Chinese Are Flooding Pentagon Supply Chain With Counterfeit Electronic Parts And Putting U.S. Military At Risk

China is dumping counterfeit electronic parts into the Pentagon’s supply chain, two senior lawmakers alleged on Monday.

Two Senators, John McCain, Republican-Arizona, and Carl Levin, Democrat-Michigan, said the counterfeits are putting U.S. troops at risk and undercutting the American economy.

One day before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the issue, the Senators offered details of the panel’s ongoing investigation. They described a deceptive process in which parts are burned off old circuit boards, washed in rivers, dried on streets and sanded down to remove identifying marks. The salvaged parts, which can look brand new, are sold on the Internet or openly in the markets, the Associated Press reports. The panel’s investigators reviewed more than 100,000 pages of Defense Department documents and material from more than 70 companies. They found about 1,800 cases of suspect counterfeit electronics being sold to the Pentagon. The total number of parts in these cases topped one million.

The committee hearing will examine three cases in which suspect counterfeit parts from China were installed in military systems made by Raytheon, L-3 Communications and Boeing. Levin, the committee chairman, told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference: ‘Now, a million parts is surely a huge number. ‘But I want to just repeat this: We’ve only looked at a portion of the defense supply chain. So those 1,800 cases are just the tip of the iceberg.’

The investigators found that counterfeit or suspect electronic parts were installed or delivered to the military for several weapons systems. They include military aircraft such as the Air Force’s C-17 and the Marine Corps’ CH-46 helicopter, as well as the Army’s Theatre High-Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defense system.
Investigators traced more than 70 per cent of the cases to China.

Nearly 20 per cent led to the United Kingdom and Canada, the lawmakers said.

They said material in Hong Kong was trucked to cities in mainland China, specifically to the counterfeiting district of Shantou in Guangdong Province.    SOURCE

ANOTHER SOURCE___THE NAVY TIMES 
ANOTHER SOURCE___DEFENSE NEWS

ANOTHER SOURCE___ASSOCIATED PRESS

70s film on private Hitler rediscovered

When “Swastika” was shown at the 1973 Cannes film festival, fights broke out and somebody threw part of a chair at the screen.“All hell broke loose,” says the film’s Australian-born, Los Angeles-based director Phillipe Mora. “There were eruptions all through the theatre. Finally they stopped the film and a French guy came out, looking like a head waiter and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Cannes film festival, not a beer hall.” The cause of the ruckus was, primarily, that the film appeared to humanise Adolf Hitler and his inner circle. Never-seen-before colour footage, shot mostly by Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun, showed the personification of evil cuddling his dog, playing with children and discussing “Gone with the Wind.”



The revival of “Swastika,” championed by the German documentary director Ilona Ziok, is a sign, Mora says, that Germany has matured in how it handles its Nazi legacy. After the Berlin screening, a German film producer effusively told Mora, a Jew whose father was born in Leipzig, that “Swastika” should be shown in every school. It’s a far cry from its reception in 1973. Three decades before films such as “Downfall” began breaking the taboo against exploring the human side of the Nazis, Mora’s film provoked outrage.

“The film was made under the assumption that everybody knew Hitler was a monster and a murderer. I didn’t realise it was open to debate,” he says. “But he was a man with a mother and a father and sisters and a pet dog. And that viscerally disturbed people. They had only seen Hitler ranting and raving in grainy black and white film. It took 30 years but now a new generation is interested.”

Lost at the Pentagon

Mora went to the Pentagon, which found the eight cans of film and happily handed them over. “We were just dumbfounded,” he recalls. “Here was this incredible footage that’d just been sitting there because no one had asked for it.”More > > >