US Military Trying To Weed Out Counterfeit Parts 264
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from an AP report:
"'Sprinkling' sounds like a fairly harmless practice, but in the hands of sophisticated counterfeiters it could deceive a major weapons manufacturer and possibly endanger the lives of U.S. troops. It's a process of mixing authentic electronic parts with fake ones in hopes that the counterfeits will not be detected when companies test the components for multimillion-dollar missile systems, helicopters and aircraft. It was just one of the brazen steps described Tuesday at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing examining the national security and economic implications of suspect counterfeit electronics — mostly from China — inundating the Pentagon's supply chain. ... The committee's ongoing investigation found about 1,800 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 $7.5 billion a year in lost revenue and about 11,000 U.S. jobs."
why not outsource all of it? (Score:3, Informative)
Contrary to what many people think, China doesn't just produce low quality stuff. They'll produce the iPad and the iPhone. They'll make whatever quality level you want to pay them for. They make 99% of the consumer stuff you buy, from the cheap-ass wallmart plastic crap to the highest end consumer electronics and computer parts.
So: the US military could get very high quality stuff for much cheaper than paying Americans to make it, just like Apple outsources the iDevices to China to make, and same for many, many other business entities. There is plenty of precedent for outsourcing your military hardware - many countries outsource it to the USA, in fact. So given China's major advantage in manufacturing, maybe it's time for the US to start outsourcing military production to China.
Then there's no issue about counterfitting. Buy whatever quality you want from the Chinese supplier.
similar in aerospace (Score:5, Informative)
Similar problems occur in large shipments of commodity aviation components, like shims, nutplates, etc.
A less than scrupulous outsource supplier could sprinkle 20% of the product yeild with improper components, and if the batch is large enough, never get noticed. This doesn't negate the issues that "bogus parts" cause downstream in the product's lifecycle. Bad shims (made from incorrect, but "similar" materials) can promote dielectrics to form in important assemblages, manifesting all sorts of failures.. all kinds of thing can go wrong because somebody some place didn't want to follow what was in the order to the letter and cut corners somewhere.
In electronics, I could see this being manifest in diodes that are of the wrong class being used where, eg, zener diodes are required for proper operation, or the use of poorly formulated capacitor electrolytes in mission critical noise filters, and failsafes.
The effects would be equally diasterous, and vexing to maintenance and service people. The properly sourced equipment simply shouldn't fail in those ways. The component choices were made for that specific reason.
It does not surprise me that chinese manufacturers are the big sources of this problem. The quality of manufacture and qa process from cheap factories are tied directly to the cost per unit: you get what you pay for.
Re:Why are these parts even coming from China? (Score:5, Informative)
...an uninformed, knee-jerk comment.
Trusted foundry is not cheap. It is not feasible to manufacture all electronics used by the federal government in the United States. This has been a well known problem for a long time. Here is an excerpt from a 2005 report.
http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/ADA435563.pdf
"Most leading edge wafer production facilities (foundries), with the exception so far of IBM and possibly Texas Instruments, are controlled and located outside the United States. The driving forces behind the “alienation” of foundry business from the United States to other countries include the lower cost of capital available in developing countries, through foreign nations’ tax, market access requirements, subsidized infrastructure and financing incentives (including ownership), and the worldwide portability of technical skills, equipment and process know-how."
Re:Why are these parts even coming from China? (Score:4, Informative)
I cannot even begin to fathom outsourcing a multi-million dollar defense system to a country that has mastered "consumer-grade" electronics.
Because a handful of multi-million dollar defense systems is not a sufficiently large market to build a factory for making resistors, capacitors, and various other commodity parts in a high-cost market like the USA. If you made it a requirement, then that multi-million dollar defense system would now cost a few tens of billions of dollars apiece.
Re:Why are these parts even coming from China? (Score:2, Informative)
Why are we even buying critical components such as these from China?
In most cases, we are not buying from China. We're buying from otherwise reputable vendors who are seeing these showing up in their supply channels.
The whole milspec thing is part of the problem, because as a system developer in the govt you're only allowed to request a part of certain specs. The buyer goes out and finds a vendor claiming their parts meet the spec and they turns out their counterfeit. I would much prefer specing out a brand name and vendor that I can rely on, but FAR regulations prevent that and instead tell us we need to pay more and use women-owned minority businesses (which usually just means the real owner put the business in his wife's name).
Don't even get me started on the whole DOD supply system like milstrip. You order a nice pair of cutters that are listed as a decent brand name, and they ship you the chinese crap. It's the Military's own supply channel substituting the crappy chinese parts instead. Last time we ordered 3M Super-88 electrical tape from them we got this shitty almost transparent no-name tape that fell off within 2 days.