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 ...
Well this is an issue, China making the parts key to the operation of our military defenses.
What if we ended up in a war with China?
At the unclassified level, the risk is real and ongoing. Some of the classified stuff would curl your hair.
Maybe outsourcing a large portion of the defense industry to our most likely enemy wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Who in hell is watching out for our side anymore?
If you have traveled to China with any electronic device/gadget/phone some companies will never permit you to connect them to their network(s) - ever. Might as well trash the items.
Duh...
The same folks who are watching the national debt and southern border.
The quality of our elected officials and the typical government bureaucrat has never been very good, but today's equivalents are criminally abysmal.
What does this say about the typical US voter?
They only do that because the know that their citizens are covertly doing to our networks here.
Nothing new, this has been happening, FOR YEARS...
The Chinese fake the part, then sell it to someone in Malaysia or Mexico, that really doesn’t give a damn where it came from.
Someone fakes a chain-of-custody, and puts it on a US plane while it’s in Mexico or South America and breaks, or there for heavy maintenance, and charges the customer the Boeing/Airbus/Embraer list price for it.
BIG MONEY in that difference in cost. No US company is going to purposely use Chinese parts. The penalties and liability potential is too great.
Company I used to work for would find these from time to time
The presence of John McCain and his comments thereof, make me immediately wonder how any solution to this might be useful to Globalists to assert further control, and to destroy American freedoms and sovereignity.
McCain is deeply evil, so anything he does must be looked at closely. Any position he takes must be examined for the trojan horse.
Consider the B-52. This aircraft will be 90+ yrs old when it’s finally retired. How many companies that were around when this aircraft was made, are still around? Of those companies, how many of them still make the components they made back then?
Hint: Not many.
Technology moves forward - but our military is stuck in the past. Consider our F-15 and F-16’s, they were made in the 1970’s. What was “state of the art” back then, is now 40 years obsolete.
The military does not have the budget to stockpile 50 years worth of spare parts for every aircraft, defensive/offenisve, weapons system, weather, satellite, radio, radar and alarm clock ever made. These parts must be “found” by companies who had the foresight to buy an obsolete item for pennies on the dollar, put in storage - and then sell back to the Gov’t for thousands of dollars each. And, yes it’s cheaper to do that than to scrap the entire system, or even re-write the technical manuals on how to use, maintain and repair these items.
Counterfeiters are looking to make money, whether it’s a fake purse, perfurme, wrist watch or chips. This is simply one market they have chosen to pursue - and one critical to our national defense.
Many weapons systems around today may have been designed in the 1980’s or even the 1970’s.
Do you think that an oddball memory chip or any other electronic component made 25 years ago will still be manufactured, stocked or supported by a US manufacturer today?
So buyers must go to the secondary market, where China is a big player in the scrap and refurbishment market. A lot of electronics dis-assembly and scrap collection is done in China (although it is moving to even cheaper places now).
Of course, China is also the king of fakes and counterfeits too.
So put that all together and YES - there probably are a lot of counterfeit or remanufactured parts in US weapons systems.
I don’t doubt the Chinese government is directly involved in this counterfeiting. Anything that is light and cheaply mailed like electronics is easy cash for them. Ebay is now full of direct from China shippers.
Who in hell is watching out for our side anymore?
No one.
I think they all must think themselves immune to the disaster they are inviting.
And how about U.S. civilian aircraft? Gosh, I feel so safe and secure.
“Who in hell is watching out for our side anymore?”
The fake President?
Actually, there’s a fix for that problem, and has been for years. One company makes programmable emulator chips that can be burnt-in, and now they’re functional dupes of old, out-of-production chips. And, of course, they keep a library of old chip designs, to produce on the fly.
They’ve been doing that since the early 90s, and it’s apparently a nicely profitable sideline. . .
Could this issue, and the F-22 killer pilot oxygen system problem be related?
Inquiring minds want to know.
They act like there's some remote control backdoor in passive components that are as simple as a resistor, as dumb as Jeff Goldblum uploading a virus into the alien computers from his Macbook.
1. US companies and German companies and Japanese companies bin parts all the time and sell remarked parts all the time. These are parts which are end runs or extended wafer runs, or overproduction that are relabeled. To the extent that the chinese are selling scrapped parts and thus stealing money from legitimate silicon companies, that's a major problem for the companies...not for the equipment/military.
2. The parts in question are not little trojan horses any more than any other legitimate devices are. To the extent the systems using them passed qualification/functional/thermal/electrical tests, it doesn't matter where they came from or what is stamped on them. There are legitimate substandard parts that may fail, and there are illegitimate functionally acceptable parts which may pass just fine. If the system testing cannot determine this at the black-box level, then it doesn't matter what the components were presented as or how they were marked.
In other words, yes the chicoms are capitalists selling parts to systems where the testing doesn't care. So what?
That is an economic pirating issue, not a functional security issue. If it is a functional issue, then that's a testing problem on the system acceptance side.
Score another “own goal” for the “free trade movement” in the US.
Right up there with the goal scored on Wall Street, where the PRC can now cut out the primary dealers when buying US Treasury debt.
All the “free trade” idiots are going to have to answer for rather a lot when this finishes blowing up in our faces.
No one cared. We are screwed.
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