A former UK colleague of mine once asked me, "How much confidence do you have in my programming abilities?" Well, he was a pretty good programmer, so I said, "Plenty."

"Good," he replied, "because my code is helping to fly this [British Airways] plane."

Do we have the same confidence in our military airplanes? According to this Business Week article, we may have no reason to:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_41/b4103034193886.htm

"Fake microchips flow from unruly bazaars in rural China to dubious kitchen-table brokers in the U.S. and into complex weapons. Senior Pentagon officials publicly play down the danger, but government documents, as well as interviews with insiders, suggest possible connections between phony parts and breakdowns."

So, the first threat is the normal counterfeit threat--sub-par parts threaten sub-par performance: "...a chip falsely identified as having been made by Xicor, now a unit of Intersil in Milpitas, Calif., was discovered in the flight computer of an F-15 fighter jet at Robins Air Force Base in Warner Robins, Ga. People familiar with the situation say technicians were repairing the F-15 at the time. Special Agent Terry Mosher of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations confirms that the 409th Supply Chain Management Squadron eventually found four counterfeit Xicor chips."

The article points out instances in which counterfeit parts may have led to plane crashes (this may be true of several civilian airplane crashes, by the way). The article also notes...

Robert P. Ernst, who heads research into counterfeit parts for the Naval Air Systems Command's Aging Aircraft Program...says the Hakimuddin episode helped him realize how blind the military has been: 'We don't know how big the counterfeit problem is, and, to me, that is irresponsible.' Now he's trying to get others in the bureaucracy to confront what he considers to be a crisis: 'The risk of counterfeiting is so high, and the cost to our weapon systems is so great, that we need to take action.' Glenn Benninger, a senior civilian engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Ind., concurs: 'Counterfeiting has literally exploded over the last few years, but not a lot of people have been paying attention.'

That is a threat to personal safety. National safety, however, is the responsibility of the military. When the chips used for a nation's military equipment comes from a country with a sometimes tetchy relationship (e.g. China), the temptation to put "backdoors" in the instructions on the chip must be high. Does it make sense to trust these chips?

Even some of the outsourced don't think so...

Hong Kong Fair's Jiang, the alleged supplier of counterfeit chips to BAE, argues that if the U.S. military wants guaranteed high-quality chips, it should purchase them directly from the original manufacturers or their official franchisees. "Why do you come to China to buy it? You know that these things in China are cheap," Jiang says. "Why are they cheap? They have problems with quality."

I do not claim that all things built in China are poorly built. But, in general, as elsewhere, you get what you pay for. If you're purchasing from/outsourcing from China to be cheap, well then, cheap is what you're going to get.

Having established that quality is an issue, in the case of military equipment it may not even be the main issue. The possible breach of national security is yet another strike against the outsourcing of production to a non-invested party. In this case, perhaps even a party with a vested interest against you. As I've posted in past blogs, outsourcing is not by default a bad idea--but outsourcing only makes sense when the outsourced parties are partners in the plans forward. The outsourcing of military hardware seems, then, merely the most striking example in a continuum of bad decisions.

As for my programming friend, I was really grateful for his vested interest in the successful functioning of the British Airways plane when our plane had to suddenly pull back into the air traffic over London when another plane had failed to clear its landing runway. Vested interest comes from equal partnership. All outsourcing should strive to create a true partnership.

Cheers,

Steve

(Thanks to Martina Trucco for the link)