoffs and save money ;).
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Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Funny)
As former Navy man who spent many a fine night with the ladies of Olongapo / Subic Bay, representing our great nation with honor and dignity, I deeply resent being compared to the F-35.
Re:Internet connection (Score:4)
Dont need?
Harriers are approaching end of life.
F18s are getting old.
A10s are going away.
These aircraft no longer have new made parts, any replacements we use in the squadrons come from the boneyards, from aircraft set into storage specifically so they could be parts sources to keep planes flying while techs, young sailors and airmen, try to fix the defective parts themselves (the training program for the military aircraft maintenence squadrons is phenomenal, and puts any civilian tech school to shame).
Your articles are bullspit and your post is ignorant.
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if they create a fighter with the performance of the F-35, it wouldn't be a problem at all... as the F-35 is massively expensive
When a fighter jet costs $150M/plane it usually means that the plane takes $10M in materials and labor to build, and $140M goes towards paying off the costs of designing the thing in the first place. It is really a $10M plane with a $1T design phase (or whatever the figure is).
Somebody copying the plane only needs to pay the $10M/plane - they don't have to redesign the whole thing from scratch. I'm sure it won't cost them nothing to start from the US blueprints, but overall it will be WAY cheaper.
taking years longer to develop
Not an issue for China. They'll just wait until we're done, and then roll out the copies after a year or two of reverse-engineering. In the meantime nobody is flying the thing.
and still can barely get off the ground.
Also not an issue for China. They'll just wait until we figure out all the problems and then copy the design that actually works.
Copying is WAY cheaper than inventing. Even if all they had as a photo of the thing it would be much cheaper. How many overall designs were tossed because using thrust vectoring vs a lift fan was an unclear design decision? The US has to spend hundreds of millions on prototypes and testing to figure out which design is better. The Chinese just have to see what we picked. If the whole VTOL design turns out to be impractical and gets canceled then they get the same data point that we get but for zero cost.
Today it is easy to point out what the design of the space shuttle was bad, even without the blueprints. Anybody who is interested in submarines knows that a 7-blade propeller is much quieter than a 4-blade one, but for many years this was a closely guarded secret that just a glance at a propeller would have leaked.
When you're doing something that has never been done before most of the cost is only incurred by the first person to have to figure it out. That's the price of innovation. Followers can always do it much cheaper.
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Interesting)
Thing is... a lot of this is about performance. If they create, say, a fighter with the performance of the F-35, then it's a real problem.
Granted, I do remember there being (supposedly) faulty plans during the Cold War that we intentionally allowed the Soviets to get, and when they used it in their pipelines, there were some catastrophic accidents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_pipeline_sabotage [wikipedia.org]
There were all sorts of games like that going on. For example that famous wiretapping coup the CIA/MI6 scored in Berlin. When this operation was eventually discovered by two East German telephone technicians the Soviet KGB was apparently pretty pissed off, something about them knowing about the tunnel and some other Soviet security service (GRU?) exposing it because of lack of inter-service cooperation. Turns out the Soviets already had a mole in that wiretapping project, George Blake. Although the CIA/MI6 claim to this day all the information they got was genuine, that assessment is based on cold war analysis with only limited access to Soviet sources. The KGB archives are still closed so it's entirely possible the Ivans were having a barrel of fun making fake phone calls to spread disinformation or that they simply deemed the information that the CIA/MI6 were gathering was of so little value they did not want to risk blowing Blake's cover by exposing the operation.
Another one of my favorites is a trio of German KGB recruits who borrowed a fully functional AIM-9 Sidewinder missile and drove the thing out of a NATO base in Germany. They stuck the thing into in the back of a Mercedes, only to discover it wouldn't fit so they bashed in the rear window, threw a blanket over the protruding missile and drove it through the German countryside. They then crated the thing up and sent it to Moscow via air freight (freight costs came to a grand total of $79.25) where there were smiles all around at the Vympel NPO missile design bureau. This missile became the basis of the second/third generation Soviet Air force heat seeking missiles (the K13M and its descendants IIRC).
Good times...
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Informative)
It makes sanctions, import tariffs and laws like the Patriot Act II much easier to enable.
How can you possibly equate tariffs w/ Patriot Act N? Last time I checked the federal government clearly has the power to levy tariffs, and in the last 200+ years nobody has come up with a decent argument for how they interfere w/ civil liberties. By contrast Patriot Act N is another step in turning that troublesome Bill of Rights into toilet paper.
