[llbeansandrice]

I don't think that solves anything. With critical secret pieces of hardware you will still want confirmation that they were destroyed or recover them. So even if the plane can attempt to self-destruct as much as possible, the military is still going to want to confirm the result.

[MarkMarine]

The skin and coatings of these planes is secret. How do you self destruct the skin?

Anyway, it’s moot. The people with the resources to actually make this stuff already hacked in and stole it. They compromised a whole CA just to get the F-35 design docs.