Weapons jam: Pentagon sucks at removing foreign objects from its gear, auditors say

The Pentagon doesn't know where components of its critical systems come from, and it's doing a poor job of finding out, say government auditors.  The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report Thursday blaming the Defense Department's procurement software for doing a poor job identifying the country of origin of …

[DS999]

The only way to do this

Is to send an order to its suppliers that they have to send an order to their suppliers, and so on down the chain. Once you hit some US company that supplies individual resistors that are buying those bulk from China they'll have to admit that or be subject to perjury charges if they sign a document saying their stuff is coming from the US when it isn't. Then as the little guys pass that information back up the chain eventually the Pentagon will know exactly how fucked they are if they think they could conduct a war where those overseas supply chains would be cut off.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The only way to do this

In general, passive components aren’t the concern.

[DS999]

Re: The only way to do this

Oh yes they are, because we don't make those in the US anymore. Just about every weapons system more complex than a machine gun has electronics in it and it will have boards that have passive components like resistors, capacitors, and so forth on it. If there's a war and the supply of those parts is cut off that's going to be a big problem before long because just in time manufacturing means no one is keeping much stock. If a war lasts for more than a few months there would inevitably be shortages of certain types of passive components.

Could we make those in the US? Sure, but there's a lot of stuff from the mundane like this to the important like batteries to the critical like chips where it is either already a problem (security of the chips) or will become a problem if there's a war and the supply is cut off. We might say "oh well resistors are simple we can set up a factory to make those" but there are gonna be tons of part numbers between all the different types of discretes and all the various ratings so we'd end up with relatively small runs for each to supply the DoD's needs. They'd cost 10x more easily, and since the DoD would be the only customer for US made resistors they'd probably mark them up another 10x just because the DoD is a captive customer and you wouldn't have any competition in for locally made resistors.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: The only way to do this

They'd cost 10x more easily

I suspect you are missing a 0 or two...

[Ididntbringacoat]

Re: The only way to do this

>In general, passive components aren’t the concern.

All components matter.

[johnrobyclayton]

Ummaaarrr the military are avoiding Tariffs

Think of all that tax revenue the government is missing out from the military budget.

Perhaps that could fill the hole that the military budget puts in the national budget?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ummaaarrr the military are avoiding Tariffs

I guarantee the suppliers of completed products are paying tariffs on imported parts, and passing that on to the DoD and the US Taxpayers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting Good Advice

The Israelis seem to be knowledgable about supply-chain security/vulnerabilities. The US DoD should ask them about that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Getting Good Advice

It won’t be an issue soon as The GAO are on the Orange Shit Gibbons reduction in force chopping block. Eliminating any measures of accountability.

The SCOTUS will override the independence of this guardrail organisation - whilst legal proceedings are on-going - and by the time they are reappointed after fully winning their case their office will look like post IDF Gaza.

[DS999]

Re: Getting Good Advice

Yep the Supreme Court is going along with Trump's worst stuff by denying the stays that are put in place in the normal order of things. They managed to run out the clock on their first yearly term, so most of these cases won't hit them for real until the current term - and they aren't required to publish their decision until next June. By that time all his damage will be done and even when their ruling is ultimately "the president can't do this, congress has the power of the purse" it will be impossible to reverse. The people who were illegally fired by Trump will have already found other jobs so few would be willing/able to return. They'll sue the federal government and win a fat payout, but Trump won't care since he won't be paying it out of his pocket.

If Biden had tried this the Supreme Court would have upheld the stays and blocked him. We need to get rid of the life term for justices, the Supreme Court we have is corrupt. If Trump gets to appoint anyone more to it it'll get far worse - he'll probably nominate one of his personal lawyers like Emil Bove who don't even pretend to care what the law is in their decision making.

[fredthe]

I’m involved in product development, one of the subassemblies comes from Taiwan. I asked the manufacturer where the primary chip came from, and they never answered. We are redesigning to use a different subassembly where the origins, while not US, are at least from much friendlier parts of the world. Responsible manufacturers pay attention to these things, but many are in it for the easy money and don’t care.

[JLV]

Ghost Fleet

There's an interesting SF / technological thriller about possible consequences: Ghost Fleet https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22749719-ghost-fleet

Basically, China behaves naughtily but US platforms are not reliable due to hardware backdoors.

The authors are actually more defense analysts / futurists but they also moonlight as SF authors to make their concepts more digestible. Not bad, kinda like a Tom Clancy (the characterization is serviceable and really no worse than Clancy's).

[ShipyardTechWork]

Contractual Requirements

Are doable. The companies involved are more than capable of implementing the tracking. It's no harder than some of the other things written in. The DoD doesn't want to change the way contracts are written because it'll endanger some Senior Service Level guys retirement plan. Same reason Austal keeps getting contracts despite the ATROCIOUS rollout of the LCS/EPF platforms. Hesgeth is a joke of a "reformer" he says all the right things but implementation is, as always, lacking.

[FuzzyTheBear]

Audits ?

There's an easy way to make that problem go away. Fire all auditors , there will not be any more bad reports. Problem solved. Trumpian logic dictates the way to go and that is it. All those reports are bad for the USA's reputation so eliminate the problem at the source. Fire all who write the reports. Fire them all. The End.

[martinusher]

We can overdo this

I purchased a small item from Adafruit recently. Printed on the invoice that came with the assembly was a note signed by a "Mary Jungman" that read in part "The products in this shipment do not contain steel or iron of Russian origin." I actually doubt if the assembly had any iron in it from anywhere. (BTW -- Note to bureaucrats -- steel is a form of iron.)

I feel that we're barking up the wrong tree(s). Just supposing we wanted to set up a production line for passives, there's nothing stopping us, you just source the machinery (from where?) and off you go. Obviously you'll need to know where all the materials you use to make the parts come from with a lot of those materials being sourced from other manufactures (e.g. the little metal bits on the end and the tapes that the parts are supplied on are externally sourced). You'd have to have an entire workflow and QA setup to ensure that what you made met specifications, something that's really only economic if you're making parts in bulk. Ultimately its better to just identify critical parts that definitely need supply chain tracking and have at least two independent sources for everything else along with a half decent incoming inspection department to keep track of part quality.

[Oli.]

Huh, why did DOGE not find and resolve this glaring oversight???

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Huh, why did DOGE not find and resolve this glaring oversight???

Simple - it wasn't what they were looking for since Elon doesn't supply DoD (yet).

[goblinski]

You misunderstood.

The question was why did DOGE not find that the GAO still has employees. This IS a glaring oversight.

[BenMyers]

DOGE with its chain saws?

DOGE were a bunch of immature amateurs hired to do an important, and perhaps necessary, job. They botched it, and the world pays the price. What DOGE did and how they did it says that they were not detail-oriented. Or maybe they were prodded to do it quick and dirty.

[BenMyers]

All it takes is some motivation

It's easy, but Hegseth is too clueless to get it to happen. From now on, all military contracts for electronics MUST identify the country of manufacture as part of the delivery manifest. Oh! And the govt database needs to be expanded to record and track this data.