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The Military China The Courts United States

Honeywell Admits Sending F-35, F-22 Technical Drawings To China (upi.com) 110

Posted by BeauHD from the violating-export-laws dept.
schwit1 shares a report from UPI: The State Department announced it has reached a $13 million settlement with U.S. defense contractor Honeywell International over allegations it exported technical data concerning fighter jets and other military vehicles to foreign countries, including China. The settlement resolves 34 charges the State Department leveled against the company for disclosing dozens of engineering prints showing dimensions, geometries and layouts for manufacturing parts for aircraft, gas turbine engines and military electronics.

Honeywell voluntarily informed the department in two disclosures that it had violated arms export control laws by sending the technical drawings to foreign countries, the State Department said in a statement. Honeywell had identified 71-controlled drawings that it had exported to Canada, Ireland, China and Taiwan between July 2011 and October 2015. "The U.S. government reviewed copies of the 71 drawings and determined that exports to and retransfers in the PRC of drawings for certain parts and components for the engine platforms for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, B-1B Lancer Long-Range Strategic Bomber and the F-22 Fighter Aircraft harmed U.S. national security," the document said. In a statement emailed to UPI, Honeywell explained it "inadvertently shared" the technology that was assessed as impacting national security during "normal business discussions" but remarked that the schematics were commercially available worldwide. "No detailed manufacturing or engineering expertise was shared," it said.

The company has agreed to pay the fine and have an external compliance officer oversee the consent agreement for at least 18 months as well as conduct an external audit of its compliance program.
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Honeywell Admits Sending F-35, F-22 Technical Drawings To China More

Honeywell Admits Sending F-35, F-22 Technical Drawings To China

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    • Re:When reached for comment, the CEO replied: (Score:5, Funny)

      by arglebargle_xiv ( 2212710 ) on Saturday May 08, 2021 @09:14AM (#61362184)
      Are you kidding? Sending the F35 data to China was a deliberate play by the CIA to try and fuck up China's jet production. Honeywell is probably on some CIA roll of honour for the part they played in dropping this design bungle on China while pretending it was a valuable leak.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        The Chinese are not stupid enough to try to copy the F-35.

        • *imagines South Park clip of the Chinese playing an ad on US TV, selling "All new F-35W! The W stands for 'is Working now', mwahahahaha!"*

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

            *imagines South Park clip of the Chinese playing an ad on US TV, selling "All new F-35W! The W stands for 'is Working now', mwahahahaha!"*

            Don't be silly. The Japanese would do that. They're very good at improving US technology. Chinese just make the same old thing, usually not as well.

        • The Chinese are not stupid enough to try to copy the F-35.

          They might actually know how to fix it!

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          The Chinese are not stupid enough to try to copy the F-35.

          You would be surprised. There are a number of times the USA and the USSR would steal something from each other and copy it so completely even the parts where interchangeable. The military tends to run on what works, and not who designed it.

          • So when are we going to get some Russian equipment into our arsenal? Asking for a...supplier.

          • The soviets had good metallurgy, and generally a better educational environment.

            There is more to it building these things than is in the CAD drawings of what is to be built.

            The situation with jet engines makes the differences clear.

            It has nothing to do with who designed it, and everything to do with who would be building it, and what they understand from reading the designs.

      • The F35's not a bad design, it's just too expensive and complex to be practical, even for the US military, and is designed for a war with another high-tech superpower that is incredibly unlikely to ever happen. For some alternate history where the US military has an even more gargantuan budget and is likely to get into a war with Russia or China, it would be brilliant.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by jwhyche ( 6192 )

          US military, and is designed for a war with another high-tech superpower that is incredibly unlikely to ever happen

          This is going to be the new norm for the foreseeable future. In the old days it was mutual assured destruction that kept the peace between the two super powers. But now we live in such a high-tech age that MUD can't be assured any more.

          So what is going to be the new norm is high tech arms race. You can't be sure how advanced your adversary's actual military is so you will never be sure if you can actually beat them in a war.

          • What will be the new norm is both sides' militaries hard-ons for high-tech designs blocking their view of what's actually possible. Russia has plenty of its own F35s, e.g. tanks, where it still hasn't managed to replace the T-72 after fifty years. The Armata in particular is probably the armor equivalent of the F35. So it's not MAD, its WCGTFTTW, we can't get the f--ing things to work.
            • The Abrams is just as old, we just keep hanging fancier armor on the sides, and making crazier rounds to shoot in the same cannon with updated computers...

