U.S. Waived Laws To Keep F-35 On Track With China-made Parts

An anonymous reader sends this report from Reuters: "The Pentagon repeatedly waived laws banning Chinese-built components on U.S. weapons in order to keep the $392 billion Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 fighter program on track in 2012 and 2013, even as U.S. officials were voicing concern about China's espionage and military buildup. According to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters, chief U.S. arms buyer Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman Corp and Honeywell International Inc, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane's radar system, landing gears and other hardware. Without the waivers, both companies could have faced sanctions for violating federal law and the F-35 program could have faced further delays."

Comments

Don't imagine it stops there.

[__aaltlg1547]

There's a lot of electronic parts in those planes. Seriously, where do you get the electronic components to run a modern warplane if not from China this last decade?

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[O('_')O_Bush]

The US has numerous fabs and electronics manufacturing facilities. I suspect this was done to help alleviate the job slaughtering and cost inflation caused by economic uncertainty and the fiscal cliff, related to Congress's inability to pass a budget.

The budget has become Congress's albatross, and has far reaching implications in the defense industry.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[mcgrew]

Did you not even read TFS? Electronics weren't being imported, rare-earth magnets were. We're still capable of building our own electronics, we just can't do it as cheaply as the Chinese.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Teancum]

It sort of shows how vulnerable America really is in terms of being able to wage a major war, and how badly the U.S. Congress has sold out the American people with it encouragement of outsources manufacturing outside of America. Sure, there are many reasons why electronics companies in particular no longer manufacture their components or devices in America any more (where at one time 100% of all ICs were made in America on a global basis), but a great deal has to do with both treaties that Congress has ratified and specific trade policies that have basically gutted the manufacturing base in America.

I guess we shouldn't go to war against China, as we would be literally destroying our own factories.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[postmortem]

You get them made from your own designs in Taiwan, which is not exactly PRC.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[ikedasquid]

Given that the aircraft contains hundreds of thousands of parts, I'd be willing to bet more than just a few "China" parts have slipped in. It's one thing if it's some $10,000 part...but for a handful of $2 magnets (which if we did go to war with China could be found in stockrooms all across the US) who cares. Don't get me wrong - this should be avoided. It happened as an oversight and a waiver was granted. Thats the kind of thing waivers are for. We don't need Uncle Sam spending $100K to replace $2 magnets.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[glavenoid]

..but for a handful of $2 magnets (which if we did go to war with China could be found in stockrooms all across the US) who cares

I do. They're probably counterfeit magnets made out of melamine and lead paint, and they probably don't even have a south pole...

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Anonymous Coward]

we cannot build electronics in the US anymore. we don't own the plants that produce the transistors, resistors, caps, diodes, etc. for the last 30 or more years, those have been made exclusively in asia (all over asia, not just china). I can't remember the last time I found a transistor or chip made on US soil.

assembly, sure; but making the parts is all done overseas. we sold outselves out in that regard. and see the capacitor problem (badcaps.net) that we have had to live with the past 20 or so years. those parts are also in the MILITARY and other sensitive pipelines. the caps that blow up on your motherboard also exist in everything else we build, unless we pay a premium for japanese caps (the chinese ones are all known to be bad; no one I know builds with chinese knock-off capacitors anymore; but I bet those that want to save every dime do cheap-out and use those bad parts).

I wish we would start a jobs program to bring electronics manufacturing back to the US. if nothing else, just for peace of mind, to be able to use those parts in critical situations and KNOW they are designed and built properly.

Not true. Intel has a number of major semiconductor fabrication plants in the US. So have Micron, Freescale, Cypress, On, Texas Instruments and others.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[dreamchaser]

Oh really? There are still fabrication plants in the US. Not too many, but they exist and can manufacture semiconductor components.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[MayonakaHa]

You might want to do at least a Google search before you write off US chip making capability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants

Hell I even have a friend who works at one of those fabs.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[samkass]

Here's a list of semiconductor manufacturing plants many of which are in the United States, including some of the most advanced fab lines in the world. It's true, as others have said, that assembly almost always happens in Asia now, though, but that's not a requirement if you're not price conscious. As for the capacitors and such, I think there's been less concern about them from a security standpoint.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[khallow]

I wish we would start a jobs program to bring electronics manufacturing back to the US. if nothing else, just for peace of mind, to be able to use those parts in critical situations and KNOW they are designed and built properly.

What would be the point? It'd just be overpriced junk that drives up the cost of military purchases even more than they already are. The US is in the process of destroying its economy. It no longer matters IMHO whether parts are made by potential future enemies or not.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[noh8rz10]

always cutting corners with their one-pole magnets!

