so they paid half price and didn't asked why was it so cheap? didn't tried it before to ensure quality and functionality?
BIG MISTAKE.

AndersonBMX

I'm sure the line sold to get the beancounters to pony up was "I could get a good look at a t-bone steak by shoving my head up a bull's ass, but I'd rather take the butcher's word for it!"

qbrad

@Dancing Milkcarton: Uh, WE get what WE pay for. This is OUR money they're spending on crap. If a gov't is going to rack up a multi-trillion dollar debt on war, maybe they should be forced to pay top dollar for quality products.

qbrad

That's almost as bad as the 360s RROD. Just kidding.

So this is where all my tax dollars are going to?

Unknown2U

15% are fake? WTF?! 15%? That's...um, a lot.

You get what you pay for, I suppose.

Dancing Milkcarton

That's what you get for not buying the real thing.

gamecrazychris

Paid half as much? Wait, I though the Gub'mint always paid four times as much for everything? Like those $75 hammers and $250 toilet seats . . .

alowishus

@TBM-Fan: There isn't room to hide a program?
Depending on the type of hardware there is plenty of room and the fact a program alone is not needed, just leave a back door for access later.

SidV

quote: The phony infiltration has a distinct possibility of leading to espionage or sabotage.

Hardware can't easily lead to espionage, sabotage cause in most equipment there isn't much room to hide a program
But still i wonder who is going to be the scapegoat for all these fake components
But i want to know why especially now it comes to the surface? i know it is kinda old news but still not older then 3 months

TBM-Fan

Where I work, there's this cycle. We buy new, genuine, vendor-brand toner cartridges for our network printers. Everything hums along fine. Some new analyst gets promoted or hired into the position at HQ that oversees expenses on consumables. He figures out that we could save $ dollars by buying no-name, mostly-defective, utter crapola toner cartridges. An engraved-in-granite directive comes down from on high and everyone spends their entire yearly toner budget on garbage. The failure rate goes through the roof, some printers get killed, and emergency money gets re-appropriated to cover the problems. Ultimately, some other analyst figures out that the cheap cartridges actually cost us 3X$ this year. The first analyst gets promoted with a big award for his money-saving idea. The second analyst gets his job. For the next 5-10 years, that analyst makes sure we buy the genuine article and everything hums along fine.

Then he gets promoted, a new analyst comes in and looks at the consumables budget to find ways to save money.

Lather, rinse, repeat, in about 7-year cycles.

Moral? Quality is important. Whoever decided "Gee, look, we can get parts for half price!" probably got rewarded and promoted before planes started falling out of the sky. The notion that the military should "competitive-source" things instead of having an unquestionable right to buy expensive (it's called "mil-spec") stuff is just crazy. Where military equipment is concerned, the failure of the littlest thing can kill people.

Anybody remember that "West Wing" episode where the military analyst had to explain why it was perfectly reasonable for an ashtray to cost $200? People make fun of that stuff, but they only do so because they don't understand.

Having people who don't understand such basics (Y'know, things like "If we're buying this for our military, we will have uniformed military inspectors at every single step of the manufacturing process, from raw materials to delivery") who are ALSO in charge of letting contracts is just too scary for words.

benenglish

they should reather buy better chips than investing in war and screwing a country like iraq so people are running away from home

rrwakc

Even though the fault are crappy chipsets, the idea of cheap parts that also spy on the U.S. seems like a good idea...

I wonder why China couldn't have had that idea earlier!

Klappstuhl

I love how contractors will risk all to save 50 cents on a processor, a processor that will execute software for which US tax payers spent millions of dollars to develop.

whootowl

once again leave it to china to make cheap knock-off deadly or dangerous products...yet another reason why we should illegalize chinese imports

jgeezy

@jgeezy:

Completely agree. Nothing but crap comes from there. Bad milk, lead paint on toys, knockoffs, lower quality products and electronics, not to mention the chinese have their own agenda against the West and will gladly made faulty chips, or worse, chips that fail on-demand.