          • You can be pretty sure they're also investigating space-based kinetic weapons, .ru seems to be working on some kind of new nuclear propulsion system per the explosion a few years back, and then the Havana Syndrome thing demonstrates development of yet more types of weapons.

            I guess the good news is most of these are less dangerous to non-combatants than old-school nukes. Less dirty, less flashy, easier to deploy with plausible deniability. Less point in letting the public know about them.

            So, probably no more

        • and is likely to get into a war with Russia or China, it would be brilliant.

          You're assuming the parts necessary to keep the plane flying [gao.gov] would be available, not flying too fast or their stealth coating might come off [defensenews.com], or having their oxygen supply suddenly cut off [nationalinterest.org].

          Aside from those minor issues, sure, it might be a decent plane.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pimpy ( 143938 )

          Strange, I would consider an overly complex design that has little chance of working in practice while doing nothing but racking up budget overruns to be a pretty terrible design.

        • It seems like the military has forgotten the lessons of WWII. The allies benefited from being able to build far more, but less capable tanks than the Germans.

          Fighter jets do have another limitation on deployment: training pilots, which is why we should be investing heavily in drones.

        • F-35 is the fully developed train wreck that would have been the F-111 fighter of the 60s when Sec'y McNamara wanted both USN/USAF to share a fighter-bomber weapons system, which turned out to be neither and the program was stopped abruptly. The Navy moved on by building F-14 with variable sweep wings while USAF finally adapted the EF-111 as a electronic warfare platform, and used a few F-111Bs for light bombing.

          The lesson !not! learned was to force the services to share an interchangeable platform, so F-

        • The F35's not a bad design, it's just too expensive

          Cheaper than an F-16, but you get your news from AM radio, so you don't know that.

          • Citation or you're full of shit, just like when you asserted that I get my news from AM radio.

            • Oh shut the fuck up, you know how to work a search engine.

              You are not a scientific journal, you do not get to have citations provided for what is said to you.

              Look it the fuck up. It sounds expensive because people quote numbers over the 50-year life of the program. They imagine they're smarter than the generals, because their social media agrees that it is a lemon. They don't notice that every country that receives it increases their purchase. They don't bother to look up the operational costs, the maintena

              • I have looked it up, I asked you for sources because I can't find anything to support your assertions. From what I can find the up-front per-unit cost is at the very least 2x as high for the F35 vs. the F16, possibly as much as 4x higher.

                The F35 has a flight lifespan of 8000 hours and an operating cost somewhere in the range of $27k~$67k/hr, the F-16 also has a flight lifespan of 8000 hours and the only per-hour cost I can find for it is $8k/hr. These include operation and maintenance costs.

                I'm willing to p

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        Even if the F35 program is a failure, it doesn't mean the technologies developed for it are worthless.

        The drawback to the clean sheet approach taken with the F35 is that eventually all the risks you undertake can add up in ways you might not expect. One of the things not adequately foreseen was how crippling sustainment costs might be, particularly for the Marine variant which is supposed to operate from austere forward bases. At this point if we are finally forced to declare the program a failure, it won'

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by shanen ( 462549 )

        +1 funny

      • they even have "honey" in their name.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I don't get it. (Score:3)

    by Ecuador ( 740021 ) on Saturday May 08, 2021 @09:12AM (#61362176) Homepage

    but remarked that the schematics were commercially available worldwide

    The summary is very contradictory, if something is commercially available worldwide, then it can't be a national security issue, so they shouldn't be in trouble, should they? But if they did share tech they were not supposed to and it is a matter of national security, how do they get away with it so easily?
    Maybe someone who cares to RTFA can fill in the details...

    • but remarked that the schematics were commercially available worldwide

      The summary is very contradictory, if something is commercially available worldwide, then it can't be a national security issue, so they shouldn't be in trouble, should they? But if they did share tech they were not supposed to and it is a matter of national security, how do they get away with it so easily? Maybe someone who cares to RTFA can fill in the details...

      2011 was quite a long time ago when it comes to declassifying documents and programs. I suspect a lot of things have become commercially available in the last decade regarding the F35. I'm guessing these documents were at minimum controlled and under ITAR restrictions, and quite possibly classified at the time of the violation.

      Also, from TFA:

      "Since Honeywell voluntarily self-reported these disclosures, we have taken several actions to ensure there are no repeat incidents,"

      That doesn't exactly sound like the expected company action that would logically align with a what's the big deal everyone's got them excuse.

    • The summary is very contradictory, if something is commercially available worldwide, then it can't be a national security issue

      DoD's classification system is based on rules, not logic. Information doesn't become declassified just because it is publically available. For instance, the information in the Snowden leaks remains classified and people holding security clearances are warned not to discuss the leaks or share links.

