The USAF: Made in China

Written by Dabney B. on Friday, September 28th, 2012

Politicians and officials in the Department of Defense are scratching their heads, trying to figure out how the US military ended up with so many bogus parts. A recent year-long investigation by the Senate Armed Service Committee (SASC) revealed that thousands of counterfeit parts from China have slipped into the US supply chain and ended up inside of military equipment.

The Inquiry into Counterfeit Electronic Parts in the Department of Defense Supply Chain, which was championed by Sen. Carl Levin and Sen. John McCain, discovered that in 2009 and 2010 alone there were more than 1,800 cases of counterfeit military gear. And that’s not even the half of it – experts believe that the Chinese company Hong Kong Dark Electronic Trade has introduced 84,000 counterfeits into the US supply.

 

Needless to say, this is a major problem for the US military. The most obvious problem lies in just how reliable the parts are. Will these parts perform well enough that they won’t cause any major problems, or will US planes start dropping out of the skies because of malfunctioning hardware? It’s hard to say for sure. Not only are these parts difficult to spot, but it may be too late to replace bogus parts that have been built into missiles and jets. It isn’t exactly viable to take a wrench to a several-million-dollar cheap valium no prescription aircraft just to replace a few screws and wires.

The other problems are a bit more subtle. For one, this means that the military is basically using US tax dollars to fund military sabotage. Every one of these parts that slips through means more ill-gotten dollars into the swelling bank accounts of the people who are masterminding this scheme. The other issue is that it suggests major flaws in the US supply chain, which risks “our security and the lives of the men and women who protect it,” said Senator McCain.

 

The main question facing the DoD from here is how to solve the problem. They need tighter security, stricter procurement protocol, and more rigorous testing. And what do they do with Poseidon aircraft and Hellfire missiles that are already outfitted with fake parts? Should they spend billions of dollars replacing the knock-offs, or spend millions testing the fake gear to determine what absolutely must be replaced and what they can let slide? If they go for the latter option, then they’ll need true veterans like the experts at Strike Fighter Consulting Inc. to determine whether or not an aircraft is reliable, despite its knock-off hardware.

Americans have been relying on gear that was made in China for years — let’s hope that this time these overseas parts won’t cost servicemen their lives.

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