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

You left out tax policy, environmental policy, and labor policy as well. Those are more responsible for gutting the manufacturing base. I speak as a manufacturer.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ImOuttaHere]

Absolutely! The US can and does still produce their own electronics. As for "cheap", that's changed. The West has moved enough jobs offshore that we have created salary competition in China (even though their education in science and engineering still sux). It's rather like what we did for India around software development and call centers a decade ago. Cost parity between formerly cheap East and formerly expensive West has been achieved.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ebno-10db]

Hello Milo. I didn't realize you posted on Slashdot, Lt. Minderbinder.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[TheGratefulNet]

I build electronic things and I have yet to see a single transistor or other part with a 'made in usa' designation.

go to the usual supply houses and find some for me, ok? mouser, digikey, newark, jameco, etc. go browse for common parts like resistors, chips, caps, diodes, etc. find me any significant amount of those common yet important parts that are made here.

some of you are quoting wiki, but having been in the electronics industry for several decades, I have yet to see any modern parts (other than specialized stuff) being made here at the component level.

go and prove me wrong. but I'd need to see more than 'wiki' to believe it. every part I have used that I bought from a distributor is made overseas. 100% of them. and I've been doing this for a long, long time - longer than many of you have been alive.

I do try to find US made parts but I have to go to a surplus store and buy stuff from the 50's and 60's to find 'new old stock'. anything from the 80's onward (roughly) is outsourced. everyone knows it, too, who is in the industry.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Antique Geekmeister]

F-35's are not for "major wars". It's bleeding edge, horribly expensive multi-role aircraft that does none of the roles well. The ill-founded claims by its manufacturers that it is "eight times more effective in air-to-ground combat" is pointless since it is almost 10 times as expensive to build and operate as a more specifically ground combat focused aircraft. The "build a core design and bolt on different components for different roles" has led to a variety of tragic design flaws that have been incredibly expensive to address for all its different variations. It's also a complete maintenance nightmare: the redesigns needed to reduce the weight, after it was enlarged to hold more weapons and provide larger engines, has led to customized parts that no one else uses, on the very edge of the strength/weight tradeoff to keep the weight down. So they fail, frequently, and are very expensive to replace. When confronted with various design flaws, such as the extremely por cockpit visibility leading to trivial destruction by cheaper aircraft in combat, Boing's suggestion that "that pilots worried about being shot down should fly cargo aircraft instead"

There is no chance that this aircraft will have the reliability and longevity of many existing models of current US aircraft, which means incredible ongoing costs in repairing and replacing expensive aircraft that can never be used at their full capabilities_. They are displacing budgets for manpower (needed for ground warfare and holding territory, as seen in Iraq and Afghanistan), supply craft (for keeping troops and warcraft supplied), base maintenance (to train and equip men and machines), and drones (which are far cheaper and more effective than modern aircraft at targeteed strikes). The best thing that could happen for the US milatary with this aircraft is to pull the plug on it _now_, throw 1/3 of money into a rebuild and oversupply of more conventional aircraft, use 1/3 the budget to build newer, more specifically suited aircraft for each military branch instead of a Swiss Army Aircraft, and use the remaining 1/3 for manpower support. America is short on the ground troops and personnel to run the several occupying wars we're in the midst of.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

Right. If only we'd allow you to pay an even more miniscule tax rate, use slave labor, and dump your toxic waste into the public water supply you could be more competitive. Forgive me if I'm not sympathetic.

A proper response would be not to weaken local regulations, but to impose tariffs on imported goods manufactured in conditions exploiting such socialized costs. Of course that would likely start a trade war with China, which we can ill afford. So perhaps we should encourage public shaming of domestic companies that import products with such an unfair advantage?

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[wiredlogic]

You get them from the US. There a number of domestic fabs pumping out military parts. You also don't need, or even want, cutting edge electronics because of the need for high reliability over wide temperature extremes and radiation exposure. This allows domestic production without the need for billion dollar manufacturing facilities.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[TheGratefulNet]

"many of which"

but not the majority.

and besides, this is about higher end chips.

you don't have common parts (the non-semi conductors like caps and resistors) made here. its not economical and its not specialized, generally, so its NEVER done here other than for rare circumstances (some high end audio parts might be made here but on a very tiny production scale and not for common use).

the wiki article is not the full truth. some higher end chips are made here but that's NOT what the issue is about. you can't build entire systems from US based parts anymore. it simply can't be done. most of your parts (usually all) are not US made. and your pc board is not just one single high-end chip.

and while you can get pcb's made in the US, its rarely done, as well. all the big players send out for their pcb's to be made.

assembly is mostly done overseas, too.

and now, even design is done there.

over time, we have a tiny percent left in terms of design and build.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[peragrin]

Um seriously?

Take a look at Syria. There are no US troops there and they are slaughtering themselves just fine. Iraq still has weekly car bombings. Hell in Iraq the majority of all deaths were not from coalition troops but from Muslim fighters killing everyone who didn't agree with them.

