Posted on 05/22/2012 8:42:58 AM PDT by the scotsman
'More than a million fake electronic parts from China have been found in US military aircraft, posing a risk to national security, an investigation has revealed.
A report by the US Senate uncovered 1,800 cases of bogus parts - including some in special operations helicopters and the US Air Force's largest cargo plane. The total number of individual components involved in these cases exceeded one million, the Committee on Armed Services publication said.
"This flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs," committee chairman Senator Carl Levin said. "It underscores China's failure to police the blatant market in counterfeit parts - a failure China should rectify," he added.
As part of a year-long investigation, the US Government Accountability Office created a fictitious company and purchased electronic parts on the internet. Of the 16 items bought, all were counterfeit and some had bogus identification numbers. The components came from suppliers based in China - which Senator Levin described as the "epicentre of electronic part counterfeiting".
The report accused Beijing of openly allowing counterfeiting operations, and said attempts by officials to get visas to travel to China as part of the probe had failed. US authorities and contract companies contributed to the problem by not detecting the fakes and routinely failing to report them, the report said.
The Defense Department was also criticised for lacking "knowledge of the scope and impact of counterfeit parts on critical defence systems".
Committee member Senator John McCain said the prevalence of bogus parts made the country vulnerable and posed a risk to "our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it".'
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
Back when I was a big deal I routinely rejected material of any sort for use in our nuclear submarines, no ifs, no ands, no buttz, no questions asked, if the item was not clearly traceable to a US manufacturer. I didn’t have the authority to keep it out of the entire federal stock system but I dam sure kept it out of our ships. Origin was a point of inspection for “ïncoming freight”. I fail to see the problem keeping this untraceable krap out of here except there seems to be a lack of guys with “hair.” The guys I trained in the discipline are getting into retirement mode now so maybe we’re losing our edge in yet another way. There are clear procedures and stiff penalties for prosecuting vendors who lowball the specs. A better grade of president might be able to jack up the inspector general corpse (as currently operating).
That’s why i could not buy a lenovo laptop. Who knows what these jackholes placed inside?
I wonder if the special forces helicopter that we lost in Pakistan had fake Chinese parts. Or the drone we lost in Iran.
Fake Chinese parts? or Fake parts from China.
“I buy parts from China. Have had good luck so far.”
I doubt you are buying fake parts from China for our military planes, our civilian planes, or our special forces helicopters. A failure rate here is not an option. That’s why we have mil specs on critical components.
“-—not a functional security issue”-—WRONG-—in spades. If one of my critical systems lets go in an unpredictable, untimely, catastrophic way I dam sure want to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the retrograde bleephole who made it AND the slimeball who sold it to me . If same bleephole is hiding in China, India Mexico etc he’s out of my reach. You go ahead and bench test all the stuff you can get your hands until you’re happy. But you’re not going to do, oh, say, a million cycle reliability test on your Heathkit Hobby Set. And my suppliers all know I got zero sense of humor. They’d better not sound like Mell Tillis ordering breakfast if something goes south. And we’re usually talking big bucks on both the hardware and consequences of failure side.
You want to test your way into quality assurance then YOU drive it.
This is the kind of crap happening when DoD decided that DLA (Defense Logistics Agency) should manage everybody’s aircraft parts. When the aircraft program offices were only buying parts from the OEMs, they got accused of buying overpriced stuff and being in bed with the contractors. Now that DLA is running it, this is the kind of sh!+ that is getting on aircraft. DLA doesn’t give a crap, it’s just a stock number to them. They look at landing gear sets the same way they look at ballpoint pens and staplers. They’ll buy it from anybody and QA is damn near non-existent.
Didn't know about the change. Even some people here are missing the point that we're talking about aircraft parts and other critical components, not toys.
I can see the possibility for what you describe to occur, but this is WA State, where much of this took place. This was all in the news at the time that unions were fighting with Boeing over the move to South Carolina, and contractors were identified.
Then all of a sudden the investigation was moved to Congress and we didn’t hear any more about it.
Unions and politics - same old story.
Wow, what a terse response.
Good day then.
You would think that “certain restricted-access computer systems” would do a better job of monitoring their supply chain...strange how a lowly telecom company like the one I work for can manage to do it...
GALS, PALS and EPROMS baby!
You can program them to anything and they come in a variety of shapes, sizes, flavors and colors.
“You want to test your way into quality assurance then YOU drive it.”
Nail, meet hammer!
This is the problem - people think you can test in quality. That just simply cannot be done. You can test functionality at a point in time on the manufacturing floor after you’ve done certain things to mete out infant mortals; all the while doing your level best to provide a test with adequate coverage, yet you cannot ever guarantee 100% that what you send out the door will be reliable.
You can sometimes get to 98-99% yields and see six sigma like performance in the field if you take the time to first sample properly (many fab houses charge you dearly for adequate sampling), do things like outlier elimination using a proper test and meaningful statistical data, not following logical fallacies and using a sound philosophy in the first place, but you never can cover 100% of all scenarios.
I like the way you think - too few of us nowadays!
Hey, we want REAL Chinese parts in our planes. NO FAKES!/s;)
Oh but we love that cheap shit from China don’t we.
