GAO Sting Finds More Fake Military Parts From China

Nidi62 writes "The Government Accountability Office, through a fictitious company, recently requisitioned parts from China in order to determine if the Chinese government was living up to its promises of battling counterfeit parts. The report from the GAO found that '334 of 396 vendors who offered to sell parts to the fictitious company were from China' and that 'all 16 parts eventually purchased by the fake company came from 13 China-based vendors and all were determined by an independent testing laboratory to be counterfeit.' The parts requested were supposedly for use in F-15s, MV-22 Ospreys, and nuclear submarines, and were requested as new parts. The report (PDF) also says that in the past three years, over one million counterfeit parts came from Chinese companies. This stands in sharp contrast to the Chinese government's promise to clamp down on the production of counterfeit parts in China."

Comments

... and nobody is surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

China looks out for China, nobody else.

Re:... and nobody is surprised.

[Fluffeh]

China looks out for China, nobody else.

Yes, but the recent few weeks seems to be US looking out for US - by trumpeting an ever-growing tirade against China across a number of political fields - manufacture, technology (hacking) and a bunch of others. The last time the US seemed to do this with such fervor, they invaded Iraq a few months later. The time before that, it built up to the war in Afghanistan. I typically don't worry too much about the US bitching about this or that, but when it reaches a critical level, bad things seem to happen in quick succession - and that makes me worried.

Re:... and nobody is surprised.

[khallow]

It's an election year. Politicians are currently looking for issues with legs, um, that "resonate with the voter". A good hate for China might help certain congresscritters with their primaries or a certain someone to look presidential.

Re:... and nobody is surprised.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an election year. Politicians are currently looking for issues with legs, um, that "resonate with the voter". A good hate for China might help certain congresscritters with their primaries or a certain someone to look presidential.

Spot on. Playing with foreign threats (real or not) is a great way to gain local support. Everyone does their part to fight the common enemy. With the enemy defeated, a new enemy is fabricated and the cycle repeats. Without this kind of trick controlling a democracy would be way more expensive, but it'd also be far more interesting.

Not sourced in the US?

[JoeCommodore]

I thought there was security issues from buying parts in countries we don't particularly trust.

Re:Not sourced in the US?

[Barbara, not Barbie]

In a new development to this story, a new series of tests run after acquiring new testing equipment (from China) and new software (from China) determined that the parts previously identified as counterfeit were in fact genuine.

Scared yet? You should be.

Re:Not sourced in the US?

[rtfa-troll]

The whole point of this is that even when they are trying not to outsource, but when they attempt to buy "made in USA" parts it turns out that lots of stuff being sold to them is actually sourced indirectly from China and made to look like the US parts. Looking at the parts they are examining it's pretty interesting. For example, bit that protect against anti-static discharge; presumably ones where long term stability is critical and breakdowns like the capacitor plague would be a complete pain.

This is pretty difficult because, in the end, nobody can keep all the parts in stock. You have to go to a shop. The shop has to go to a supplier and so on. At any point in that chain there are people who have a good motive to swap out the good component (which can be sold on at US prices or used to make reliable equipment) for a fake component which costs much less.

The free market selects exactly for components which work for some time but fail shortly after the testing period or guarantee period. I'd be interested to see what the effect of European two year guarantees is on the level of fake components in distribution. Probably not enough; you really need at least five years and a government testing lab willing to prove that inadequate components were used to even have a chance of pushing back against this.

Re:Not sourced in the US?

[Ihmhi]

This is pretty difficult because, in the end, nobody can keep all the parts in stock.

No, that's horseshit.

Look, for all the money we spend on defense we can afford to have secure warehouses of all the stuff we need.

Look at the A-10 Thunderbolt. That airframe is a precise weapon of destruction. It has served faithfully for years and it's tough as all hell. The A-10 is a marvel of engineering in every way.

It's also impossible to build new ones. Why? Because the supply chain doesn't exist anymore. The plans are gone. It'd be like trying to build a brand new shuttle - it just isn't feasible. You'd have to reverse-engineer an existing one.