Personally I say we retreat back to north america maybe keep one or two bases open and wait in 20 years the world will descend into major war. For as war hungry as the USA has been theUSA has been the person everyone can hate equally.

Of course I also believe in letting Iran have nukes. Iran is stupid enough to use them. Most likely against Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ChrisMaple]

Neither mercantilism nor fascism, which is the sort of economic technique you are proposing, is successful in practice.

Or is it that you believe that anyone not American, particularly the Chinese, is unworthy to deal with Americans? That's either racism or nationalism.

There are several reasons for not buying military products outside the US, particularly from those not our closest allies. Risk of sabotage. Risk of inferior goods. Inability to inspect production process. Loss of new product and replacement parts in case of war, particularly if the enemy is the supplier. Loss of critical production technology. Loss of production paper trail. Loss of military production lines. Longer supply lines. Etc.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[ChrisMaple]

It isn't just a question of a few foreign parts slipping in. Counterfeit military grade parts have been an ongoing scandal for decades. In some cases the parts have not received mandatory testing, in others the parts have been inferior and have failed in use.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[RabidReindeer]

Did you not even read TFS? Electronics weren't being imported, rare-earth magnets were. We're still capable of building our own electronics, we just can't do it as cheaply as the Chinese.

DO they currently manufacture LCD displays in the USA? At all?

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[RabidReindeer]

There are several reasons for not buying military^W strategic products outside the US, particularly from those not our closest allies.

Shooting wars are not the only types of conflict that modern societies engage in.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Anonymous Coward]

and I've been doing this for a long, long time - longer than many of you have been alive.

Well damn grandpa! Let me get the fuck off your lawn!

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ColdWetDog]

Mouser, Digikey, Newark, Jameco basically sell 'generic' electronics. Suitable for every day use. If you want American sourced products, be prepared to pay and be prepared to source them differently. None of those parts distributors could make it on the prices one expects to pay for USA! stuff. Interestingly, though, a quick look through Thomas Register failed to find any distributor that sells predominantly US made components. It may be such a small market that only the people that need to know have that knowledge.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best thing you could do is learn some fucking English but then shut the fuck up and don't use it because you have no idea what you're talking about. I work on F35s daily testing these bugs you bitch about and so far everything is fine. All new models of anything have issues and they get fixed as time goes on. There is no "killer" problem with the F35 that we can find, only a few small annoyances really. The F135 engine can put out the power as well though we are thoroughly pissed Congress killed the F136. You should always have a backup.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

I didn't say they weren't slaughtering each other just fine, just that they started largely because of us, and whenever we get directly involved we do much worse to no better end. Hell we had an ongoing death toll in Iraq of over a hundred thousand before 9/11. Or was that Afghanistan, I forget. The point is that we've been neck-deep in the Middle East since the fifties at least. Most of the area had actually developed stable democracies, or were at least in the process of gently phasing out monarchies prior to US intervention during the Cold War - whereupon we installed extremist dictators for our own ends, picking from those who had no chance of seizing or holding power legitimately (after all we want them loyal). We can't duck our share of the responsibility for the mess they made when we were propping up their regime the whole time.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[alexander_686]

I will take the opposite side.

Much of the prosperity in today’s America can be traced back to the fact that we live in an era were nations resolve their differences in multilateral originations that are rules based. That free trade and openness have greatly expanded.

This has occurred, on balance, because of American leadership. You may not always get your way, and it might cost more in the short term (both in blood and money), but there are huge advantages in being able to set the priorities of the world.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[plopez]

Jobs are a major argument for military boondoggles. So much for that argument.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ebno-10db]

Of course that would likely start a trade war with China, which we can ill afford.

Start a trade war? We've been in a trade war with China for many years, but only one side has been fighting it. As for who would be hurt worse if we started fighting back, it would be China. It would mean the loss of a major market for them, but we would benefit from bringing back some of our manufacturing and R&D. It's been sold out for the short term benefit of a small group of people that does not include you and me. I don't think we should try and make low end products in the US though, but there are lots of countries we can buy cheap garbage from.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[alexander_686]

And it kind of depends on how you define “many”. Intel figured it only needed a single fab plant for its latest generation of chips to meet demand because the plants were getting to be very large, efficient, and costly. Of course they were going to build more than one to cut down on unforeseen risks. i.e. don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ArbitraryName]

we cannot build electronics in the US anymore. we don't own the plants that produce the transistors, resistors, caps, diodes, etc. for the last 30 or more years, those have been made exclusively in asia (all over asia, not just china).

Completely false. To name just a handful.
Transistors: Loads. Intel, Freescale, Micron, NXP, etc.
Resistors: US Resistor, Powerohm
Capacitors: American Capacitor Corporation and AFM Micro
Diodes: Sensitron

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ArbitraryName]

and besides, this is about higher end chips.

