A reality of the globalization of the defense industry

ARTICLE: “Dangerous Fakes: How counterfeit, defective computer components from China are getting into U.S. warplanes and ships,” by Brian Grow, Chi-Chu Tschang, Cliff Edwards and Brian Burnsed, BusinessWeek, 13 October 2008.

This is the longer-term and just an inescapable fear as those our military originally bumped into regarding Y2K: the defense industry, in its network-centricity, has gone global to a stunning degree.

The main carrier of the virus: counterfeit computer chips.

The knee jerk is to declare the need for IT autarky—about as oxymoronic a concept as one can come up with in our networked world.

The smarter play is to recognize that the connected world has been made as interdependent in the security realm as it has become in the financial realm.

So the answer is more regulation and transparency.

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

Irony: National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) developed and promoted technology to use fully automated digital spec software to design and manufacture computer chips because US manual efforts produced many more failures than the manual efforts in Japan. Then they pushed to internationalize those standards with DOD as early buyer. Catch 22, the form fit and function drill can make it appear that the parts are OK, but material processing was inadequate.

So, DOD guys get your parts lot management textbooks out, and make sure you have some quality assurance checking provisions in your contracts. You can get advice from the mechanical parts QA guys across the hall who went through the same drill a decade or two ago.