Yep, and you also don't want your enemy to find the crashed plane before friendly forces have the opportunity to destroy it. If an F-35 crashed over foreign soi

Yep, and you also don't want your enemy to find the crashed plane before friendly forces have the opportunity to destroy it. If an F-35 crashed over foreign soil, an actively transmitting transponder would be a nightmare scenario for friendly forces that intend to scuttle the remains. Nobody wants another RQ-170 incident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentinel#Iranian_capture_and_reverse_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_RQ-170_Sentine...