Intel makes their high end chips exclusively in the US. Overseas fabs make lower tier chips.

the wiki article is not the full truth. some higher end chips are made here but that's NOT what the issue is about. you can't build entire systems from US based parts anymore. it simply can't be done. most of your parts (usually all) are not US made. and your pc board is not just one single high-end chip.

You seem to be conflating cost and efficiency with technical capability. It usually doesn't make any sense for mass produced consumer level electronics to be made in the US. It would be horrendously expensive, quantities would be relatively limited and no one would buy them. That doesn't mean the capability isn't there. If an F-35 could be made from the ground up in the United States (which is obviously can be, as rare earth magnets are the only thing at issue here) your desktop PC's motherboard could be if there was some reason for it.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

Right, because that's the only alternative to policies that destroy american manufacturing. Miniscule tax rates, slave labor, and toxic water supplies. I'll forgive a mistake but not willful idiocy. Destructive regulations, punitive tariffs, and public shaming. Yes. That sounds like a country I want to live in. What flavor of authoritarian do you consider yourself?

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Luckyo]

I'd like to remind you that "free" trade is one of the main enemies of democracy. The idea behind free trade is removal of sovereign control, which in democracy means control by the people, and putting it in the hands of large multinationals (i.e. those with large amounts of money).

Severe decline of democratic rule in most Western countries, including US can be traced directly to globalization advancing far enough for this particular negative impact to start hitting Western democracies significantly enough to be felt. It had been demolishing weaker democracies elsewhere for far longer, as those were simply weaker and less resistant to power of money which (often half-forced or bought through corruption) free trade unleashed on them.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[kelemvor4]

Um seriously?

Take a look at Syria. There are no US troops there and they are slaughtering themselves just fine. Iraq still has weekly car bombings. Hell in Iraq the majority of all deaths were not from coalition troops but from Muslim fighters killing everyone who didn't agree with them.

Personally I say we retreat back to north america maybe keep one or two bases open and wait in 20 years the world will descend into major war. For as war hungry as the USA has been theUSA has been the person everyone can hate equally.

Of course I also believe in letting Iran have nukes. Iran is stupid enough to use them. Most likely against Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

Syria, Iraq, and any country other than the USA is not our problem. Let them handle their own affairs.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[dkleinsc]

Cost parity between formerly cheap East and formerly expensive West has been achieved.

Umm, no it hasn't:
1. In countries in the formerly cheap East, they don't have pesky environmental or labor laws (or at least nothing effective), so unlike the West they (for example) don't have to pay extra when they work people 7x16 hours a week instead of 5x8 (or 5x7).
2. If there really was parity, right now there'd be a glut of electronics manufacturing jobs in the West for goods for export to the East. That has demonstrably not happened.
3. In India, an average software developer earns about Rs400,000 a year, which is approximately $6500 US. An average American developer easily earns 10-20 times that.

And even if there were parity between East and West, that really doesn't matter, because manufacturing will simply move to the global South, where there are plenty of desperate people looking for work. For example, if China started getting too demanding, within a few years you'd see iPhones being made in Botswana or South Africa instead (both are politically stable enough to make business investment possible).

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

It should also be noted, that you don't allow me to do anything. The people give consent to be taxed and regulated. If that consent is abused, it can also be revoked. There's a few ways that can happen. It generally doesn't work out well for the people that think it is their job to "allow" people to be successful.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Anonymous Coward]

you don't have common parts (the non-semi conductors like caps and resistors) made here. its not economical and its not specialized, generally, so its NEVER done here other than for rare circumstances (some high end audio parts might be made here but on a very tiny production scale and not for common use).

the wiki article is not the full truth. some higher end chips are made here but that's NOT what the issue is about. you can't build entire systems from US based parts anymore. it simply can't be done.

Oh, really?

I've read that a lot on slashdot... let's see...

American sourced components (from the top of my head):

capacitors (ceramic, tantalum), inductors:
http://www.kemet.com
(look for the defense/aerospace section)

resistors
http://www.micro-ohm.com

discrete transistors:
http://www.semi-tech-inc.com

LED, Displays:
http://wamcoinc.com

IC's, microprocessors, basically the stuff from Natsemi and TI:
www.ti.com
(go to the space, avionics and defense section)

I could go on... basically all microwave components are available as well.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[citizenr]

Did you not even read TFS? Electronics weren't being imported, rare-earth magnets were. We're still capable of building our own electronics, we just can't do it as cheaply as the Chinese.

Why do you think they used Chinese magnets? Do you believe those were magic unique magnets that only China can make? or that they were simply cheaper?
Now that they got the waiver they will use more cheap Chinese parts.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

Right. And which environmental regulations can we relax to let companies be more competitive with China without also letting them dump toxic waste into the environment?

