Military Standards

Been there, many times.

Offshore parts are OK, if the strategic implications of delivery problems are understood. And they meet the requirements of "the applicable specification".

The whole idea of "MIL-SPEC" procurement is evolving.

You might want to investigate the "QPL" for some items.

Qualified Product Listing (QPL)
I got in big trouble by offering some "unqualified" material (epoxy adhesive) to a (satellite) project guy one day, when we were out of the "flight qualified" material. Same manufacturing lot/batch number, just didn't have the sticker on the can. I knew it was the same, he knew it was the same. The "flight" stuff was 10 times more expensive. Who is right???

Many of the MIL specifications have been abandoned. Back in the late 80s most MIL programs were directed to use COTS (commercial, off the shelf) parts to reduce costs. Of course, all that did was reduce the up-front costs. Now most companies making military equipment spend hundreds of man hours tracking and searching for new parts (and having to re-qualify devices) since the industrial grade stuff goes obsolete so quickly. Or they are forced into massive up-front purchases while a program is still in the development phase, not knowing for sure if a particular part will be used when they go into full production.

I believe that's why FPGAs are used so much, since they give back some of the control allowing the parts to be programmed and re-programmed as needed.

There is a waiver for everything. Usually you can get away with just getting the commander to sign off on a non mil-spec part, but sometimes they want you to get a letter of authorization from depot maintenance. It just depends on the part and local leadership. As long as the part meets the mil-spec standard and you can show a need for a part that is unavailable mil-spec quickly enough.

~Anon~

Another area is medical electronics. Same deal, much more extensive testing, and possibly an insurance premium. Is it correct? Let's say you make product x, if you have to certify that it meets a specification you should be able to charge more. Whenever I buy a piece of test equipment, I'm offered the choice to have it calibrated to NIST or not. There is a charge. Most modern portable two way radios are intriniscally safe. If you compare two radios you will see few if any differences, however, if it doesn't have the green label AND the corresponding battery, it isn't going to pass.

For intrinsically safe radios it is a problem of liability. Even if two radios look identical, only the on with the certification is backed up by the manufacturer saying it will not start a fire outside the device if a short causes a spark inside the device. You pay more for that sticker and the liability coverage it implies.

Drew K

From a technical risk perspective, using identical, fit for purpose but not certified components presents no additional risks.

The statistical chances of encountering a dodgy component doesn't change just because a label is affixed. What does change with certification is the ability to make a failure somebody else's problem. Warranty and responsibility has a price.

Now, why would you want to source offshore if they are available locally? Just because you trained your competitors doesn't mean you have to keep feeding them.

I can only speak for electronics components, but the vast majority of them ARE made offshore. There are many quality standards put in place to assure that those parts are as good as, if not better than their commercial equivalents. Sourcing of raw materials is controlled and traced, assembly of those materials is also verified, and the testing after final assembly is also monitored. All of this is documented with lot travelers, which must be made available to the qualifying activity on demand.

You suggest that the mil parts are the same as commercial parts, which in some cases is true. However, in many cases, there is a different source for the raw materials and process flows for some parts. You cannot, for example test quality into a YUGO and expect it to be as reliable as a Lamborghini.

That's not to say that ALL mil spec parts are bonafide. We've seen many instances of counterfeits and other forms of cheating done to "assure" the parts are good. And some of them are better than we can currently produce here in the USA, due to the onerous regulations in place by the EPA and other out of control government agencies. This is part of why foreign produced goods are so much cheaper, too.

The problem our military has is that inspection and verification of this quality is difficult, if not impossible. Our qualification engineers cannot travel to those plants, either due to economics concerns or just plain "travel restrictions" to a particular country (such as china). We must trust the agents who do the oversights/inspections for us. After almost 40 years working in the spec writing arena for MIL SPEC electronic components, I've seen some good and some bad being assembled into out equipments.

When it comes to metallurgy, it's my impression that china is where Taiwan and Japan were 40 years ago - they have some real crap. But they also might turn out some good metals for their own (internal military) use, too.

We're also seeing a return to the USA of some parts manufacturing due to political unrest. Case in point is one of the semiconductor plants in Mexico. Due to all the crime (can you say assassinations) in that area, One company is returning its lines to Californica.

I work in the aviation industry, designing for commercial and military applications. We are required to work with mil-spec qualified materials and hardware for 95% of our work, always working to gain FAA approval and sometimes with military scrutiny.

That said we almost always have to provide certificates of conformity for everything we source. I don't have the luxury of looking into where the stuff comes from. I can only hope that it's not counterfeit or that the manufacturer (where ever in the world they may be located) isn't cheating the spec.

I, personally, haven't heard of any problems in the fastener or raw materials supply chains but there have been recent dust ups in capacitors and chips sourced from China that did not meet specs. One of our competitors was burned rather badly over the chip fiasco since it's not feasible to sue a Chinese company for any liability.

