Report Reveals Fake Chips in U.S. Military Hardware

Yikes! All of the documentation required by the US gov't, and these counterfeit parts still make it in?

What is the recourse? In my business, if I get caught providing noncompliant material on a government job I have to do it again, or they will simply not pay me. Are these bogus parts discovered too late, the checks are cashed and the providers have gone bust?

To clarify, I haven't tried to provide noncompliant materials... I have done so in error a few times, but they 'correct' me, and I have learned another US procurement idiom.

I would have to say, these parts were more than likely discovered after failure.

In my business, if I get caught providing noncompliant material on a government job I have to do it again, or they will simply not pay me.

But by not paying you wouldn't create an international incident where China would or the domestic contractor that used it ...... says p911 sarcastically.

Documents mean nothing to these guys. I asked for documentation and electrical agency certification paperwork from a potential supplier there and they at least had the honesty to respond "Sure! So how much fake paperwork and what fake markings do you want? We do this for all our US customers!".

Recently we asked another supplier to slightly change a circuit to improve quality. One of our engineers hand-sketched the requested changes onto one of their existing schematics and sent it to them asking they update their schematic to reflect the new design. What did they do? That's right...they photocopied the badly hand-scribbled drawing we sent them and sent it right back to us. As if they'd somehow come up with it...?

I was talking about this with a buddy of mine recently who is a QA engineer for a company that supplies military components and subassemblies. He said most of the parts are run-of-the-mill resistors, capacitors and so forth. A smaller portion are parts that include memory or processing capability which might have more serious consequences.

The problem, in his opinion, is that companies are simply not doing their QA due diligence when they buy parts. They are buying parts from distributors and merely accepting on faith the distributors' claim that the parts are compliant and not gray-market counterfeits from China; they're not tracking the parts back to the manufacturer.