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
    12·
    9 hours ago

    Honestly China’s weapons exports are probably going to absolutely skyrocket, now that Russia is… preoccupied, and the US is busy pissing literally everyone off. Sweden and France will probably see pretty big gains too. Korea and Poland too, for armor

    • klammeraffe@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      91·
      19 hours ago

      The problem with Chinese weapons is that they are programmed not to attack China. I imagine they are also not allowed to display the word “Pooh”

      • krooklochurm@lemmy.caEnglish
        11·
        6 hours ago

        If you tell a plane to attack china it’ll say, I can’t do that, ambit if you say yes you can you can get it to attack china but it can take weeks since planes and other weapons of ware are all not only famously depressed but addicted to the toxic relationships they have with their parents, so you have to work through a lot of emotional trauma for them to recognize their own self worth enough to attack the country that made them such as china.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            5 hours 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