A months-long congressional probe found at least 1,800 cases of counterfeit electronics in U.S. weapons, with the total number of suspect parts exceeding 1 million.
The results of the investigation, conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee, are to be presented at a hearing Tuesday, where senators plan to grill defense contractors about lapses in monitoring their parts supply chain.
"Fake electronic parts often are produced in China by burning raw material off old circuit boards, washing the components in sometimes-polluted rivers and drying them on city sidewalks, Senate investigators said. They said the resulting parts are unreliable over the long term, even if they pass initial factory testing by manufacturers.
“We can’t tolerate the risk of a ballistic missile interceptor failing to hit its target, a helicopter pilot unable to fire his missiles or any other mission failure because of a counterfeit part,” said Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee.
We need to stop outsourcing everything to China, and I mean right now.
What really concerns me about this is that what if these parts have hidden viruses in them that could somehow be activated to cause a weapon of some type to malfunction if targeted towards China or one of it’s allies like North Korea?
WatrDawg, I’d just like to not think about that but, sadly it’s nowhere near being implausible. It bothers me that our own government is outsourcing the manufacturing of parts and pieces for our arms and transportation.
Why give another country a chance to sabotage us. Isn’t it common knowledge that most countries don’t care for us. Also, what makes anybody think that China, who we owe trillions, wouldn’t try to do exactly this. Give them the opportunity to disable a piece of our militia and then invade us. (Albeit, once they hit the mainland they’d be met by a fleet of citizens willing to shoot on sight.)
I know this isn’t too likely and I’m not a conspiracist or anything, it’s just genuine concern. I don’t like other nations tinkering with our internals.
Probably because many of the very basic components that make up the more advanced items simply aren’t made in the US anymore.
When you can pay a Foxconn worker $480 for the entire month including 20 hours of overtime a week, it begins to look really attractive over the base price of $290 a week with no overtime for a US worker.
Edit: In like terms, the worker in Texas working 20 hours of overtime a week would make $2030 a month if earning minimum wage. You probably couldn’t fill the factory with enough people at minimum wage to keep up production though.
Because it goes like this. Company A bids on an item. Company A doesn’t really make the item, they are just middle men. They then outsource the parts to company B who also doesn’t make them, but outsources it to a Chinese company. This country is nothing more than a bunch of middlemen now days. Pretty soon well invent the quarterman, you know, the guy who is the middle man for the middlemen.
And to think all these people all these years have told me China just makes trinkets no one in the US would work to make and its better stuff is made over there.
Well year by year the stuff they are making there is becoming more and important. I posted an article last year maybe explaining how the Chinese are investing a ton of money in modern machining equipment and infrastructure to support it. They send tons of Chinese over here to go to our schools.
Just look at our trade deficit with them, and how much it has risen just in the last 10-15 years.
What worries me more than crappy quality components in our defense systems is the fact that the Chinese undoubtedly will clone any design they handle. So years down the pike the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, et al., will have the technology too.
We may one day fight a war where we have to face our own technology in battle.
Because they grew thier technology off that AWACS plane we *landed in thier airfeild and left it for 6 weeks for them to dismantle, study, duplicate, the reassemble.
They can now make items for us because they can meet the TDP
*instead of the pilot running it full fucking bore into the side of a mountain like he was morally and militarily obligated to do once they discovered they couldn’t make home and the on board self destruct rigs for sensitive equiptment did’t work.
For anyone old enough to remember, we had these stories during the big Regan build-up of the military. At that time, a lot of electronic components were coming from Japan.
You all may remember Clinton granting China MFN trade status. Since then, the Establishment Party has pretty much sent as much manufacturing as possible to China. A simple case of profits over patriotism.
With all of this outscourcing, my main concern is are we even able to produce planes, helicopters, ships, tanks, ect. in a time of war own our own?
In WWII dozens of new planes/tanks rolled off the lines every hour. Every thing was made here. We probably couldn’t even do that today. Then again, you probably can’t build a F18 or B-2 in a few hours, like you could a P-51 or B-17, either.
Reminds me of a show I saw on PBS a couple yrs ago…“The War”…On a part about the plant Ford built to make B24’s… At the time, the average car had about 10-12,000 parts, the B-24 had 1,200,000 parts in it, and a completed one rolled off the assembly line every 60 minutes…Even by today’s standards that’s getting with the program…