Which labor laws can we relax to allow Americans to be employed competitively with Chinese near slave labor?

And sure, we could cut corporate taxes even further - but why exactly are we allowing those who benefit the most from the status quo to avoid paying to maintain it? And it's not like Chinese corporations get a free pass on taxes, though a lot of them might be more accurately classified as bribes.

Take your time. Seriously. If you have a considered suggestion I'd be delighted to hear it, I could use some good news. So could every CEO that cares about their country as well as their profits. But it seems to me that China's advantages come primarily from the from atrocious environmental and employment practices they allow - and you can't compete with that on the same turf without being almost as bad.

That being the case, how do we allow US companies to compete? Well, we could subsidize their production costs - but that's a rather nasty step towards fascism, and tends to create more problems than it solves (just look at how farm subsidies have turned out). Or we could impose tariffs to compensate for the unfair advantage Chinese companies have. Or we can engage in public shaming of abusive companies to encourage Chinese companies to live up to US standards to get our business. Or... I don't know. Have you got a better suggestion? I'd love to hear it.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[PrimaryConsult]

I pass by one of those plants on my way to the mall... my bullshit detector has shattered completely reading some of these comments about US chip manufacturing capability...

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[PrimaryConsult]

I'd mod you up if I hadn't already commented...

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

No argument. Now, if you can tell me, as a member of the general public, how I can allow you, as a member of the corporate elite, to be competitive with China without screwing over me and my descendents in the process, then I'll consider revoking that consent. But *you* don't get to make that call beyond casting your vote as a citizen, at least not without a lot of back-room dealing with legislators which, in my opinion, should be classified as treason on their part.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Concerned Onlooker]

It's too bad when informative posts are downmodded.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[fox171171]

I wish we would start a jobs program to bring electronics manufacturing back to the US. if nothing else, just for peace of mind, to be able to use those parts in critical situations and KNOW they are designed and built properly.

Yep... "Made by NSA"... errr, I mean "Made in USA".

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

Corporate elite? I wish. I have a company where I am the CEO, engineer, IT department, secretary, grunt labor, and janitor. My "elite" company is affected by those policies you prefer. They affect my costs, my product, and my quality of life. I wish I could always, or even most of the time, say for the better, but that is not the case. Thankfully I don't have competition from China, or even outside the country. Yet. Keep making it harder for me to make stuff, and eventually I will.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bite The Pillow]

I'm sure if there are sourcers for purchasing military approved reading Slashdot, and they happen to read your comment, and are allowed to post such information, you will feel stupid. Until then you have basically said "I operate in completely different circles" much like using your social connections to prove Kardashians don't exist because they are not at your gatherings.

In other words, your industry sounds like consumer goods, not military hardware. Consumers won't pay domestic prices, military sourcing will. Ergo, I give your first hand experience zero relevance.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

Man, how did civilization ever survive all those thousands of years before the US existed? Just dumb luck I guess. The fact of the matter is that it's been less than a century since the US got significantly involved in international politics, when we were drawn in by the presence of a major alliance seeking to conquer the rest of the world. And most of the problems since then can be laid directly at the feat of the aftermath of those wars, when we and the Europeans divied up the conquered nations as the spoils of war, even if we did install "independent" puppet governments instead of claiming them as colonies

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

Yeah, down three points in twenty minutes, I'll be interested to see if that's despite upvotes or not. Even my occasional smartass trolling doesn't generate that kind of response.

Still, I can't think of a better reason to burn Karma points. Kind of scary to think of how many people actually cling to the image of the US as the White Knight in this ugly story.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[alexander_686]

First, I want to ask what you mean by declining democracy. That is a very broad claim – what specifically do you mean? I suspect that I would lay the blame for these defects on other causes.

I will point out that under Classically Liberal / Western democracy, the whole point is to reduce sovereign control over people.

I will also point out that for the past 200 years, in particular the last 50 years, there has been a strong correlation between economic linearism leading to higher growth, and higher growth leading to greater freedom. I will point to South Korea as a shining example among many.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Frosty Piss]

Are you ready to instantly reduce your purchasing power by, say, 90%?

Purchasing power of what? Cheap smart phones? Cheap TVs (we need one in every room in the house, right)?

China produces cheap consumer goods, most of which are "wants" not "needs".

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Luckyo]

Reduction of influence of power of the people on affairs of the state.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

Heh, I hear you there. But my point remains - those regulations were put in place in response to egregious abuses by corporations in the past - do you have any suggestions on how to loosen them without returning to the bad old days?

