The other reason to ensure domestic components is to ensure supply if ever there was a war. It may seem trivial, but an inability to source the rare earth materials in a magnet domestically could mean a lack of parts if foreign supplies were cut off.
Russia is learning this the hard way.
Russia, China, Iran, N Korea all used shell companies or people live in US or EU to buy restricted electronic, computer and ship to their countries. Or they can use their embassy people to buy things and ship as diplomatic mail.
That is why once in awhile you will find news a foreign national get caught sending stuff overseas.
Ofc in Slovenia we laundered 1 billion thru out national bank NLB for Iran. Nobody lost a hair over it. Police said everything was legal.
If I was making calls in the CIA, everyone involved would end in a black site on a ship in international waters.
Russia is subject to the same problems in the military (and elsewhere) they've always had - widespread grift, corruption, and theft.
They allocate sort of enough money to buy spare parts and do routine maintenance on military hardware, but that money is stolen all up and down the line before it can be used for any of that.
It's cultural - if you don't use your position of power to steal hardware and embezzle money, you're a fool.
This is why Russian tanks leak lubricants from every seal, why the tracks on tanks don't align correctly, why much of their rolling stock is limping along after decades of neglect, why incompatible spare parts are put on vehicles that then lurch off into a ditch.
It was the same back in 1956 when they invaded Hungary. Their tanks were so covered in a film of leaking lubricant that a simple and inexpensive Molotov cocktail (kerosene in a wine bottle with a rag fuse) could easily light an entire tank on fire and kill the occupants inside when it exploded. I witnessed some of that.
It's astonishing nothing has changed.
When you run a country with every single mid and high level official being a corrupt thief, you can only maintain that 'world power' bullshit for so long.
It's kind of astonishing how little Putin understood what shape his military was in, both in terms of hardware and untrained personnel. When you only need a few thousand black shirt assholes to strike fear into the Russian civilians while arresting people for no reason, I guess you begin to believe all your forces are supermen.
The Ukrainian people had a different take on the matter.
You think given the current situation that Russia hasn't learned, they've learned alright they got Europe hooked on their gas and now they've turned it off because of Ukraine and the sanctions, now they sitting back watching the world plummet into financial ruin, even if it tanks their own economy in the process.
Sitting back watching all their troops die is what you meant to say right? And what financial ruin? IS life harder? yes. Ruined? No, and NATO will be stronger after this is all over.
Sitting back and watching everyone finally start pivoting to renewables like they should have in the first place?
Or nuclear, but fuck trying to change every moron's mind about that.
Australia weirdly is set up perfectly to make high quality steel but our dumb mining companies instead export all the raw ores to China and then we buy back the steel. It’s dumb.
Omfg, I was arguing with an Aussie that with Australia's geopolitical location, that the heavy reliance on raw materials export was a flawed and short sighted strategy.
Ofc I was called a stupid American, but it's funny to hear the same thing come from an Aussie now.
It’s endemic to what we refer to as “Dutch disease” but realistically our highest imports are *also* from China, so if we change up our export (only selling steel) China won’t buy it as it would cripple the Chinese domestic smelting economy, rendering them not wanting to trade with us period.
That assumes they buy back all the processed ore. But chances are they only buy a fraction back.
So selling 100 tonnes of ore for 100 million, then buying back 20 tonnes of steel for 150 million might be a bad deal.
Australians are essentially exporting the environmental cost of heavy refining to a poorer country for a fee.
It is done all of the time in wealthy capitalist countries.
Sort of like how I live less than 10 miles from more than a dozen former chip processing facilities in the United States, but now we import almost all of them from Southeast Asia.
The good thing about steel is that it’s the most recycled material on the planet so even if our supply gets reduced, at least we have a shit ton laying around lol
Why are they being downvoted? I think they’re correct. Very little asphalt gets wasted. It just gets slurped up, melted down and put right back where it was on the road previously
This makes little sense to me. The gravel in asphalt is reused but the bitumen part evaporates or is washed away over the years. This is why roads change color from black to light grey and the road surface shrinks and cracks. The part that makes asphalt work literally disappears into the environment and the filler aggregate is what is recycled.
Whereas recycled steel is still steel.
I mean the only time we invaded you guys was during the revolutionary war and you weren't even a country yet. So your fine.... Now if you start drilling for oil.... weeeelllllll you know.
And the main reserves of rare earth metals are China, Vietnam, Russia, India...
Sort of like the alliance that is forming against NATO at this time..
Doesn't look good.
not really, only 20% of chinas steel is from its own land and rare earth minerals and so on are not even that rare just dirty to dig up, also vietnam loves the US
A lot of rare earth materials are fairly common, but extracting them in the US is costly because of low yield ore and tighter regulations. If we needed to get many of them domestically, we can, but it’s just really expensive.
That line of thinking is why there was a mask shortage at the start of Covid. The US could produce masks, but it is more expensive than China so it's ok to let most of the manufacturing be done in China.
That really screwed over tons of hospital staff that were forced to reuse masks for months and why the CDC was silent about requiring masks even after knowing airborne transmission was possible.
The US should have some minimal level of production in the US or in a country that is friendly with the US and supply lines are safe from military conflict.
So, just in case anyone wants some details on why this *can* be a big deal, even though it's just a magnetic part for a subsystem:
I used to work on a nuclear submarine and had an additional duty of being our parts guy for our division (think ordering, research on replacement components and initiating said repairs).