      If a coworker shows you a classified document that is above their clearance level, and you then look at it and hand it back to them, you just broke the law.

      This sounds stupid, and it is, but that is how the syst

      • This right here. It's even down to specific copies of information, not the information itself. It doesn't matter if widget X's diagram is publicly available. The information was (most likely) given under a specific contract and is marked as a specific type of control. Most of this is marked CUI, Controlled Unclassified Information governed by 800-171, which is the "commercial lite version" of 800-53. Some of this probably is covered as Secret, CUMI, FOUO (yes, that is still used), or a vast plethora of mark

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Collated public information, i.e., collected and integrate in a document(s), can also be classified.

      • When I was in the USAF in training from the manufacturer of the tactical jamming system, we knew it was all secret level stuff, and would be in prison for a long while if we ever divulged any of the specs, then the teacher threw a Japanese defence magazine on the classroom table with anything you wanted to know about the electronics involved, he also reminded us although it was classed as secret , the info was out there for anyone to see ...

    • You seem to not have the Content Mafia brain upgrade yet.

      Aka "Share it with everyone, while expecting secrecy about it at the same time".

    • This is an ITAR violation, not a top secret or similar DOD violation. Once a program is labeled ITAR even the most benign things about it now become ITAR controlled. Considering it's only a $13M violation the reality is this is a slap on the wrist to make sure they do better rather than a major breach in technology.

    • but remarked that the schematics were commercially available worldwide

      The summary is very contradictory, if something is commercially available worldwide, then it can't be a national security issue

      Pull your thinking cap on a little tighter, and you might realize that when a supplier shares things they were not supposed to, that itself is a national security problem, regardless of if the adversary already had the information,(this time) or could easily acquire it.

    • This is ITAR [wikipedia.org], not classified. That's why the State Department is the one handing out the penalty.

      If something connected to a weapon system is deemed sufficiently advanced by the State Department, it gets covered by ITAR. And you have to ask the State Department before sharing anything about the system to a non-US person.

      The fact that the information is available from non-US sources doesn't remove the ITAR requirement. Because they would like to review that claim about availability from other sources befo

  • at the F-35 drawings when they see how far behind them that the plane is.
    It is over-engineered, over-complicated and hugely overweight. Apart from the ability to go supersonic, there is little advantage over the old Harrier.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed, that was my first thought as well. Nobody sane would ever touch the F-35. There are far better ways to waste your money. The only thing it makes amply clear is that the US cannot do "fighter plane" anymore.

      The time of fighter planes is over anyways. In a few years, a cargo ship carrying drones will be able to wipe the floor with any aircraft carrier.

      • Build eight drone ships, attack-click the enemy's front line, laugh maniacally as their FPS plummets and they disconnect.

      • The only thing it makes amply clear is that the US cannot do "fighter plane" anymore.

        That was never the point of it. The point was to spend lots of taxpayer money and keep a percentage of that among the people who attended the design meetings.

        • The F-35 is also about extending US sovereignty into the air forces of the countries that buy the plane. It has been designed to send home (to the US, not the country that bought it) massive amounts of data including exactly where it has flown and when all in the name of preventative maintenance. Additionally, major fixes won't be done on the airbase but at one of a few locations set up by the manufacturer. I believe that there will be only four in total in Europe once they are all running and more than fou

  • Not even a penalty. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday May 08, 2021 @09:16AM (#61362192)

    $13 million? That's not even a penalty to these guys, it's a fucking rounding error. They literally get billion dollar contracts with the US government.

    $13 million seem really low for committing treason.

    • Oh, don't be like that, it is not like they shared an MP3 or something...

    • Thirteen Billion is a better deterrent. And onerous oversight. Costly oversight.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Prashast ( 60085 )

      Guess the competent authorities did not consider the breaches to be serious enough to warrant more than a slap on the wrist. In many other countries, I am sure some people would be going to jail for this. There should be stronger deterrents than fines if the matter is serious enough.

    • ITAR means Honeywell needed to let the State Department review the information before it was released.

      Reading between the lines, the small size of the fine indicates Honeywell's claim that the information was already available from non-US sources was true. But that doesn't remove the review requirement, and so the government issued a fine.

    • The penalties for covering up (as opposed to disclosing) a failure to contain classified information is much more severe, because it prevents the government from investigating a breach in a timely fashion to understand the leaked information and possibly mitigate it. Honeywell self-reported the disclosure of classified info, which by itself mitigates the punishment required.