Re:Internet connection (Score:4, Insightful)
Was thinking the same thing. Used to be you kept your secure stuff on a network with an air-gap between it and the rest of the world.
Given how many stories we've been seeing about these hacking attempts, to have those machines accessible from the outside network means people haven't been paying attention.
Given that you still can't export some software due to encryption, to have the plans for these kinds of things be something hackers can get into is a pretty stunning failure.
Re:Internet connection (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about all of the people that have access to these drawings in electronic form. You have the designers, the testing folks, the documentation people, the people who approve changes, the entire manufacturing operation, and anyone with authority to oversee the project. If any of those people view the document on a compromised computer or themselves are compromised, the drawing is in the wild.
And "compromised" does not necessarily mean "internet". And you don't even need a compromise - people make mistakes, systems are imperfect. Someone could toss a server or workstation in the trash, screwing up the wipe. A leased computer could go back without getting cleaned up. They could even accidentally wire up the "secure" computer to the LAN/WAN, wireless could accidentally be left on, USB ports left active, bluetooth, etc.
Spying has been going on for a long, long time and is a very difficult problem to solve. Hell, even a compromised cleaning crew could snatch stuff.
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If the government were smart, they'd use Linux instead of Windows, and in addition, they'd make their own custom version of Linux.
They already did that: SE Linux [wikipedia.org]. Obviously, in this case, it didn't help. Very few security procedures work if they aren't followed. Besides, even if everyone in the government was doing this, how can we be sure what the contractors were doing?
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Indeed. It's kind of odd, when you think about it. It's almost like the Pentagon has purposefully left the barn door open...
But that's silly talk. It's not like our country would ever neglect to erect defenses when needed. It's not like there is a group of politicians looking for this generation's 'Pearl Harbor,' nor have they been recorded as saying this is their objective.
I believe I speak for my generation when I say that if they play the same games with this generation that they did the previous, they h
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Yes, but if you read the article, it isn't the Pentagon that's the problem. The problem is the defense contractors, those paradigms of free enterprise the conservative republicans are always honking on about. It seems they've been caught with their pants down.
Now, one might argue they just managed to cost the American taxpayers billions. Do we see the conservative republicans complaining about it. Nope.
Just to be fair, the liberal democrats wouldn't recognize a defense industry secret if it danced naked in
Re: Internet connection (Score:5, Interesting)
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The Chinese stole it off one of the classified networks (like SIPRNet), which the DoD has known to be compromised for quite some time.
You got a citation for that? Seems to me that if true, that information itself would be classified.
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I'm a British nobody and I knew that. It was all over the news a couple of months ago. Here we are [bbc.co.uk].
Which demonstrates further that almost all classification is about hiding secrets from ones own citizens.
Re: Internet connection (Score:5, Funny)
You got a citation for that?
I bet Bradley Manning does.
Re:Internet connection (Score:4, Informative)
The question is - was the information really that sensitive, or was it the stuff not sensitive enough to be considered classified?
To get anything more sensitive than FOUO, these "hackers" would have had to physically infiltrate a facility, break NSA Type 1 crypto protocols (in which case the DoD would be shitting their pants), or compromise someone with access to such information.
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Oh course now I can just go to the Chinese and get a cheap knock-off.
Sure it smells a little funny and pulls a little to the left, but hey, my country is on a budget.
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People some twit finds it inconvenient to isolate the information.
What is likely going on is that there is a network at one of the design facilities where the files are exchanged around. That's reasonable. But then what they did was link that network to the internet at large because how else are you going to get email or post on facebook.
We can all cite a dozen ways to make this a more secure system but they didn't. They wanted to eat their cake and have it too.
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So the guy in Tulsa who develops, say, rotor blades should have only the access to the relevant parts of the helicopter design. Why would this guy need to know the schematics for the targeting system, for example? Thus if a hacker gains access, he will only get rotor blade secrets, not the whole design's.
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they've spent a severe amount of money having a dedicated network for that.
you know what's ironical? the guys designing the single parts probably have less access than what was on the hacked machines.
Or so they think... (Score:3)
Re:Or so they think... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe it was a honeypot attack by the US. V-22 Osprey? Flying those could thin out the Chinese ranks pretty quick. And the Chinese military could bleed itself dry trying to build F-35s.
allies? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Um, who ever said they were? They most definitely are not.