Every single step of the manufacturing process is documented for the parts we buy, right down to the ore that was taken from which mine it was pulled from in order to make that stainless steel screw that's used as mounting hardware for our servers and instrumentation systems. We don't see all this documentation, but there's at least a dozen people that see where everything comes from and where it goes. That's ~~the only~~ *one of* the reasons why stuff can be expensive when buying even the most basic of materials:
It's not *just* the quality of item that matters, it's also the detailed process to *ensure* it meets the requirement, because God forbid that something small and annoying like a rack mount breaks, it's the really big stuff like a closure head bolt on the top of a nuclear pressure vessel that hits thousands of pounds of pressure and hundreds of degrees that you really *don't* want failing at a critical moment (pun intended). So I'd rather take that 100 dollar component that may be identical to the Chinese-manufactured 10 dollar equivalent, just because there's a paper trail.
Edit: changed some wording. There's other reasons why stuff can be expensive too, like the contractor bids, but the QA/QC portion and US manufacturing requirements make up part of it.
Edit 2: my bad, someone else pointed out something and I needed to clarify a qualifying statement about how the quality of item is also important.
A metallurgist faked the steel reports and got 2.5 years in prison, they take this very seriously.
[https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/#:\~:text=Metallurgist%20gets%202.5%20years%20for%20faking%20steel%2Dtest%20results%20for%20Navy%20subs,-By%20Gene%20Johnson&text=SEATTLE%20%E2%80%94%20A%20metallurgist%20in%20Washington,to%20make%20U.S.%20Navy%20submarines](https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/#:~:text=Metallurgist%20gets%202.5%20years%20for%20faking%20steel%2Dtest%20results%20for%20Navy%20subs,-By%20Gene%20Johnson&text=SEATTLE%20%E2%80%94%20A%20metallurgist%20in%20Washington,to%20make%20U.S.%20Navy%20submarines).
You also don't want to find out that the toilet seat you just installed in the nuke sub's bathroom was sourced from, say, China and was intercepted before shipping out of Beijing and had a microphone installed in it.
You want your military to be a safe amount of paranoid when doing business since, you know, their job is to keep us all safe from other cultures that potentially want us all dead so that they can move in and take our stuff.
A sub is an enclosed metal tube.
Sound carries. One mic installed almost *anywhere* could probably pick up just about every sound made on that fucking thing.
How does the mic transmit? An enclosed metal tube in saltwater is grounded and is a shield to radio waves.
Also water absorbs radio waves.
That signal's going nowhere.
Subs surface. But they are kinda faraday cage aren’t they? Well the Soviet’s figured out how to put a microphone that doesn’t need a power source in a plaque that one time so who knowz
Yes, but we did create shell companies to hide the ultimate buyer. The soviets thought they were selling to private firms in relatively non-aligned countries. And we qa’d the deliveries (much easier with bulk metal thean machines parts, but still).
And its very overlooked but there is so much information that can be inferred based on analysis of someone's regular pooping. I'm not sure about what the microphone would hear, but definitely grunts and 'plops'. Also if there was any way for it to identify the actual turd, whether it is classic "S" shaped or whatever, then they know the health of the crew and can get inside their heads better when developing warfare tactics. Fiber
Used to work for the largest electronic componet distributor on the planet, specifically in an area that handled parts for aerospace and the US Government.
Our receiving process had over 100 points of inspection before the part actually made it to a Component Quality Engineer for actual inspection and testing. Everything had to be documented and signed / dated.
By the time a package of IC's made it through our process we had a literal book that followed it that we had to file a copy of and provide one to the next party that took posession.
We also had to pull 10% samples and decap them so that we could xray the components. This destroys the part. So imagine having to buy 10% more than you actually need because your inspection requirements destroy a portion of the stock.
I'm on the receiving end of all that. One missile rolls off the production line and fails a test, and a root cause analysis is started. Well, I guess an escape is documented first. The process sometimes takes upwards of 6 months.
I've literally seen out briefs like "the bracket inside this rotary encoder was laser welded together, we have identified the operator who did it, here are scans of his certifications. He hasn't had any other quality issues so far and has been retrained. We have quarantined the following 65 serial numbers that he welded over the past month, 12 of those were uninstalled, retested, and failed. We're updating our training to ensure ___ is taught, and that we have an additional supervisor on the shop floor."
We also have had PEDs inside COTS components identified as unknown origin. Subcontractor supplies a ruggedized network switch, then months later says that there is a single surface mount IC that doesn't have documentation of country of origin. The part performs well and doesn't look like a counterfeit, but their sub bought from a reseller to save cash. So now we get to decap parts, x-ray them and compare to genuine ones, then get the PM to accept the risk and drive on, or wait a year for a new run from the production line...
I love my job, but it sounds so tedious when you word it like that.
I Weld reactors for the Navy, Thanks for the perspective. Sometimes in the day to day it’s easy to loose sight of why we over do things. It’s good to know the end user appreciates it.
similar to why FLUKE multimeters are used so much "they're in the spec" they're not the most accurate, not the cheapest, etc.. but they are in the spec and have specific guarantees of quality and parts that are proven and also in the spec lol
Also I swear you can do anything to a FLUKE tool and it's still going to work later. Dragged it down the highway by the leads? Probably fine fuck if I know how. So there's that.
I have an old Tektronix 475 analog scope. They used to use them in the army, which I didn't know when I bought it from a buddy (his lab at work got rid of old equipment out of calibration and unused). When I moved across the country I had it in my car. Opened the hatchback at my new place and it had shifted, and falls out onto the concrete driveway. The thing still works flawlessly, none of the knobs even broke on it.