I don't care how small you are, I'm not letting you dump toxic waste into the woods or sewers, nor pay drastically sub-poverty wages or operate an unsafe work environment. But I could see at least freeing small businesses from a lot of the paperwork requirements since unlike the big boys they're unlikely to damage the US economy no matter how badly they behave - but doing so would give small businesses an advantage against the megacorps. Not that I think that's a bad thing, but I don't see it happening so long as they own all lobbyists. Perhaps if every small business in the country donated $100/month to some organized small-business lobbyist group(s) that would engage in those same traitorous back room deals on their behalf things would improve, but that seems like a challenging proposition. Hell, I'd love to see private citizens do the same, perhaps we could buy back some voice in our government, but I think most people are both cost conscious and morally squeamish, not a good mix for buying political favors. Plus you know, the question of how you would organize and control such an organizations.

Maybe we could put some of these direct-democracy or other plans into place as corporate control systems within a lobbyist group? At even $10 per person that's over 3 billion dollars - I bet you could buy a fair number of political favors with that kind of money. In fact that's more than the total (identified) lobbyist expenditures most years since 1998 (http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/index.php). We could even offer politicians the same incestuous revolving door positions they get with normal lobbyist organizations. Is it still corruption if politicians sell out to the people they were supposed to be representing in the first place?

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[alexander_686]

For that I see the root issue as the rise of the special interest groups and the importance of money in politics. Corporations are only one of many special interest groups. Neutering them won’t increase the say of the common man. It’s not a question of corporations but how the political system is structured.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Tablizer]

Did you not even read TFS?

Not allowed, it's written in China.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[CrimsonAvenger]

"many of which"

but not the majority.

Hmm, by my quick count, we have 56 our of 157 of those fabs.

So, more than 1/3 of the world's fabs, and 1/20 of the world's people.

I fail to see the relevance of us not having "the majority" of fabs....

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Areyoukiddingme]

Not true. Intel has a number of major semiconductor fabrication plants in the US.

True, for the list of parts he specified. Processor cores, yes, Intel and Texas Instruments have fabs in the US, but he's entirely correct that discrete components are exclusively manufactured in Asia. No one at all makes resistors, capacitors, or diodes in the US.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Hognoxious]

I didn't say they weren't slaughtering each other just fine, just that they started largely because of us

Assuming "us" means the US or Western countries in general, how did "we" precipitate the uprising in Syria? Or Libya, or Egypt...

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[stenvar]

So perhaps we should encourage public shaming of domestic companies that import products with such an unfair advantage?

What "unfair advantage"? The Chinese are paying the cost of their policies, you just pointed that out yourself.

A proper response would be not to weaken local regulations, but to impose tariffs on imported goods manufactured in conditions exploiting such socialized costs.

No, a proper response is to let the Chinese make that stuff and enjoy the low prices we are paying. Imposing tariffs, on the other hand, is just a way in which you let US corporations enrich themselves at the expense of US consumers, hitting us with a double whammy of being uncompetitive and then paying inflated prices. Of course, that's exactly what corporate cronies like you want.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've worked in electronics for years but have not yet seen ITAR restricted parts come up in searches on places like Mouser? Or seen the warnings in datasheets that parts available on sites like Mouser are not for military use and that for military use parts you need to contact the manufacturer directly? Regardless, sounds like the work you've done is generic or boring enough that you've never seen such things, but for some reason assume that means it can't exist. Component manufacturers and consumers don't give a crap about a "made in US" stamp, but if you contact them about getting parts for use in military equipment, they are more than happy to try to get you parts that meet all of the annoying requirements.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Hognoxious]

strong correlation between economic linearism leading to higher growth

I have no idea what it is, but you'd pretty much expect it to be 1 by definition.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Billly Gates]

Did you not even read TFS? Electronics weren't being imported, rare-earth magnets were. We're still capable of building our own electronics, we just can't do it as cheaply as the Chinese.

Is it about price? Or is it about corrupt lobbyists?

It can cost 10x as much as another contractor! But ... if you have millions to bribe the congress and the president they will be happy to waste tax payer money.

Did you know Pakistan (as in the government) pays off our politicians all the time to influence US policy agaisn't our own interests.

The fact is the American government represents everyone but Americans as corporate interests. Doesn't matter which party, but the democrats at least happen to believe the world is older than 5,000 years old so I lean towards them but they are corrupt. The republicans believe those silly things so they can promise oil and defense contractor lobbyist that they can twist church goers into thinking they are voting for God by voting for these Chinese contracts etc.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Intel has a number of major semiconductor fabrication plants in the US.

True, for the list of parts he specified. Processor cores, yes, Intel and Texas Instruments have fabs in the US, but he's entirely correct that discrete components are exclusively manufactured in Asia. No one at all makes resistors, capacitors, or diodes in the US.

Well, from GP " I can't remember the last time I found a transistor or chip made on US soil"...

That said, google "american made capacitors" etc., and you'll prove that false too.

I'm not disputing there is a lot of electronics components made in Asia, but they are not the only choice the way OP made it out to be.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Billly Gates]

No

The right thing to do is throw these corrupt bumbs out of office and make bribing illegal!!