Aturayd

@alowishus: Congress mandates quality in certain things.

kanon

@Unknown2U: The Pentagon is trying to save your dearly extracted taxpayer dollars, because the Pentagon cannot afford to throw about the dollars like Congress can. If it is looking for components on the cheap, it cannot afford to pay for name-branded gear.
Write your congressman about this today!

kanon

Where I work we invest far more manpower in design verification, validation, characterization, production test and burn-in, and insuring that our parts work flawlessly in our customer's designs than we do designing the chips themselves. If someone stole our masks and process tech and managed to make a clone, there wouldn't be any assurance that any of our production testing would be done. And trust me, there would be hell to pay if our enterprise customers got even a few chips that failed in service.

BTW counterfeit Slot A K7 FTW.

dingus

There have been rumours over the years that when the US sells military equipment to allies like Israel and Taiwan, there is hidden circuitry that essentially forms an "off" switch. In the event that the weapons ever pointed in the wrong direction a simple coded signal could transmitted that renders the equipment useless.

If this rumour is not true, than it should be, sounds like a good idea to me!

Gary_7vn

@Gary_7vn: You're kidding, right? If you condone your nation installing backdoors in equipment they sell other nations, then wouldn't you expect other nations to do the same to you?

robjennings

@qbrad:

Then it should read, THEY get what WE pay for.

este

@Gary_7vn: I think Israel, Taiwan, and everyone else that's made it out of the bronze age is smart enough to understand the concept of the Faraday cage, the only thing necessary to prevent a "simple coded signal" from doing jack.

The US can (and has) turned off or provided 'fuzz' into essential signals like GPS, but that's rather obviously not an acceptable method for turning off weapons, at least unless you want a gun to turn off when you go inside.

gattsuru

STOP BUYING STUFF FROM CHINA.

blacktop

In many cases this is not the contractor being "cheap". I worked for a company that did consulting for the Federal government and worked with vendor certified/approved suppliers. Out of the hundreds of Cisco units we installed, we received two that were knock-offs. The first we found b/c we called in for support and the serial number belonged to a company South America. The second we found b/c we started verifying all units after that.

The problem is that the government bids contracts based on price and you'll almost always get a better price going through a volume reseller and not the vendor. The whole process encourages you to cut as many corners as you can. So, while we would have happily sourced directly from Cisco... we would have never won any contracts.

An effective (but annoying) solution to this is to require an activation code for the product. Challenge/Response. If it's been powered off for more than 24-48 hours it won't start up without a response code that's specific to that unit (one programmed at the factory and not determined programatically). It's annoying but when you're shelling out $50-100+k for a piece of hardware... it's worth a 5 minute phone call to make sure it's authentic.

thesandbender

Unfortunately the problem is more ominous than some contractor trying to save money. Gov't contractors buy their parts from a vendor who is trying to make a hefty profit (or discovers a really large inventory of products sitting on Chinese shelves that will more than supply the needs of the contractors) and sells those parts to the contractor. The contractor is completely clueless that they are poor quality Chinese parts since they requested Mil Spec parts. The only way to tell Mil Spec from non-mil spec are the part numbers. But hey when you are a Chinese manufacturer you can just make sure that your non-mil spec parts have a mil spec number on them since (wink, wink) you know already that all mil spec parts are going to your enemy. Selling bad parts to your enemy is just plain good business practices. And usually the parts go through several middlemen before a formerly reputable supplier is caught with egg on his face because he thought he was supplying a military contractor with Bona Fide mil specs. And guess what folks the problem isn't going away anytime soon without some kind of oversight investigation.

willie333

This is the same situation the UK government already faces. In their bid to make spending budgets transparent to the taxpayer, abide by EU competition laws and tender contracts to cut costs they ultimately back themselves into a corner and have to award the bid to the cheapest bidder. And many contractors end up bidding lower than they'd comfortably like else risk losing the contract entirely so end up cutting corners at a later date or the taxpayer is forced to bail out the project.