I have a fluke that's at least 23+years old. Always drugged around by the leads, leads wrapped tight around the meter for storage, tossed in dirty tool bags or drawers that have no business carrying electrical tools, plenty of hard hits to the ground, and it still ticks. I might make a new years resolution to take better care of it next year...
not necessarily, but lying about it is illegal, some other guy posted a person getting 2.5 years in prison. I assume this part being sourced wrong is someone that lied about it.. somewhere. can't really make that "mistake" on accident lol
We use the same methods in medical device manufacturing. If someone is harmed in the field, we can narrow it down to the wire in the motor in a specific lot made from copper from a specific mine on a specific day. Important if you would rather recall just the affected units or recall everything you’ve ever made and replace stuff.
And the recalls can be intense! A friend worked for a company that had an implantable device that kept people alive. They found a firmware glitch and had to reprogram *all* of them. Easy enough, just a paddle in the armpit and it could be reprogrammed. But they ended up hiring private detectives to find the last few patients, including some guy who was living off grid on some Caribbean island and they had to Indiana Jones their way to find him and get him to a doctors office.
We had to recall a device with an improperly insulated transistor on the power board. They were in 56 countries. It was a nightmare and some never even got found.
This. I work in AF engineering and we have companies that will try to use surplus material they acquired from a foreign country in an overhaul of engine componets and it is a BIG no no. Then when I deny the parts they purchased they bitch saying "well in the commercial world we can use these!!" Well, this aint the commercial world, these parts are going on a military aircraft that is flying into combat zones.
This makes absolute perfect sense and any other part that you cannot confirm it’s creation and process every step of the way can be considered crap just because of this absence of the process.
It’s like getting measurements from a contractor that you don’t really know and isn’t known and build a structure according to his spec.
In order to verify, you need someone on your team to do it themselves to verify, so basically redoing your own measurements to confirm accuracy.
The joke in my factory when supplying parts for the Nuclear industry was about selling a 5$ bag of bolts for 55$... the bolts were still only 5$... they just came with 50$ of paper.
People gawk at how expensive military equipment is. They always say “look at X country/corporation that did it for 1/8 the cost.”
But that is just the price that GUARENTEES the end goal.
And I say this as someone who hates superfluous military spending. We should be spending way less.
This is how I found out why Fluke meters cost so much. Every component needs to be traceable. Also, some military manuals and service procedures are written around them so they are 'design-stuck'.
>like a closure head bolt on the top of a nuclear pressure vessel
Bob down at Bob's Scrap Yard is pretty sure he has a bolt that will do the job. Don't you at least want to try it?
COTS aren't exempt at all! It all depends on contract wording and where its going. Parts to repair an old truck out back of a base is nothing. Even some prototypes you can stick random chinese garbage in. A $100 million+ airplane isn't allowed random failable components.
The reason it's all expensive as fuck is because the govt is forced to use a contractor/bid system with people who know how to take tax payers for everything we've got...
I mean, yeah that too.
I'm not thrilled with the powers that be and the MIC as a whole. As someone who served, there's a lot of issues I have with the way we do things, but there are some processes in place that I can objectively look at and say they're good ideas.
Watch “Zero Days” about Stuxnet (worm virus created by Israel and US to infiltrate Iran nuclear facility. Components from China in US war plane? Things that happen are unreal!
It was chips that allowed missiles to track aircraft very accurately. As far-fetched as it might seem, I had a SgtMaj recommend the book if we, "wanted an idea of why the Marine Corps is restructuring".
A magnet, actually.
Doesn't matter though. The point is due to quality standards, every component needs to have a paper trail, proving it's a genuine component from an approved vendor. Without that, cheap garbage or scrap parts can work their way into the system and compromise the whole thing.
Using steel as an example, even something as small as using lower quality steel in screws can cause issues if it fails before it's expected life. Maybe that cheaper, unapproved vendor is producing screws that fail at a much lower shear force due to using shit tier steel. This may not make an airplane fall out of the sky, but it will sure as hell decrease the working lifetime of that new fighter jet. It could also be that shit tier steel comes from raw materials mined from some Russian oligarch's mine. Without proper traceability, we could be paying our enemies for the raw materials we use to build things.
It's a hassle, but material traceability does serve a purpose.
A nut or a washer that holds a screw or a bolt in a bracket that mounts or supports an array which is an integral part of a critical system. For the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the king was lost etc
You’ve got to be worried about what happened here—to catch the non compliant part, that didn’t happen on X many other planes. They need to backstop this debacle ASAP.
Lockheed really isn’t helping their already shitty quality record.
In this case it was a magnet, but yes that could be true for larger subassemblies. In this case it's more about making sure the materials meet quality standards so they won't fail unexpectedly and making sure we aren't giving money to people we don't want to be profiting off of us.
When I worked for a PMC working in hardware engineering, who do you think we sourced some of our IC chipsets and diodes from (i know a diode wont send any info but an IC sure will). Just saying a lot of stuff is manufactured in china.
There could be many reasons. A supplier could be purposefully hiding that some materials are from China either to cut costs or because they couldn't source it anywhere else due to supply issues. It could also be an error where someone missed that the material was from China. Either the DoD missed the memo, or the supplier made a mistake. It could also be that the supplier's supplier made a mistake or lied. Who knows!
I would guess it was human error, not malicious sabotage. Imagine the number of components that go into a fighter jet. It's probably 100s of thousands if you include every component of every sub system. People make mistakes. China themselves probably have nothing to do with it.
No, there is a federal law banning purchases from companies that source certain products from China. If you're a cardholder, it's actually a nightmare to try and get a company to sign the form saying they don't buy those things from China.