This is, frankly, idiotic. It's rare to have created a machine so perfect. The A-10 is going to be in service at least through to 2028. That's a testament to its staying power, and it's sad that we're not going to see any new ones created.

Re:Not sourced in the US?

[wierd_w]

I work in aerospace. Ironically, in quality.

The problem is likely to be counterfiet material (stock material sold as 2025, or 7075, but is really some gods awful alloy of who knows what, but you would never know the difference because it weighs the same, mills the same, and looks the same...... until you do a hardness test, a conductivity test, and a vapor assa test.)

Other things likely counterfieted:

Bolts. Nuts. Nutplates. Washers. Rivets. Paint. Adhesives.

We literally order NAS and BACD nutplates and rivets by lots of 1 million. We go through those things like diabetic children dig through candy. It would be *really* easy for our suppliers to slip us a mickey, and sell us bogus nutplates. Those things have specifications they have to meet, concerning their material composition, degree of heat treat, size, and overal dimensions, including weight, and finish. Once cooked up though, are you *really* going to check each and every nutplate in a bin of 1 million to look for counterfeits?

That's the problem. Counterfeit rivets and nutplates throw a monkey wrench in a product's expected lifecycle. Shitty rivets crack out. They corrode. They induce the rest of the assembly to corrode. They respond incorrectly to changing pressure... on and on and on.

Similar with bad adhesives and finishes.

What, are you going to expect every plant in america to do wet chemistry testing on all their paints, primers, and sealants? In addition to vapor testing each and every rivet and nutplate?

Can't be done. Airplanes would cost billions of dollars each.

The US govt wants to crack down on it? Here's an idea: customs can do its fucking job, and search cargo containers from china for counterfiet goods.

That way the cheap chinese knockoffs don't get mixed into fungible supply bins, and we don't have this problem.

Re:Not sourced in the US?

[neyla]

You don't have to. To the contrary, checking becomes *easier* when you order a larger quantity of an item.

If you've received a million nutplates, pick 100 of them randomly, and check them thoroughly. Reject the entire shipment if any of those 100 are counterfeit.

If more than 1% of the nutplates are fake, you'd be likely to detect it, and if more than 10% of the plates are fakes, you'd be virtually guaranteed to detect it. Thus when all 100 check out as genuine, it's unlikely that there's more than a few percent fakes, tops.

At that point, it's probably not worth it to the supplier to fake the delivery. Yes they can put in 1% fakes and 99% reals, and hope that it's not detected (their odds of this are about even).

But having 50:50 odds of getting away with 1% fraud while 50% of the time your entire shipment is rejected, just isn't profitable.

In contrast, it's hard to do reasonable checking when you order a *low* count of some part, say 3.

Statistical sampling *works*. You really -can- test the quality of a million-gallon-delivery of whatever by picking a few random samples, and test those.

Re:The government can blame itself.

[GodfatherofSoul]

You started out right, then you ended very wrong. Tax policy in this country didn't start being a problem until we decided to go Free Market; translation, forcing US companies to compete with Chinese companies that don't give a shit about human rights, worker rights, or environmental rights. It's impossible for US companies to be competitive with a company that can dump its waste behind the factory, work its employees like slaves, and treat its citizens like government property.

Lenin was wrong.

[bluemonq]

Turns out, the capitalists won't be selling the rope with which they'll be hanged. They'll be paying for it themselves.

Re:counterfit?

[Suddenly_Dead]

They're parts being sold with fake product numbers and manufacturing dates to make it look like they came from an original parts manufacturer. Some of them probably don't meet specifications, and the danger is that you can't tell without testing them because they're misrepresenting themselves as being from a reputable source. That's definitely no good when these parts are being installed in aircraft and weapons.

As another example of potentially dangerous counterfeits, there's counterfeit climbing gear floating around out there that apparently fails at forces far lower than it's claimed to be rated for.