You only have to look at the following projects to see this incompetence in action-

Wembley Stadium- £400 million over budget and 2 years late
The Millennium Dome- on time (but many aspects cut to ensure the completion) and ended up costing the taxpayer approx £1 billion which was something like £800 million over budget

The NHS national computer system, thought to be the World's largest civilian IT project, is running years behind schedule and currently estimated to be £6 billion over budget.

Eurofighter project - years late and £2 billion over budget

But the biggest and best example to date is The 2012 London Olympics.

In 2003 consultants to the government put the cost of building and staging the games at £1.796 billion.
This rose to £2.4 billion in 2005( to include a 50% contingency) when London was awarded The Games

In 2006 that estimate had risen to £3.3 billion

In 2007 the final cost had yet again risen and now stood at £5.3 billion to include regeneration and infrastructure costs.

The total budget including contingency, security and tax now stands at a staggering £9.7 billion. As history has shown that final estimate will probably again rise as we near closer to 2012.

So this competitive, cost saving, better value for our money charade has cost us tens of billions more and made us a laughing stock around the world for being unable to complete public building works on time or budget.

jimbowyer

@undefined:

Sorry, did they explain why the ashtray cost $200? I would like to hear that explanation.

Baldyman1966

@jimbowyer: How very true...transparency and competition are the worst things to come from a government. Good thing they haven't implemented safeguards to ensure that contracts are met on-time and under budget or else we'd all be screwed.

geowrian

@blacktop:

Seriously! I would rather say lets try reducing our dependency on China and migrate to other countries so we're less reliant on one country manufacturing all our goods. This way we protect ourselves from one country deciding to drop any trade agreements we possibly had or foreign countries saying "Hey if you don't pass this $700 billion dollar bill we're going to f*ck your economy over by dropping the U.S Dollar"

addiktion

@benenglish:

A high quality grade chip makes a lot more difference then a $200 ash tray. I'm sorry but $200 isn't justified. I can understand actual missiles, rockets, and other important devices having top grade chips but in this case the military overspends on useless shit and under spends on the important stuff.

addiktion

The problem doesn't lie with the military per se, but with the contracting requirements. All military govt contracts or purchases must go with the lowest price or provide justification. Also, sole-source contracting (not competing out a contract or purchase) must also be justified. I have worked some with contracting and I have never seen "potential to be counterfeit" as a reason (nor could I see it be accepted as such).

Not the military's fault. The fault lies with Congress who forces all this overbearing contracting requirements onto the military. True, there might be a few more causes of fraud without all the overburdening oversight, but the amount of money saved ultimately saved and the quality of the products procured would far outstrip any harm from relaxed contracting.

HERE'S AN EXAMPLE YOU WILL ALL ENJOY. All military travel is now required to go through a system called DTS (defense travel system). The govt spent over $700 million on this system (contract price only). This does not include training, time for the user to input their travel, increased maintenance & helpdesk etc. Now consider you have a high grade employee (around $90k+/year) having to take time to put in their travel when before this was done by their secretary (at around $35k/year) who could do it in about 15 minutes. Because the high-grade employee infrequently travels & with the certain inconsistencies in DTS, it could easily take them 1+ hours to put in their travel.
Now consider that all govt employees are required to attend a 1+ hour course on DTS (with yearly refresher courses in some cases). Ouch.
A friend of mine very conservatively evaluated the cost of the system and CONCLUDED THAT THE GOVT WOULD HAVE SAVED MONEY JUST BY HANDING TRAVELERS A $33,000 CHECK RATHER THAN USING THE DTS SYSTEM. (note that the average cost of a trip is around $2000-2500).

(sorry to shout, just want to make sure you caught the relevant points)

PigVenus

China, Korea and Japan has the entire world wiretapped.

FinalValgas