A report has come in that some “sprinkling” has taken place during the manufacturing of much of U.S. military equipment and it is jeopardizing the lives and mission of U.S. Servicemen. Sprinkling refers to the practice of replacing genuine electronic parts with less reliable substitutes. To add insult to injury most of these counterfeit parts are said to be from China. How does this happen? Noone seems to be owning up. Hearings have already began taking place before Congress. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the following:
The committee’s ongoing investigation found about 1800 cases of suspect counterfeit electronics being sold to the Pentagon. The total number of parts in these cases topped 1 million. By the semiconductor industry’s estimates, counterfeiting costs $US7.5 billion a year in lost revenue and about 11,000 US jobs.
“The Chinese government can stop it,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican on the panel.
Later in the day, the Defence Department said in a fact sheet that it has a quality assurance process to determine whether parts are authentic and is taking steps to detect counterfeit parts, including training more than 2000 personnel in identifying fake material.
The Pentagon also said there has been “no loss of life or catastrophic mission failure due to counterfeit parts”.
This is interesting to me on a few levels. Even if they say otherwise the companies that manufacture U.S. weapons technology aren’t overly concerned. I feel that weapons technology manufacturers should have their own quality and control measures in place before they sell weapons to the Pentagon. If they can’t pull it together I suggest they should be replaced with more reliable manufacturers. Bootleg luggage, bootleg clothing…. these things happen but bootleg electronics in a precision fighter jet?
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