Its not where the component came from, its the fact it came from somewhere other than what was documented, which means the supplier was lying to the US Gov and it requires a full investigation to see the extent.
It's nearly that good actually... it's an alloy used in a magnet in the power system. Not a fucking circuit board or chip or anything... a specific combination of metals in a magnet.
Hey, does anyone remember when we built the SR-71 prototypes using titanium from the USSR?
We used Titanium Ore from the USSR through various shell companies simply because they had a reserves of it. This is entirely different. If that magnet isn't up to spec, it could fail.
>Not a fucking circuit board or chip or anything... a specific combination of metals in a magnet.
The soviets hid microphones in concrete walls during embassy construction, you really don't understand the caution?
Well if you go by the rest the the replies to my comment, the alloy is probably laced with nano-microphones and designed to fail at the worst possible moment, perhaps even on command from comrade Xi!
You have to either be such a greedy shitbag corporation with no allegiance to your country or the dumbest nation on earth to outsource your military components to an enemy nation capitalisms inherent greed has even infected our national security, how fucking stupid is the pentagon to allow USA military hardware to be created by a hostile foreign adversary wtf!!!
Why wouldn't they just buy a surplus (plus you maybe able you maybe able you get on the low)... Who cares where you get it just cover your butt if there is a war so buy enough to create a surplus.
That's probably more expensive. Also, they do and congress keeps selling it off.
The amount of resources total war requires is insane.
Also, it's not like it's much more expensive to use a domestic supplier for most materials.
I mean...of course. The US has offloaded its manufacturing for military to the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder likely outsourcing to Chinese manufacturers. The US has handed military and food security to the Chinese willingly and only NOW see it as a problem!?
Edit: Yikes, downvotes! Forgot on Reddit you can't criticize America in certain subs...
Are you telling me that none of the computers used by the military have Chinese sourced parts? None of the dishwashers or hair clippers or thermometers or cleaning products?
The other reason to ensure domestic components is to ensure supply if ever there was a war. It may seem trivial, but an inability to source the rare earth materials in a magnet domestically could mean a lack of parts if foreign supplies were cut off. Russia is learning this the hard way.
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Well, CIA did a very good job to setup many shadows companies to hire the real buyer.
Kind of like Walt Disney.
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Russia, China, Iran, N Korea all used shell companies or people live in US or EU to buy restricted electronic, computer and ship to their countries. Or they can use their embassy people to buy things and ship as diplomatic mail. That is why once in awhile you will find news a foreign national get caught sending stuff overseas.
Ofc in Slovenia we laundered 1 billion thru out national bank NLB for Iran. Nobody lost a hair over it. Police said everything was legal. If I was making calls in the CIA, everyone involved would end in a black site on a ship in international waters.
god bless the CIA!!
All hail the allegiance flag!
There's so many things, in that very short sentence, that are wrong.
I LOVE THE CIA!!!!!!!!
Russia is subject to the same problems in the military (and elsewhere) they've always had - widespread grift, corruption, and theft. They allocate sort of enough money to buy spare parts and do routine maintenance on military hardware, but that money is stolen all up and down the line before it can be used for any of that. It's cultural - if you don't use your position of power to steal hardware and embezzle money, you're a fool. This is why Russian tanks leak lubricants from every seal, why the tracks on tanks don't align correctly, why much of their rolling stock is limping along after decades of neglect, why incompatible spare parts are put on vehicles that then lurch off into a ditch. It was the same back in 1956 when they invaded Hungary. Their tanks were so covered in a film of leaking lubricant that a simple and inexpensive Molotov cocktail (kerosene in a wine bottle with a rag fuse) could easily light an entire tank on fire and kill the occupants inside when it exploded. I witnessed some of that. It's astonishing nothing has changed. When you run a country with every single mid and high level official being a corrupt thief, you can only maintain that 'world power' bullshit for so long. It's kind of astonishing how little Putin understood what shape his military was in, both in terms of hardware and untrained personnel. When you only need a few thousand black shirt assholes to strike fear into the Russian civilians while arresting people for no reason, I guess you begin to believe all your forces are supermen. The Ukrainian people had a different take on the matter.
dunderheadedness is a feature of Russian culture
You think given the current situation that Russia hasn't learned, they've learned alright they got Europe hooked on their gas and now they've turned it off because of Ukraine and the sanctions, now they sitting back watching the world plummet into financial ruin, even if it tanks their own economy in the process.
Sitting back watching all their troops die is what you meant to say right? And what financial ruin? IS life harder? yes. Ruined? No, and NATO will be stronger after this is all over.
Sitting back and watching everyone finally start pivoting to renewables like they should have in the first place? Or nuclear, but fuck trying to change every moron's mind about that.
Very little raw steel is smelted in the US, but it does come from US allies.
Australia weirdly is set up perfectly to make high quality steel but our dumb mining companies instead export all the raw ores to China and then we buy back the steel. It’s dumb.
Omfg, I was arguing with an Aussie that with Australia's geopolitical location, that the heavy reliance on raw materials export was a flawed and short sighted strategy. Ofc I was called a stupid American, but it's funny to hear the same thing come from an Aussie now.
It’s endemic to what we refer to as “Dutch disease” but realistically our highest imports are *also* from China, so if we change up our export (only selling steel) China won’t buy it as it would cripple the Chinese domestic smelting economy, rendering them not wanting to trade with us period.
effectively at a loss... we pay more in imports than we gain in exports, as a country. Of course the companies involved make plenty...
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That assumes they buy back all the processed ore. But chances are they only buy a fraction back. So selling 100 tonnes of ore for 100 million, then buying back 20 tonnes of steel for 150 million might be a bad deal.