At least that’s what the politicians/treasoness thieves tell us.
Don’t be so smug. I am certain your company has counterfeit components in its equipment. The “monitoring of the supply chain” is a complete joke! They inspect paperwork and do QC testing, not teardown and crush inspections of individual components from sub-contractors whom they have no oversight of.
No company makes all its parts. If you had any idea of the number of manufacturers contributing parts to communications equipment you wouldn’t be so confident in your company’s equipment.
Putting devices inside commercial communications equipment for the purpose of espionage, control or sabotage has been going on for decades, mostly by the West. Now it’s being done by China with components going into US systems. But you don’t think anyone could do that to us? Pure hubris.
Yes, this is true - they are commodies. But, here's the rub. The Gov't runs off Technical Orders (TO's). The TO has a parts list, a drawing of the board, in some cases the schematic as well as maintenance, testing, calibaration and operational guidelines. Each piece of equipment may have a thousand page TO tied to it. So, if a resistor goes obsolete - now you need to change the TO on thousands of components (in which each obsoletel resistor was used) not only across our military/govermental operaions, but also across the TO's owned by our allies. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to republish a gazillion TO's in multiple languages?
Take the humble Carbon Composition resistor. Used to be common as dirt, now they are exceeded in precision by many other technologies - however the Carbon Comp is like a pinch of playdoh - it has thermal mass to it. Unlike film resistors which have an incredably thin film of resistive material, Carbon Composite can withstand significantly larger amounts of inrush current that would destroy a film resistor. Now, does the application in which this resistor is used require the large "in-rush" capability?
It's an unholy mess. And we are flying aircraft that will be nearly 100 years old before they are retired (as in the B-52).
Thank you for explanation. Didn’t know about different types of resistors; I thought a resistor had an ohm value and that was it... I guess they need to a surge protector or “leveler” or something in front of the film resistors...
“And we are flying aircraft that will be nearly 100 years old before they are retired (as in the B-52).”
Takes your breath away, that somebody could build an airplane like that. It would be like the HMS Iron Duke serving in the Falklands... Sad truth is, I think a C-130 could do much of the job of a B-52 today (just roll the bombs out the back...). I suspect the B-52 would have a very short life expectancy in a contested airspace.
The more you learn about these old components, the more you realize the 'why' about various components. Take the capacitor for example - these not only vary in size and value, but their frequency response varies greatly with the material they are made. Titanium, polymer, electrolytic, mica and more - each have their strengths and weaknesses. Knowing these strengths/weaknesses is a hallmark of a good Design Engineer. If you want the design to be robust, you use the right tool for the right job, right?
Thus, when the logicistics group gets ahold of a parts list that calls out specific resisters - we have no clue as to whether this component was used simply because it was in stock in the lab at the time the designe was being prototyped; or whether this specific component was chosen due to it's various properties. Because of the expense in finding these specific components, and the implied risk of using a "generic" component when a specific part was called out - plus the cost of changing the Tech. Orders ... even if an obsolete resistor costs $100 apiece instead of $0.06, it's cheaper to buy the origional component. Keep those planes in the air.
The problem is that China sees these obsolete resistors selling for $100 each, and they can mix carbon powder into plaster-of-paris as well as we can. Mix enough and you have a resistor. Paint it to look like the "real" thing, and you have an extremely profitable counterfeiting line. And they may work fine for awhile ... then they fail after some period of time. But, so what? They cashed that check, and have changed their company name and have gotten away with a very profitable counterfeit product. This is the problem we face.
Thank you. And that's the only subject these scare articles actually pertain to. FRAUD. Not ESPIONAGE.
There's evidence and proof of obvious commercial fraud. There's no indication whatsoever of the PLA secretly inserting magic backdoors into resistors that readers are inferring.
The article is third-rate hearsay from a report from DEMOCRAT Carl Levin and RINO John McCain for crying out loud.
The article uses "fake" and "counterfeit" interchangeably. If it's a fake blank package, it won't function. The article also says "Of the 16 items bought, all were counterfeit and some had bogus identification numbers." If it's got A CLEARLY MARKED DIFFERENT PART NUMBER STAMPED ON IT then it's not a goddam counterfeit!!
Yet from this, the PLA is trying to sneak backdoors into systems by clearly marking their surreptitious parts with the wrong part numbers? Come on!
It says, "[counterfeit parts] were also found in memory chips in the display systems of C-17..." Nonsense. Did they mean that counterfeit chips were found in memory modules? Or they de-capped the chips and found counterfeit dice in memory chips? This article is good for nothing but promoting FUD from a RINO and a Dem to make the defense system vendors look as bad as the Chinese and deflect any blame from incompetent bureaucratic procurement QA weenies.
I'm 2/3 your 59 and "hold" twice the patents, FRiend.
But your statement raises a red flag. How many of those are you listed as "sole" inventor?
Nobody "builds the world's first uP w/ on-chip ROM...." by themselves. People who play a part on the team and then claim to be "the guy" are well known types. You sound like one of them.
Also, how many of those patents that you "hold" have you assigned to some company for $1 because you don't understand IP agreements?
You've been around the sun 59 times, but I see I was still correct on your maturity.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.