The only reason these defense contractors do whatever they hell they want is because money talks and shit walks. They pay off politicians to get whatever they want at the expense of the people.

I am sick and tired of hearing this year after year after year. With a 15% approval rating I think the voters are too. Why can't we protest and rebel. The Tea Party is the only viable option here representing the far right in protesting but they stand for more corruption and the Koch Brothers bought them out so that is too agaisn't everyone's interest.

I am sick of this and no laws will ever be written as the system is written by agents of these corporations yes politicians work for them if they accept gifts and cash so in essence they are corporate employees!

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[NormalVisual]

go to the usual supply houses and find some for me, ok? mouser, digikey, newark, jameco, etc. go browse for common parts like resistors, chips, caps, diodes, etc. find me any significant amount of those common yet important parts that are made here.

What kind of chips? While they do have overseas fabs, TI makes plenty of stuff domestically.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Hognoxious]

"many of which"

but not the majority.

Put those goalposts back where you found them and then get lost, asshat.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Billly Gates]

Please

All China has to do is impose a temporary embargo for just 1 week.

Walmart, Sony, and 90% of all corporations would be SCREAMING MURDER and we would have the stock market crash and another recession start.

China has the west by the balls. Not the other way around my friend. Corporations will rule once again at the expense of the people and I bet Walmart might even go out of business as its stores all have just in time inventory and have so much of its funds tied to replenishing stock. Walmart doesn't buy anything outside of China in the last 15 years.

China is the winner here as they laugh at our outdated thinking with big military weapons can secure peace and assertiveness in economic trade. China owns all the darn means of production!

This was their plan all along and if they invade Taiwan we wont get involved. After all without Walmart who will pay for their re-election campaign and the economic fall out will be devestating. Intel and others who have expensive R&D can't just build a new chip fabrication plant overnight and make chips immediately in the US. It takes years to move out and set a factory up.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can go to some place like TI's website, and see that while Mouser and Digikey are normally authorized distributors of their products, they are not listed as authorized distributor of some of their product lines listed as defense and aerospace related. A subtle hint is that Mouser and Digikey don't push aerospace as one of the applications, while the manufacturers' websites have pages for such applications. Nonetheless some of the products, or versions of them, end up on those sites anyway. From my desk, this one is clearly labeled on the package as from their US fab, but they don't bother putting that on the Mouser listing.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[TheGratefulNet]

again, you totally miss my point.

specialty chips are not enough to fully build things.

a pcb is often much, much more than a huge chip and a power supply.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Hognoxious]

There is no "killer" problem with the F35 that we can find.

Thanks. I feel totally reassured now.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Teancum]

You left out tax policy, environmental policy, and labor policy as well. Those are more responsible for gutting the manufacturing base. I speak as a manufacturer.

That is all sort of how Congress has gutted American manufacturing. When treaties presume a level and fair trade policy between nations, but clearly basic industrial policy and regulations are so much different, is it a wonder that continual trade deficits occur?

America has been buying stuff around the world on the basis that the U.S. Dollar is the world's reserve currency (the form of money used for the most common exchanges). It will be interesting to see what happens when that ends, and surely it will.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Teancum]

F-35's are not for "major wars".

I hope for the sake of America that you are right, that it will never need to be used for a major war. America won WWII in part because everything used in that war could be produced domestically and didn't rely upon parts made in Japan or Germany. That is sort of my point, that China can do that sort of thing but America can't.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[residents_parking]

This is about magnets not electronics. China played a 1-2 game first cutting the price of Neodymium magnets making Western production uneconomical, then when the West gave up trying, they trebled the price.

It's a well-known issue wherever a Neodymium magnet is part of a design because they are kinda special in the magnet world. They having a wide B-H curve compared with traditional ceramic magnets, although the latter have higher flux density. It's been 25 years since I properly fiddled with magnets and have never done much serious design.

The West (US, Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc) has no difficulty supplying their electronics needs.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[sjames]

The '50s was prosperity. Today we have disparity.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[shutdown -p now]

Thankfully I don't have competition from China, or even outside the country. Yet. Keep making it harder for me to make stuff, and eventually I will.

I really don't see how this is avoidable so long as there is free trade with China. The guy above was rather rude, but he is right - Chinese can make stuff cheaper than anyone in the West because they abuse their labor force like we didn't do since early 1900s, and shit on their environment. Even with no taxes, we cannot compete them, because the playing field isn't even - and to even it out would require us to regress our standard of living to early 1900s for a significant part of the population, as well.

