By Tony Capaccio
Nov. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Dozens of suspected counterfeit parts have been installed on U.S. defense equipment from Raytheon Co., L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. and Boeing Co., including aircraft deployed to Afghanistan.
The Senate Armed Services Committee found counterfeit parts -- usually from China -- on at least seven aircraft, including the Lockheed Martin Corp. C-130J transport plane, Boeing P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol and L-3 27J Spartan transport.
“Suspect electronic parts from China were installed on military systems and subsystems that were manufactured by Raytheon Co., L-3 Communications and Boeing,” said the memo from the committee’s staff, released yesterday in advance of a hearing today.
None of the examples were connected to instances of lives lost or dramatic failures causing an aircraft crash, Michigan Senator Carl Levin, the committee chairman, said.
Still, the committee staff has “identified lots of places where, unless that correction was made, there was real fear that those kind of disastrous consequences could take place,” Levin said.
Separately, the Pentagon’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service is investigating approximately 40 cases involving various counterfeit items, Assistant Pentagon Inspector General for Investigative Operations James Ives said in an e-mail. The agency is conducting 225 investigations “involving potentially defective or substandard parts and components,” he said.
Deployed Aircraft
“The cases may involve counterfeits or improperly made parts,” Ives said.
Two new L-3 Air Force C-27J Spartans deployed to Afghanistan have displays with suspect parts, according to the committee. L3’s Integrated Systems unit notified the Air Force on Sept. 19 that 38 suspect video memory chips were installed in the display units on eight of the first 11 aircraft delivered.
The L-3 unit that made the displays learned of the suspect memory chips in November 2010, the memo said. The committee traced the chips to Hong Dark Electronic Trade in Shenzhen, China, which also delivered an earlier counterfeit part L-3 discovered in October 2009, it said.
The display units are made by L-3 Communications Display Systems and provide pilots with diagnostic data including engine status, fuel usage, location and warning messages.
The C-27J displays were among more than 500 containing suspect Chinese parts sold to the Air Force, Navy and defense contractors for installation also on C-130J and C-17 transport and Marine Corps CH-46 helicopters, the memo said.
Memory Chip Risks
“Failure of the memory chip could cause a display unit to show a degraded image, lose data or even go blank,” the memo said.
L-3 spokeswoman Jennifer Barton said the company is “reviewing the matter.”
“The fact that defective parts are in aircraft that are deployed in Afghanistan is evidence of the seriousness of the problem,” Levin said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News.
The Senate committee’s investigative staff amassed a database with 1,800 cases of counterfeiting totaling about 1 million parts. It scrutinized 100 cases and found that 70 percent of the suspect parts were traced to Chinese firms, according to the memo.
“Nearly 20 percent of the remaining cases were tracked to the United Kingdom and Canada -- known resale points for counterfeit electronic parts from China,” it said.
Legislation Considered
The panel is considering ways to tighten rules against the counterfeits, Levin told reporters, including requiring the defense contractors to pay for replacing the parts with genuine items.
“There’s a lot of possibilities here,” Levin said. “Right now, there is ambiguity in some of the contracts,” he said. “It depends on some extent as to the wording of the contract, whether it is cost-plus or fixed price,” he said.
Legislation “will force contractors to tell” their subcontractors and their subcontractor’s suppliers that they need to make sure the parts being sold are legitimate, he said.
“If you out the onus on all of our contractors they will get that message back to their suppliers as well,” he said.
--Editors: Steven Komarow, Jim Rubin.
To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio in Washington at acapaccio@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net
And my article from 2005 in its entirety:
SLEEPING GIANT
STAY AWAKE, DAMMIT By: Resa LaRu Kirkland
One of my favorite icons in history is Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. I was raised with a great love for history by a dad who knew just about every damned thing to do with WWII. In fact, I had to be the only fifth grader who knew that Yamamoto planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. I didn’t stop there; I went on to tell my teacher and class that he was educated in America, warned Japan against fighting us, told them they would lose, was sent out to sea in part because his life was being threatened for daring to say the emperor could be defeated, his personal hero was Abraham Lincoln, and made the famous "Sleeping Giant" quote.
It was a warning we continue to ignore.
There was much about him to admire. He wasn’t just an intelligent man; he was wise and honorable. While studying at Harvard, he was awed by the American people. He could not get over what he called "their unfailing optimism." It was unimaginable to Yamamoto—they were not disciplined with the Bushido code, not part of the superior Japanese race. And yet, they had a sense of hope, a sanguinity that both baffled and inspired him.
He had been taught in Japan that easy living had made Americans soft and lazy. They would never have the disposition to fight a long, hard war…at the first loss of life they would fold. Americans had a silly sentimentality attached to the individual human life. The Japanese believed in never actually dying, and that ending your mortal life in war for the emperor meant eternal exaltation. It also meant that the parents of such a son would be financially compensated. (Hmmmm…sounds familiar.)
Japan had taught their people that Americans paid lip service to freedom being more precious than life, but they didn’t actually mean it. The 1930’s had proven that. America turned a blind eye to what was happening in the hope that it would all just go away; that Hitler would finally be satiated with each new nation he ravaged under the Nazi scythe. They had even ignored Japan’s aggression in Korea and China. This appeared to support the Japanese perception that Americans were just too ductile to take on the hard, disciplined nation of Japan. America had been the only realm that Japan and Germany feared could stop them. But once it became clear that they would do nothing and would actually look the other way, they became a joke to the two predator nations.