Re:allies? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wut? The Chinese are just trying to make a living. Most are minnow farmers moving to city factory jobs. They're developing a middle class and as whole are going through a lot of changes very quickly. We've been through that rodeo before and we can foresee some of the stresses and strain they're going to go through, but by and far populations like that can
China, the country, and more specifically the government running the show, is an ally. But they're not an altruistic beacon of good. They're really just in the game to help themselves. Just like all of our other allies. Great Britian, France, Japan, the Saudi family, Iraq, they are our allies, but don't give the term too much weight. Once it suits their intrests to stab us in the back they will. And, sadly, we would do the same. Because this isn't some utopian fantasy land where everyone plays nice. It's a competative game where we can increase our score by working together, so we do, for now. They're allies the same way that Wall Street, Hollywood, Monsanto, Texas, and Silicon Valley are our "allies". Sure, they're ostensibly working on our side, under our rules (mostly), and we get goods and taxes out of them (sometimes). But they're not in it for our own well being. They want cash and power. They have their own agenda and plans. We all do. And those fuckers on Wall Street have taken the whole economy hostage and demanded free money to clean up their shit.
But yeah, some of our allies would suffer more if we got pissed at them. Those are closer allies than others. China isn't that close of an ally.
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They are your 'allies' in the sense that if either of you has a bad time (economically speaking), the other will have a bad time, too.
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First, this is not suffice to discard them as allies (even though they are not). The USA was and is spying in Europe for various reasons including industry espionage, but they are still counted as allies by, let say France or Germany. Second, the USA is spying all around the world. Not only to murder suspects and protect its international position as overlords ehm I means, last remaining super-power and worlds policemen, but also for industrial purposes, like stealing technology or stealing trade secrets. T
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so individuals of a country stand for all of those in that country.
I'll believe they are our allies when they storm the little punks house with our FBI agents to arrest them and get our plans back. Until then, they are just as involved in my book.
Sooo . . . (Score:2)
Re:Sooo . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Now the Chinese government too can sink untold amounts of money on ultra-expensive gear? :P
Not only that, but the plans call for Made In America(TM) parts, so this will boost the US economy.
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Now the Chinese government too can sink untold amounts of money on ultra-expensive gear? :P
Nope, Chinese are better known for making cheap knock offs.
Okay, who's the moron? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Okay, who's the moron? (Score:3)
But it was (Score:3)
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What moron thought to himself that having sensitive blue prints to highly classified military equipment was best stored on a computer with Internet access?
Someone who previously sold the same data to the Chinese and now cannot be traced as the only source of the leak.
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We can only assume they wanted it stolen. Either that, or the Pentagon has had a serious markdown in quality recently.
If it's connected to a network, people will find a way to tap into it. They will then spend all their time trying to find the usernames / password for various accounts, because chances are, auditing is not turned on for those accounts, and no one ever checks the logs.
cancel the systems (Score:2)
Maybe not.
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If any plans being leaked were the fault of a defense contractor, they should get slammed financially by the Pentagon since they would have cost the American taxpayers billions.
Pwned (Score:2)
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So how was the Washington Post able to get a copy of the Confidential report from the Defense Science Board?
. . . the Justice Department will obtain all the phone records and emails from Washington Post employees to find out . . .
Joke's on them. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Joke's on them. (Score:5, Funny)
The designs are in English.
Not only that, but I hear the designs don't even use metric measurements. Good luck figuring them out!
Re:Joke's on them. (Score:4, Interesting)
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The designs are in American.
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The designs are in English.
No, the joke is on US jobs... the Chinese didn't steal them, they were leaked... it was the first step in outsourcing in the military industrial complex. You see, since sequester, the US govt doesn't pay enough for them to maintain the same level of profit, thus they need to cut the costs.
(grin)
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Hmm. I thought it was the first step in colonizing China. They do have WMDs, and now they have plans for uber-weapons...sounds like a good reason to go over and say "Hello" (in Mr. Popo's voice [youtube.com]). Then we can engage in a nation-(re)building exercise, while making Russia feel really uncomfortable.
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"Lao Tzu, these plans say to make the ultra-secret RADAR out of cardboard! Are you sure the CIA didn't modify them?"
All part of our diabolical plan... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Defense isn't what put the country into debt, it was mainly a combination of years of social programs, Congress having no balls to ask Americans to pay for what they passed, and the sainted American people falling, eyes wide and cluelessly open, into the housing crisis.
Re:All part of our diabolical plan... (Score:4, Informative)
The US spends about 20% GDP on social programs (from here [oecd.org]) - below the OECD member average.