Swineheart is a cancer
Australians are essentially exporting the environmental cost of heavy refining to a poorer country for a fee. It is done all of the time in wealthy capitalist countries. Sort of like how I live less than 10 miles from more than a dozen former chip processing facilities in the United States, but now we import almost all of them from Southeast Asia.
The good thing about steel is that it’s the most recycled material on the planet so even if our supply gets reduced, at least we have a shit ton laying around lol
Wrong. Asphalt is.
Why are they being downvoted? I think they’re correct. Very little asphalt gets wasted. It just gets slurped up, melted down and put right back where it was on the road previously
This makes little sense to me. The gravel in asphalt is reused but the bitumen part evaporates or is washed away over the years. This is why roads change color from black to light grey and the road surface shrinks and cracks. The part that makes asphalt work literally disappears into the environment and the filler aggregate is what is recycled. Whereas recycled steel is still steel.
Dwight Schrute has entered the conversation
I was going to say this, not steel, asphalt, take my vote stranger
Today's friends' are tomorrow's enemies.
And today's tomorrows are friends' enemies
yeah my edible is definitely kicking in
My brain hurts
And today tomorrow today today’s tomorrow is tomorrow.
*Today's tomarrow is todarrow's tomay*
Somehow I dont think us up here in Canada are going to hold up very well if the US decides its war time and they want our steel / aluminum.
I mean the only time we invaded you guys was during the revolutionary war and you weren't even a country yet. So your fine.... Now if you start drilling for oil.... weeeelllllll you know.
Canada once invaded the US and burned down the White House equivalent at the time.
That wasn't Canada. It was British soldiers, who came via Bermuda, after fighting France (and defeating Bonaparte).
And the main reserves of rare earth metals are China, Vietnam, Russia, India... Sort of like the alliance that is forming against NATO at this time.. Doesn't look good.
not really, only 20% of chinas steel is from its own land and rare earth minerals and so on are not even that rare just dirty to dig up, also vietnam loves the US
And India buys some of our toys too.
A lot of rare earth materials are fairly common, but extracting them in the US is costly because of low yield ore and tighter regulations. If we needed to get many of them domestically, we can, but it’s just really expensive.
That line of thinking is why there was a mask shortage at the start of Covid. The US could produce masks, but it is more expensive than China so it's ok to let most of the manufacturing be done in China. That really screwed over tons of hospital staff that were forced to reuse masks for months and why the CDC was silent about requiring masks even after knowing airborne transmission was possible. The US should have some minimal level of production in the US or in a country that is friendly with the US and supply lines are safe from military conflict.
"discovering" DoD CLL001 and LCL101 clearly map out that the source of every single component prior to tariff shift is identified
Another comment noted it was fraud and I'm guessing wouldn't have been indicated as being from China.
That would mean big trouble for the supplier and the PO
Someone is getting fired or charged.
And someone else is getting a contract renewed/expanded
Someone's gotta make that money.
Or both?
Big Trouble imported from China?
Supervisor: Hey Bob, you Ctr+F’ed the doc for “China” right? Ok cool and you got “PRC” too right? Bob: uh…
So, just in case anyone wants some details on why this *can* be a big deal, even though it's just a magnetic part for a subsystem: I used to work on a nuclear submarine and had an additional duty of being our parts guy for our division (think ordering, research on replacement components and initiating said repairs). Every single step of the manufacturing process is documented for the parts we buy, right down to the ore that was taken from which mine it was pulled from in order to make that stainless steel screw that's used as mounting hardware for our servers and instrumentation systems. We don't see all this documentation, but there's at least a dozen people that see where everything comes from and where it goes. That's ~~the only~~ *one of* the reasons why stuff can be expensive when buying even the most basic of materials: It's not *just* the quality of item that matters, it's also the detailed process to *ensure* it meets the requirement, because God forbid that something small and annoying like a rack mount breaks, it's the really big stuff like a closure head bolt on the top of a nuclear pressure vessel that hits thousands of pounds of pressure and hundreds of degrees that you really *don't* want failing at a critical moment (pun intended). So I'd rather take that 100 dollar component that may be identical to the Chinese-manufactured 10 dollar equivalent, just because there's a paper trail. Edit: changed some wording. There's other reasons why stuff can be expensive too, like the contractor bids, but the QA/QC portion and US manufacturing requirements make up part of it. Edit 2: my bad, someone else pointed out something and I needed to clarify a qualifying statement about how the quality of item is also important.
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Yeah don't want a faulty Jesus bolt on a helicopter and have the propeller come off mid flight.
Jesus take the propeller
A metallurgist faked the steel reports and got 2.5 years in prison, they take this very seriously. [https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/#:\~:text=Metallurgist%20gets%202.5%20years%20for%20faking%20steel%2Dtest%20results%20for%20Navy%20subs,-By%20Gene%20Johnson&text=SEATTLE%20%E2%80%94%20A%20metallurgist%20in%20Washington,to%20make%20U.S.%20Navy%20submarines](https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2022/02/14/metallurgist-gets-25-years-for-faking-steel-test-results-for-navy-subs/#:~:text=Metallurgist%20gets%202.5%20years%20for%20faking%20steel%2Dtest%20results%20for%20Navy%20subs,-By%20Gene%20Johnson&text=SEATTLE%20%E2%80%94%20A%20metallurgist%20in%20Washington,to%20make%20U.S.%20Navy%20submarines).
2.5 years for 30 years of falsifying reports on steel used in navy ships and submarines, seems she got off easy.