Yamamoto didn’t want to align with Germany. He told his Army friends that such an alliance would be death to Japan. When it happened, the heads of Japan’s military machine asked him to plan a first, massive strike on American soil. What he told them stunned the council.
"I can make an attack, and I can assure you of victory for the first 6 to 12 months of the war. But after that, I promise nothing. I also know that you think America is soft, and will not fight a sustained and costly war anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we start this war, we cannot stop at Hawaii or even California…we will have to march on until we are at the steps of the White House. We must follow the Geneva convention in this attack. If we deal with America dishonorably by not first signaling our intentions to them in cutting off negotiations, they will be unmerciful with us, and we will lose."
We all know what happened.
In the hours after the attack, Yamamoto found out that the message had failed to reach the President before the first strike as planned. In America’s eyes, it had been an unprovoked sneak attack. While all around him were celebrating their victory at Pearl, Yamamoto sat in stony silence. Slowly the others noticed, and out of engrained respect, sat to listen to what the great warrior had to say.
"The message did not reach Washington until hours after the attack began. I can think of nothing that would enrage the American people more than an unprovoked attack. I fear all that we have accomplished is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
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There it is—the first reference to America being asleep on thejob, and only awakening after being attacked.
All of Yamamoto’s predictions and warnings came to pass. Six months after Pearl, they suffered their first great defeat at Midway. By the first anniversary, the tide had turned. In less than four years, the American "terrible resolve" mushroomed for the entire world to see.
But there is one saying Yamamoto had that I do not agree with. When consulting with his Army friend about negotiating with America, he reminded him that "there is no final word in diplomacy."
This is not true.
When you have an enemy who refuses to acknowledge your right to live as you choose, you only have two word choices—capitulation or war.
Again we have an enemy who believes we cannot win. Unlike Yamamoto, however, they are not men of honor, who believe in following any of the established rules for warfare, let alone human decency. They turn their women and children into combatants—just as the VC did—and then exploit flaws in the American system they so despise to gain wealth, propaganda, and a world that will submit to Islam or taste the point of their spear. They do not warn their own people that they cannot win; instead they use our own people—hippies—on our own soil—Hollywood—to spread their lies and defend their civil rights, ensuring that they can continue in their wicked work until they succeed.
But we are fortunate. We still have those raised in Islam who recognize the evil and abandon it. They see the good things about America and Israel, and the two do not reckon. They choose the one that is right and good. Out of respect and a sense of safety for this land, they sound warnings to us constantly. My Muslim contact is one, but his warnings are many.
"You are under attack, and they will not stop. They will fight in ways you consider horrifying, such as using civilians and children against you. They will sign treaties only to get you to let your guard down. They will never honor a treaty because the Quran teaches it is not a sin to break a promise with the infidel. In fact, it encourages such behavior as an insidious way to weaken and destroy the enemy. In Islam you are taught to be a good neighbor, to attend barbecues, baby-sit for your neighbors, and get them to like you. This will make it harder for them to believe that Muslims are really that bad, thus enabling the goal of Islam and stunting America’s ability or willingness to stop them. It will also make it so you never see it coming—they’ll be at your party one weekend, and when—not if—the call comes, they will slit your child’s throat in front of you the following weekend.
"The Nordic races have been gutted to the point of fracture all over the world, but particularly in America. Your attitude and apparently mandated policy of racism against whites—the race that created and built America—is baffling. Allowing feminist ideals to put your children in the hands of the state from birth on is only ensuring that they will tow the government line and not fight back when the time comes.
"One of the problems I have with the black race is their attitude. (Don’t worry, he can say that. It’s only racist if you’re white.) I have a colleague from Africa who is black, and he is the best scientist I know. But the blacks in America have this outlook of entitlement—that they don’t have to work and sacrifice like the white races have. This is something they continue to do to themselves in spite of their vast opportunities. They don’t have to overcome what my African friend did—their choice of being criminals rather than men of honor is a result of their own attitudes and America’s continued guilt-ridden PC attitude that blacks have to be ‘taken care of.’ How does this help you? It’s insulting, yet blacks endorse it! By now it should be obvious that this policy is destroying you, and yet you continue it.
"Your universities are aiding and abetting the enemy by insisting that America give more visas to foreign students and overlook background checks. Why? Well, partly because they are the bastions of liberalism. But it is also because Americans don’t want to work hard in the un-glamorous and damned difficult fields of science. All of your top scientists in America are either Indian, Muslim, or Chinese. Why aren’t your children doing this? You are constantly being compromised when you have enemy nations creating technology in your land and sending it back home to use against you. They have even stolen from you, but your own press downplays it! How can you be so deliberately suicidal?
"Do any of you know what Mean Time Between Failure means? It is the guaranteed time that a new technology can last before it needs to be replaced. Say that a part is created for the space shuttle that has an MTBF of 2000 hours. In countries that are your enemies, they will make it only to last 1000 hours. I know this is done—I’ve seen it. Do you see how insidious this is? They are not only stealing your technology, but ‘dumbing down’ the products they send you, all in an effort to destroy you. Do you see now? Are you ever going to stop apologizing for defending yourself? Are you ever going to wake up and stop this policy of self-destruction? Why are you doing this? If America is brought down, then Islam and Communism will rule the world. I’ve seen both, which is why America must remain the predominant power in the world."
There’s that phrase again about waking up. I think it’s time that America stop sleeping so much. For a few more moments of rest we are compromising our future. Try getting any sleep then, America!
Stop sleeping, giant. You’re late for school, and you can’t afford that. You’re already behind in your lessons.
Keep the faith, bros, and in all things courage |
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I rest my case. 
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