Design != manufacture capability (Score:5, Interesting)
China can steal all the designs they want, but without successfully implementing the designs, I'm honestly not that concerned. In the 1970s, China managed to kludge together a weak clone of Boeing's 20+-year-old 707, powered by what are believed to have been spare 707 engines. If you think China can manage to cobble together some F-35s that will be worth the effort, or some F/A-18s that can match US spec, you need to understand that it's easier and probably more cost-effective to place orders with Sukhoi Design Bureau for something that actually works than it is to duplicate the processes needed to actually create the American aircraft mentioned above.
China doesn't have the best track record in building designs stolen aerospace designs from other countries, and has found better success in getting people to willingly hand them the capabilities and processes. China's MD-80 license production and the assistance they got from McDonnell-Douglas is the biggest factor in their current aerospace pushes being at least semi-feasible.
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China can steal all the designs they want, but without successfully implementing the designs, I'm honestly not that concerned.
North Korea buys from China. Are you scared now?
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North Korea buys from China. Are you scared now?
Because North Korea so totally has the ability to build F-35 clones...
Re:Design != manufacture capability (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but manufacturing processes are often also obtainable documents. Any company who has set up good process control around their manufacturing lines has probably documented almost if not everything needed to recreate their subset of the secret sauce. Due to subcontracting these constitute a more distributed set of targets, and probably have local IT staff better capable of locking down their small networks than a megacorp oursourcing model would, but its probably all still there...
Don't underestimate the Chinese (Score:2)
Cheap F-35s! (Score:5, Funny)
This is all a conspiracy by the US government. They *say* they got hacked and the designs got stolen, but we all know that sneakilly they've just given them all to the Chinese.
The reason for this is of course obvious: The Chinese can make these things much cheaper! So it's all about savings!
(If you think this might be something with tongues and cheeks, you might possibly be somewhat right)
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The reason for this is of course obvious: The Chinese can make these things much cheaper!
Yeah, but it would just be cheap knockoff crap that does weird things like flip upside down when it crosses the international date line.
What's the chance that this was intentional? (Score:3)
So here's a question: What if the leaking of these designs was intentional? There could be several motivations for doing this. One, maybe these aren't the actual designs and they are flawed in some subtle yet crucial way or perhaps multiple ways. Two, they aren't the actual designs but the goal was to lure the hackers in to determine their methods. Or three, that some peacenik thought that it was unfair that the US has all the cool toys and are attempting to achieve whirled peas by way of leveling the playing field.
Not intentional (Score:2)
For some lulz (Score:3)
Now, put some new plans on the cracked network titled 'Top Secret: Strategic F17A Propulsion Update.doc' in which the engines are installed backwards, right in line with the fuel tanks. Wait for youtube vids.
So plant flawed plans (Score:2)
.
F-18 and Black Hawk are advanced? (Score:2)
the F-18 was a competitor to the F-16 design back in the 70's
we had black hawk's in the mid 1990's when i went to air assault school and they were at least 10 years old by that time as well
smart phones are faster than aegis cruisers (Score:2)
these were first designed in the 70's and even with some upgrades i bet smartphones have a lot more computing power than the aegis cruise
Most advanced? (Score:5, Insightful)
Patriot Missile: In service since 1981
Aegis: In development since the 1980s, first test 1999
F/A-18: Introduced in service in 1983
V-22:First flew in 1989, entered service 2007, was unreliable for several years after that. It took us over 20 years to fully develop it
Black Hawk: Introduced 1979
F-35: An expensive piece of crap that can do a lot of different things not so well (a couple gems from a 2011 Pentagon study: The fuel dump subsystem poses a fire hazard, The airframe is unlikely to last through the required lifespan, The aircraft is in danger of going overweight or, for the F-35B, not properly balanced for VTOL operations, There are multiple thermal management problems. The air conditioner fails to keep the pilot and controls cool enough, the roll posts on the F-35B overheat, and using the afterburner damages the aircraft.) Would be a waste of money to try and reproduce.
I am 26 years old, and most of these systems were in development or introduced before I was born. The 2 most recent technologies have been fraught with problems in development, production, and deployment. Maybe they should just go ahead and give the Chinese the F-22 plans as well, so half of their pilots will asphyxiate. I'm not worried about the Chinese gaining access to equipment that has been in use for decades: once something is out in the open and being used in combat/training operations, their capabilities are easily discerned and easy to copy. I would be more concerned if they got access to anything in development that we don't know about, the stuff the government is working on that they haven't revealed.