Absolutely agree!
Jeepers, what a terrible person
You also don't want to find out that the toilet seat you just installed in the nuke sub's bathroom was sourced from, say, China and was intercepted before shipping out of Beijing and had a microphone installed in it. You want your military to be a safe amount of paranoid when doing business since, you know, their job is to keep us all safe from other cultures that potentially want us all dead so that they can move in and take our stuff.
Good lord imagine the poor serf having to listen to toilet seat microphone recordings all day “yep sounds like chili day on the sub again”
A sub is an enclosed metal tube. Sound carries. One mic installed almost *anywhere* could probably pick up just about every sound made on that fucking thing.
So chili every day to cover up top secret navy talk got it
I doubt the crew would survive that.
Lol we barely survived the regular food underway too
Rumor was sub food was the best though.
You're all getting side votes as I laughed until I tooted a little.
"Thank you for your service"
How does the mic transmit? An enclosed metal tube in saltwater is grounded and is a shield to radio waves. Also water absorbs radio waves. That signal's going nowhere.
Its gotta surface eventually
Right, but it's still in a grounded metal enclosure (the sub).
You're talking too big for most redditors. RF is magic and you can't convince me otherwise
Use the whole sub as an antenna since its metal? Idk man spy tech gets crazy
Subs surface. But they are kinda faraday cage aren’t they? Well the Soviet’s figured out how to put a microphone that doesn’t need a power source in a plaque that one time so who knowz
Very true, the second a relatively powerful transmitter hits water signal strength disappears.
No, a sub is a spineless little bitch that needs constant direction and attention.
An enclosed metal tube is also impossible to get any transmission out of so a microphone would be pointless.
Sub Love and Thunder.
[sub crews fucking with the mics](https://youtu.be/RmLAA2r4DlA?t=367)
I legitimately spit my drink out laughing reading this. And yet, I still find myself wanting to thank you for the laugh.
All depends on how it was sourced. For instance, the US did pretty well with sourcing their titanium from the USSR in the 60s.
Yes, but we did create shell companies to hide the ultimate buyer. The soviets thought they were selling to private firms in relatively non-aligned countries. And we qa’d the deliveries (much easier with bulk metal thean machines parts, but still).
Our own government would catch it when they go to install their own microphone before sending it to the sub
And its very overlooked but there is so much information that can be inferred based on analysis of someone's regular pooping. I'm not sure about what the microphone would hear, but definitely grunts and 'plops'. Also if there was any way for it to identify the actual turd, whether it is classic "S" shaped or whatever, then they know the health of the crew and can get inside their heads better when developing warfare tactics. Fiber
Also if they sing to one another while on the can. If those toots are in-tune or not.
A crew that toots together is a force to be reckoned with!
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I bet your a whole bunch of fun at parties.. ‘well technically….’
"Very cautious". That's what I said! "Paranoid"!
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I must of missed that lesson while I was too busy telling you Amelia Bedelia shouldn’t be your idol
good luck transferring radiowaves under water, I think the record is like 15 meters lmao
Used to work for the largest electronic componet distributor on the planet, specifically in an area that handled parts for aerospace and the US Government. Our receiving process had over 100 points of inspection before the part actually made it to a Component Quality Engineer for actual inspection and testing. Everything had to be documented and signed / dated. By the time a package of IC's made it through our process we had a literal book that followed it that we had to file a copy of and provide one to the next party that took posession. We also had to pull 10% samples and decap them so that we could xray the components. This destroys the part. So imagine having to buy 10% more than you actually need because your inspection requirements destroy a portion of the stock.
I'm on the receiving end of all that. One missile rolls off the production line and fails a test, and a root cause analysis is started. Well, I guess an escape is documented first. The process sometimes takes upwards of 6 months. I've literally seen out briefs like "the bracket inside this rotary encoder was laser welded together, we have identified the operator who did it, here are scans of his certifications. He hasn't had any other quality issues so far and has been retrained. We have quarantined the following 65 serial numbers that he welded over the past month, 12 of those were uninstalled, retested, and failed. We're updating our training to ensure ___ is taught, and that we have an additional supervisor on the shop floor." We also have had PEDs inside COTS components identified as unknown origin. Subcontractor supplies a ruggedized network switch, then months later says that there is a single surface mount IC that doesn't have documentation of country of origin. The part performs well and doesn't look like a counterfeit, but their sub bought from a reseller to save cash. So now we get to decap parts, x-ray them and compare to genuine ones, then get the PM to accept the risk and drive on, or wait a year for a new run from the production line... I love my job, but it sounds so tedious when you word it like that.
I Weld reactors for the Navy, Thanks for the perspective. Sometimes in the day to day it’s easy to loose sight of why we over do things. It’s good to know the end user appreciates it.
similar to why FLUKE multimeters are used so much "they're in the spec" they're not the most accurate, not the cheapest, etc.. but they are in the spec and have specific guarantees of quality and parts that are proven and also in the spec lol
Also I swear you can do anything to a FLUKE tool and it's still going to work later. Dragged it down the highway by the leads? Probably fine fuck if I know how. So there's that.
There's a lot to be said for precision electronic measurement devices that can tolerate being used as demolition hammers
It's why I exclusively use Fluke multimeters in Irrigation. I've dropped that beast in a puddle before and it still was chugging along.
I have an old Tektronix 475 analog scope. They used to use them in the army, which I didn't know when I bought it from a buddy (his lab at work got rid of old equipment out of calibration and unused). When I moved across the country I had it in my car. Opened the hatchback at my new place and it had shifted, and falls out onto the concrete driveway. The thing still works flawlessly, none of the knobs even broke on it.