I hope the feds are taking a pro-active stance on off-shore sourcing. Cheating on the specs can kill our troops (which I once was) or greatly imperil our national security. My attitude is that for what I do the extra cost of mil-spec conformity is well worth the price, and in the end, the gov't/taxpayer pays the price anyway since it's passed along in the contract. It's in the best interests of the US to be vigilant in this arena.

Hooker

My original comments was prompted by 1. I thought there was a "buy American" clause in purchase contracts for the U.S. government and 2. the Thresher disaster. It wasn't proven 100% that the Thresher incident was due to Japanese made valves, but the buy American clause was soon after adopted by purchasing for the military.

Apart from the obvious economic and social benefits for the US to spend its money on shore instead of feeding Her competitors.....

.....If you keep it "in house" (aka vertically integrated) then sabotage is easily traceable and parties can easily be held to account for any failures.

There's another problem we're saddled with. It's that darn "LOW BID" CRAP. It doesn't always mean that you have to be the best, just the cheapest.
If we strongly think that you, as the cheapest, are somehow skirting the requirements of the spec/standard/contract but we can't prove it, we still have to buy from you. That's why you managed to crash the space shuttle, a B2, and, OH, YEAH, that other space shuttle.
Neil Armstrong lucked out, getting to the moon (and back) with the low bidders....

And even if we can/could prove that you were cheating, we still play hell getting you out of the mil program.

Another case in point - You can produce AND TEST, let's say, 200,000 parts a month on your line. Yet you sell, ship and send out C of C's, which if added up, total 1,000,000 tested parts to the JAN spec. Wouldn't that suggest to you that at least 700,000 parts are fake ?!?

It takes YEARS for the Qual people, DCAS QARs and Legal people to document, validate and prosecute that kind of counterfeiting. And another Space Shuttle is crashed in the meantime....

Down the hall in the qualifications offices, they can't always dump the cheaters. Those lawyers have to dance jigs to make things happen and debar the cheaters. And then all the cheaters have to do is change the company name and they continue to sell that same crap to the govt again. I saw much rejected govt surplus crap sold at the DRMO auctions be remarked and sold back to the govt, rather than to be destroyed, so it couldn't be sold back.

And semiconductors are SO hard to police bcuz of the onerous laws and regulations.

And how many of the microprocessors are designed here in the USA and then produced in china ? Are ANY of the Micro-P's designed here ?
Well, many are produced there but have you ever tried to examine a Micro-P mask set and then compare it to the part that you bought from an unknown plant (and ALL the plants in china are unknown simply bcuz we are not allowed to send any of our qualifications engineers over there to inspect their lines. We can't travel to communist countries) before putting into our defense systems ? Do we have TRUSTED examiners in china to verify that what we get from them is actually completely good ? I wouldn't trust anything for OUR defense that comes from any part of china.

What I'm getting at is that there might be some Micro-P's that have trojans built into them, then are assembled into our systems. (trust me, they KNOW where those parts are being used and who is using them) They will work just fine until someone (one of the enemy, that is) trips a trigger and the whole system fails in some mystical way that they have designed in just so they can defeat us. We then lose a battle, and maybe the war bcuz we're buying from weapons systems components from OUR ENEMY !

Bottom line is that we need dedicated lines HERE building defense systems for our own protection.

Just this weekend I watched a show on TV that showed where used computer components were dumped in the streets and people were removing chips and cleaning them up and selling them to resellers. This show found that these used chips have found there way back into new components. some of these components are used in the F16. So not only do we chance having hidden trojans, those same chips may be used ones that could fail at any time.

My personal experience with Mil Spec products is with foam concentrate used in fire trucks. The Mil Spec foam product is required to be compatible with all other Mil Spec foam of the same strength. So while we hate to have to pay the premium price for the Mil Spec foam, it becomes a necessity in order to be sure that at some time in the future all of the existing stock of foam does not become obsolete. We stock around 5,000 gallons of the product. If we were to allow non Mil Spec foam, It would require a second complete storage system to prevent cross contamination. And what if the third shipment was delivered before the first was fully consumed? then a third storage requirement.

Last year there was a manufacturer that was selling falsely labeled Mil Spec foam. The incident went back a few years, and was a lot of aggravation for many in the field. Luckily we had not purchased any from that manufacturer.

Bob

You saw that ONLY THIS WEEK ?!?

I read that story several years ago and the mil agencies were aware of it way before then, too.

Our legal system has no teeth now. What needs to be done is very simple. Find them, charge them, convict them. PUBLICLY EXECUTE THEM. Even if they are public officials, or elected officials. Even the president, too. It's TREASON.

That will do more to change the culture than anything else.

Works in China

This contemporary article seems relevant to this topic :

http://www.rfglobalnet.com/article.mvc/Chinese-Counterfeit-COTS-Create-Chaos-For-The-0001

Think about this the next time you fly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vN_7NJ4qYA