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I'm 31 years old. I recently bought a military surplus vehicle which was designed before I was born and manufactured before you were born. It is still in limited use in some National Guard applications but, for the most part, it has been decommissioned.
All of the manuals and, to large degree, parts and construction are fully known. The same can be said for the humvee, except it hasn't been decomissioned and is still in broad use.
Granted, the Chinese have blueprints for the humvee, and have been making their
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And you also seem to be unaware that weapons systems generally aren't fixed points in time - it's a very rare system where development halts when the system enters service. Upgrades and modernization are pretty much routine for anything much more complex than a rifle or a pistol.
Something you're no
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You seem to think that the plans are somehow the first drafts created in 1989, as opposed to the versions created in 2007. If that's the case, not only did they get the plans for a warplane, but also the end result of an 18-year R&D project. The worst-case isn't that they can build the V-22. It's that the plans illustrate some principle/solution they haven't discover
V-22 Osprey (Score:2)
This explains the constant delays of such projects (Score:4, Funny)
If you keep on losing the design drawings, then no wonder they're running into delays! They really should be keeping copies of them, so in case someone steals the originals, they don't have to draw them all over again.
Modern Cold War (Score:2)
Sure, these tanks and carriers still have value, but they are not sufficient on their own. They can't protect us from our infrastructure, financial system, chunks of manufacturing and education all getting remotely wiped/disabled/overloaded from under us.
Only now w
Consequence of outsourcing IT and development... (Score:5, Insightful)
Big companies tend to misclassify IT as a cost center, and apply brilliant programs like Six Sigma and Virtual Workforces to cut expenses. I've seen plenty of dangerously unqualified people assigned to set firewall and router rules on networks that contain corporate crown jewels, or open NAT paths to offshore contracting houses brought in to help make a schedule after attrition and 'rightsizing' have made it impossible to stick to the schedule handed down from above.
In the old days this stuff would be kept on airgapped networks. Today we have 'globalized workforces' and companies are run by MBAs who don't really understand or care about things the military does. Patriotism? Doesn't appear in my mission statement...
Posted as AC as I work for a figurehead of this problem, and waste time keeping networks I'm responsible for clear of the APTs I see continually from other parts of the companies network that NOBODY wants to talk about. You can get fired for pointing out they've cut the budgets too far. So frustrating...
Outsourcing (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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what the DoD doesnt exactly recommend is the precise thing that would secure us from this manufactured menace: reduce the amount of off-shored and outsourced manufacturing to China.
The DoD has nothing more powerful than nuclear weapons, but the outsourcers are listed on the stock exchanges.
England v. Washington (Score:3)
I can't help but get an image of the English soldiers in the American Revolution, standing out in the field in ranks, getting shot by George Washingtons troops, thinking, "WTF, man, you're not allowed to hide behind stuff!" Washington thinking, "Well, yeah, but... we're winning."
American diplomats in China saying, "Like, what the fuck, guys? We're not at war, why are you stealing our stuff?" Chinese guy just completely baffled thinking, "Ummm, because we're trying to win? You fuckers have been twisting our nuts in a global economic vise for half a century because you can't get over your own propaganda from the 1950s, and you don't get what we're doing? Idiots."
Strip away the right/wrong of it and just look at the realpolitik, it's kind of funny.
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"WTF, man, you're not allowed to hide behind stuff!" Washington thinking, "Well, yeah, but... we're winning."
ain't it a bitch when someone doesn't "fight fair." I believe a similar complaint was made during Vietnam War when VC didn't wear uniforms.
Under Obama heads will roll. (Score:2, Insightful)
The heads of the people that let this leak be known. Not the hackers, not the people that made this information available on the internet, but the people that let America know that it was hacked. They will do jail time, and they will be the only people that do jail time.
Disinformation (Score:3)
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I'd say that a sweet dirigible would benefit us more than another variant of F18. Even with hydrogen, they're safer and more economical than planes, it's just that loads of money went into optimizing planes while no one seriously pursued dirigibles since the '30s.
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Our government is terrible everything. They could have at least pulled a torrent [deleted], had the file labelled "F35 best plane ever", and leak the actual design.
FTFY. This move will certainly cripple any enemy.
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From personal experience, anything by Northrop Grumman is complete shit.
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Because the world would be one big radioactive crater if each and every act of espionage was treated as an "ok then war it is" moment.
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Sounds like an act of war. Why are we not fighting the Chinese yet?
All countries spy on each other, all the time. If this were considered a valid reason to start a shooting war, the entire planet would be a glowing, smoking crater.