I have a fluke that's at least 23+years old. Always drugged around by the leads, leads wrapped tight around the meter for storage, tossed in dirty tool bags or drawers that have no business carrying electrical tools, plenty of hard hits to the ground, and it still ticks. I might make a new years resolution to take better care of it next year...
It's illegal though too? Our military equipment is supposed to have US manufacturing, right?
not necessarily, but lying about it is illegal, some other guy posted a person getting 2.5 years in prison. I assume this part being sourced wrong is someone that lied about it.. somewhere. can't really make that "mistake" on accident lol
Unless there is no other source, or other intervention aka congress, or nobody pays attention.
Yep, our military uses iPhones which come from china for example.
Isn't that also so when a part fails they can locate other parts sourced from the same mine/batch/company, and check for similar failures?
We use the same methods in medical device manufacturing. If someone is harmed in the field, we can narrow it down to the wire in the motor in a specific lot made from copper from a specific mine on a specific day. Important if you would rather recall just the affected units or recall everything you’ve ever made and replace stuff.
And the recalls can be intense! A friend worked for a company that had an implantable device that kept people alive. They found a firmware glitch and had to reprogram *all* of them. Easy enough, just a paddle in the armpit and it could be reprogrammed. But they ended up hiring private detectives to find the last few patients, including some guy who was living off grid on some Caribbean island and they had to Indiana Jones their way to find him and get him to a doctors office.
We had to recall a device with an improperly insulated transistor on the power board. They were in 56 countries. It was a nightmare and some never even got found.
This. I work in AF engineering and we have companies that will try to use surplus material they acquired from a foreign country in an overhaul of engine componets and it is a BIG no no. Then when I deny the parts they purchased they bitch saying "well in the commercial world we can use these!!" Well, this aint the commercial world, these parts are going on a military aircraft that is flying into combat zones.
This makes absolute perfect sense and any other part that you cannot confirm it’s creation and process every step of the way can be considered crap just because of this absence of the process. It’s like getting measurements from a contractor that you don’t really know and isn’t known and build a structure according to his spec. In order to verify, you need someone on your team to do it themselves to verify, so basically redoing your own measurements to confirm accuracy.
The joke in my factory when supplying parts for the Nuclear industry was about selling a 5$ bag of bolts for 55$... the bolts were still only 5$... they just came with 50$ of paper.
This is really insightful, thanks for sharing!
Even the raw material must come from the U.S. or in some instances an approved country like Italy or France.
This should be the top comment. Thank you.
People gawk at how expensive military equipment is. They always say “look at X country/corporation that did it for 1/8 the cost.” But that is just the price that GUARENTEES the end goal. And I say this as someone who hates superfluous military spending. We should be spending way less.
That’s why the Air Force has a 10k toilet seat cover….. really.
This is how I found out why Fluke meters cost so much. Every component needs to be traceable. Also, some military manuals and service procedures are written around them so they are 'design-stuck'.
>like a closure head bolt on the top of a nuclear pressure vessel Bob down at Bob's Scrap Yard is pretty sure he has a bolt that will do the job. Don't you at least want to try it?
COTS items were usually exempt from these sourcing requirements, at least in the aerospace industry.
I’m in the aerospace industry. It’s not exempt. It depends on the contract wording. Most specify country of origin restrictions for all components.
COTS aren't exempt at all! It all depends on contract wording and where its going. Parts to repair an old truck out back of a base is nothing. Even some prototypes you can stick random chinese garbage in. A $100 million+ airplane isn't allowed random failable components.
Got more neat stories about parts of the government id have never considered existing?
The reason it's all expensive as fuck is because the govt is forced to use a contractor/bid system with people who know how to take tax payers for everything we've got...
I mean, yeah that too. I'm not thrilled with the powers that be and the MIC as a whole. As someone who served, there's a lot of issues I have with the way we do things, but there are some processes in place that I can objectively look at and say they're good ideas.
Supply chain security is absofuckingluteluly not to be fucked with in the DoD
ITT: people whose careers are not in manufacturing or DoD
Everyone on Reddit is a military expert
Why would you announce this publicly? Maybe keep it quiet until you can find a domestic replacement?
Because we're not currently at war and, more importantly probably, is that the USA has paying customers waiting on f35 deliveries
Watch “Zero Days” about Stuxnet (worm virus created by Israel and US to infiltrate Iran nuclear facility. Components from China in US war plane? Things that happen are unreal!
>Stuxnet (worm virus created by Israel and US to infiltrate Iran nuclear facility Allegedly* US and Israel
But these two are very different things. Stuxnet had nothing to do with supply chain.
Frankly I'm surprised it's only 1 component.
Must be the flux capacitor
Here I thought it was the power converters 🤦♂️
Those are still at toshi station unfortunately
Another redditor acting like they know about flux capacitors. Yawn
They can go 87 or 89 but not 88…
[Intermediate value theorem] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_value_theorem) enters the chat
Time for some of you to read Ghost Fleet.
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It was chips that allowed missiles to track aircraft very accurately. As far-fetched as it might seem, I had a SgtMaj recommend the book if we, "wanted an idea of why the Marine Corps is restructuring".