      Your logic is the "tough on crime" argument that every transgression needs to be punished severely. In reality the response should be

  • The Chinese will not be stupid enough to build the over-priced, dysfunctional F-35 flying heaps of trash. All their engineers likely got out of these plans were a few good laughs. And the plans for the F-22 they were likely had already.

  • How can you avoid this? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by larwe ( 858929 ) on Saturday May 08, 2021 @09:37AM (#61362250)
    This is simply an illustration of a non-solvable supply chain problem. You can't pay enemy factories to make components of your classified materiel, because it's literally impossible to avoid leaking information to them in the process. If their part has to screw into someone else's part, they need a drawing that shows exactly where the screws go and what diameter they are, which gives many clues as to what the next piece in the mechanism is doing, what forces are expected to interplay between the two parts, etc. Even if you're just buying, say, screws - specifying the alloy, hardening, size, thread pitch - all of that leaks information about the intended application.

  • Even spying can just literally be *bought* from the American government. All you need, is to be an actual American citizen. Aka a corporation. Not a human being. Aka livestock. But an actual cititen with actual voting rights. Aka having lobbyist politicians. Not ballot crossing rights. Aka lolyoureallybelieveyouvoted?.

    Now I wonder how much the Chinese paid. Because I'm sure Honeywell made a profit. Cause, you know, ... they're American! What other point in life is there? *Laughs in Great Nagus*

  • Clearly, these loyal Americans were simply trying to tempt the Chinese military into sinking vast amounts of money and expertise into building an unreliable trailer queen of an aircraft with a software package from hell.

    Anybody like to bet the F-35's only real advantage, stealth, has already been compromised?

    • >In fiscal 2019, the F-22 fleet was the least ready among fighters at a rate of 50.57 percent. The F-35A had a rate of 61.60 percent, F-15Cs at 70.05 percent, F-15Es at 71.29 percent, and F-16Cs at 72.97 percent. The A-10 attack jet had a rate of 71.20 percent.

      >In partnership with the [Joint Program Office] and services, we estimate this PBL approach will simplify the contracting process, enable continued industry investment in performance improvements and cost reception estimated to provide the DoD

      • Once spotted, though, the F-35 would have to watch out for Sopwith Camels out-flying it and shooting it down. Assuming the ground crew could get one of them from "ready" to "actually flying" in less than a day or two.

    • Stealth is not a secret handshake, it is a matter of physics.

      A big part of the problem with trying to build their own stealth is that they have no relevant combat experience, no significant ability to acquire telemetry other than with their own equipment. They don't have any idea if what they build can be seen by American radar, or not.

      Whereas the US has extensive operational experience against the Soviet radar systems that the Chinese base their designs on.

      • Physics is physics. Assuming they know the basic performance characteristics of US radar, and of course they do, figuring out whether or not one of their aircraft will be spotted by it isn't that difficult.

        • How would they know that? Have they ever captured a US ship with modern radar so they can see what it picks up?

          They can see what signals their own radar receivers pick up from US radar transmitters, but they can't easily know what US receivers can see.

          • Do you seriously not know how radar works? Radar, in the generic sense, is located in a particular area of the electromagnetic spectrum. This area is pretty well mapped out.

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radars#United_States

  • Thirteen million is nothing for companies like this. They'll just pad that 13 million into one of their other Government contracts and not actually end up paying anything. They should be banned from all Government contracts for at least 10 years which should send a message that this type of sloppy work will not be tolerated.
  • Tariffs incoming. Soybeans again?
    Just giving China the plans is undercutting the wages of state sponsored Chinese hackers.
    It's unfair competition. China needs those steady jobs.

  • The national insecurity of the USA is rediculous. It's laughable, tbh.

  • If a company screws up this badly, intentionally sending technical information about classified weapons systems, regardless of that weapons system being a pile of junk or not, said company should be blacklisted from getting ANY more Government contracts for at least 10 years with no appeal or Congressional/Presidential override.

    Getting hacked is one thing, handing over the info is another.

    Not going to happen of course but just wanted to add my 2Â¥

  • The CEO will now only be able to have 14 bathrooms with gold toilets in his mansion instead of the original plan of 15.

  • "The company has agreed to pay " OK the company paid the fine then slapped that amount +20-0% for the bad PR on it's next no work billing spigot. Sorry "Defense Contract" so the government is fining itself because the company sold!!! US aircraft designs to anyone with money. No news here folks.

  • So why isn't this corporation being prosecuted for treason, mishandling of classified information, etc.?

    Oh, that's right, this is America. Some people (corporations and the vanishingly few super-wealthy) are more equal than others.

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