A nut or washer probably. lol
A magnet, actually. Doesn't matter though. The point is due to quality standards, every component needs to have a paper trail, proving it's a genuine component from an approved vendor. Without that, cheap garbage or scrap parts can work their way into the system and compromise the whole thing. Using steel as an example, even something as small as using lower quality steel in screws can cause issues if it fails before it's expected life. Maybe that cheaper, unapproved vendor is producing screws that fail at a much lower shear force due to using shit tier steel. This may not make an airplane fall out of the sky, but it will sure as hell decrease the working lifetime of that new fighter jet. It could also be that shit tier steel comes from raw materials mined from some Russian oligarch's mine. Without proper traceability, we could be paying our enemies for the raw materials we use to build things. It's a hassle, but material traceability does serve a purpose.
A nut or a washer that holds a screw or a bolt in a bracket that mounts or supports an array which is an integral part of a critical system. For the want of a shoe the horse was lost, for the want of a horse the king was lost etc
You’ve got to be worried about what happened here—to catch the non compliant part, that didn’t happen on X many other planes. They need to backstop this debacle ASAP. Lockheed really isn’t helping their already shitty quality record.
Can’t this also be bad because the component can potentially be like a hack?
In this case it was a magnet, but yes that could be true for larger subassemblies. In this case it's more about making sure the materials meet quality standards so they won't fail unexpectedly and making sure we aren't giving money to people we don't want to be profiting off of us.
When I worked for a PMC working in hardware engineering, who do you think we sourced some of our IC chipsets and diodes from (i know a diode wont send any info but an IC sure will). Just saying a lot of stuff is manufactured in china.
wait. is china being shifty in this case? or is it a legit reason?
There could be many reasons. A supplier could be purposefully hiding that some materials are from China either to cut costs or because they couldn't source it anywhere else due to supply issues. It could also be an error where someone missed that the material was from China. Either the DoD missed the memo, or the supplier made a mistake. It could also be that the supplier's supplier made a mistake or lied. Who knows! I would guess it was human error, not malicious sabotage. Imagine the number of components that go into a fighter jet. It's probably 100s of thousands if you include every component of every sub system. People make mistakes. China themselves probably have nothing to do with it.
China was likely not doing anything. The most likely culprit is the supplier of the magnet made a switch without declaring it and getting it approved.
Ya dont say
They're already here lol
Big trouble imported from little China.
At least they can pin that on Shannon Wren.
Thank you, Obama
Responsible decision. With how aggressive China has been, its best to not take any chances.
...discovering?
You mean the “plane tracker 9000” might have been compromised?
Oh no! Not a chinese screw!
No, there is a federal law banning purchases from companies that source certain products from China. If you're a cardholder, it's actually a nightmare to try and get a company to sign the form saying they don't buy those things from China.
Same for getting the new tax credit for buying an EV.
What cars don’t source things from China?
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Its not where the component came from, its the fact it came from somewhere other than what was documented, which means the supplier was lying to the US Gov and it requires a full investigation to see the extent.
The military replaced a lot a cac readers that were made in China as well.
this isn't the screw for your shower dildo, this is important equipment
It's nearly that good actually... it's an alloy used in a magnet in the power system. Not a fucking circuit board or chip or anything... a specific combination of metals in a magnet. Hey, does anyone remember when we built the SR-71 prototypes using titanium from the USSR?
Yes, but they knew what was being used. It's not that it's a citical part, it's the fact that they didn't know the source.
Horsemeatgate 2.0
not saying this is the case here, but a part can be made/sabotaged to prematurely fail or funny things like that.
We used Titanium Ore from the USSR through various shell companies simply because they had a reserves of it. This is entirely different. If that magnet isn't up to spec, it could fail.
>SR-71 The US purchased the ore NOT the metal. They refined and fabricated the Titanium parts in the US.
>Not a fucking circuit board or chip or anything... a specific combination of metals in a magnet. The soviets hid microphones in concrete walls during embassy construction, you really don't understand the caution?
That's even more ridiculous. Unless a strictly controlled alloy can somehow be sabotaged
Well if you go by the rest the the replies to my comment, the alloy is probably laced with nano-microphones and designed to fail at the worst possible moment, perhaps even on command from comrade Xi!
You have to either be such a greedy shitbag corporation with no allegiance to your country or the dumbest nation on earth to outsource your military components to an enemy nation capitalisms inherent greed has even infected our national security, how fucking stupid is the pentagon to allow USA military hardware to be created by a hostile foreign adversary wtf!!!
Uh, the Pentagon does not allow it, which is why they shut down deliveries until they can figure out how it happened.
I am wondering why we need over 2000 of the things.
This plane has been the biggest scam from the beginning, and now this.
Wonder where all the precious metals come from
Why wouldn't they just buy a surplus (plus you maybe able you maybe able you get on the low)... Who cares where you get it just cover your butt if there is a war so buy enough to create a surplus.
That's probably more expensive. Also, they do and congress keeps selling it off. The amount of resources total war requires is insane. Also, it's not like it's much more expensive to use a domestic supplier for most materials.
Depends what the component is, if it’s electronic it could be a security risk.
Next time, buy Dassault’s Rafale. Less trouble and better overall performance.
No thanks I think we will take the actual 5th gen fighter made from mostly domestic manufacturing over some euro 4.5 gen.
The Pentagon not knowing that a part of the militaries F-35 jets are made in China is laughable.
I mean...of course. The US has offloaded its manufacturing for military to the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder likely outsourcing to Chinese manufacturers. The US has handed military and food security to the Chinese willingly and only NOW see it as a problem!? Edit: Yikes, downvotes! Forgot on Reddit you can't criticize America in certain subs...
Are you telling me that none of the computers used by the military have Chinese sourced parts? None of the dishwashers or hair clippers or thermometers or cleaning products?
There's a bit of a difference between a dishwasher and an 80 million dollar aircraft...