So the next best thing we can do is apply tariffs to try to even it out. Not even on countries, but rather on pollution and wage slavery in imported goods, so that the total cost would still add up to what the same thing would cost to manufacture in a society like ours.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

>What "unfair advantage"?
Chinese *citizens* are paying the price, not the Chinese *businesses* that are making the money. It's called external or socialized costs, and it's the reason we have environmental regulations in the US - to keep corporations by making an unfair profit by making the rest of us pay the costs. Without a democracy the Chinese have to hope for the self-interested benevolence of their government.

No, it's really not. It just looks that way at first glance. It is absolutely the rational response in any given instance to buy the cheapest of equivalent commodities, but in the long term that can really bite you in the ass. Because who's paying your wages? US companies. And where are they getting their money? Selling stuff to you. They're certainly not selling much to the Chinese.

In 2009 China imported $5.8 billion from the US, while the US imported $28 billion from China. That's about $22 billion that's been stripped from our economy and transferred to theirs. They're using that money to do wonderful things modernizing their industrial base, but meanwhile next year that's an average of $73 dollars that's no longer passing though each of our hands (because the corps aren't going to take the hit so long as they can pass it off to us as smaller raises). And if the trade imbalance continues then next year we'll be down $146. And $219 the next year, and so on and so forth - every year our average income will drop by last years trade deficit*. Meanwhile the price of Chinese goods keeps climbing as their population becomes more affluent and demands better compensation.(slowly for now I'll grant). Eventually things will stabilize when they can no longer undercut us on production costs, but at that point they'll be about as wealthy as us, and they've got us outnumbered 4 to 1. Do you really want to share your paycheck 5 ways as the wealth gets spread around? Not to mention they'll be the ones with all the existing industrial base.

* Of course if the economy is growing that may offset things, but still if you would have gotten a $300 raise you'll get a a $227 dollar raise instead. And of course the reality is a lot more complicated than that and you may not see your salary take a hit immediately, or at all if you're high enough in the heirarchy. But what are corporations for if not to concentrate profits while spreading around the costs?

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[alexander_686]

What are you trying to say? All class are more prosperous than in the 50s. – even the bottom 20%. And I could make a decent argument that corporation where more powerful back then – buying congressmen outright instead of renting them via campaign contributes.

Why pin this on corporations when we can pin this on:
          The great wage compression of the 50s, a unique event brought about by the massive destruction of capital during the 20s and 30s and the post war surge in productivity.

          Technology that leverages the cleverest, ripping the middle class to shreds. Same as during the time of luddites.

          Slowing productivity growth, which historically shifted power to capital over labor.

It is o.k. to be mad. It is not o.k. to blindly strike out.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[sjames]

And if you withdraw that consent so you can enslave your workforce and poison their children like China, your body will be found in a trash heap somewhere because there won't be police to protect you. And you'll richly deserve that fate.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[sjames]

Citation seriously needed. It's hard to be prosperous when unemployment is high and tends to be chronic. In the '50s, a single income was adequate for a family of 4 and they could even afford to go to the doctor.

We have a lot more unessential junk (and I say junk because it's fragile and fails easily) these days, but the essentials remain stubbornly expensive. We're seeing record highs on Wall Street and in quarterly reports, but it turns out that it DOESN'T trickle down.

At one time, everything but churches was closed every Sunday and holiday. Now the claim is that they can't even afford to be closed for Thanksgiving.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ArbitraryName]

again, you totally miss my point.

Your point has been repeatedly shown to be without merit, by myself and others. The only one missing anything here is you.

specialty chips are not enough to fully build things.

Except, you know, an F-35 and all its associated avionics and systems. But whatever, keep living the delusion that because you can't buy it at Digikey it doesn't exist. Wal-Mart doesn't sell hand tailored silk dress shirts but I assure you they are regularly bought and sold in the United States. Your arguments speak more to your limited worldview than any actual reality.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

I would agree. However, I don't see any realistic way to eliminate the power of money in politics, which leaves reducing wealth disparity as the primary mechanism for promoting functional democracy. And by that measure the last 50 years have been a travesty - essentially none of the US's substantial economic growth during that period has reached the general population.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[stenvar]

Chinese *citizens* are paying the price, not the Chinese *businesses* that are making the money. It's called external or socialized costs, and it's the reason we have environmental regulations in the US - to keep corporations by making an unfair profit by making the rest of us pay the costs.

You're just pulling these rationalizations out of your ass. The reason the Chinese can produce and sell stuff cheaply is because their workers are willing to work cheaper, harder, and with fewer benefits than American workers. That has nothing to do with "external or socialized costs".

Because who's paying your wages? US companies. And where are they getting their money? Selling stuff to you. They're certainly not selling much to the Chinese.

Wages by themselves are irrelevant; what matters is what you can buy for those wages. And by imposing tariffs, you reduce the amount of stuff we can buy, making us all poorer.

In 2009 China imported $5.8 billion from the US, while the US imported $28 billion from China. That's about $22 billion that's been stripped from our economy and transferred to theirs.

No, that's just $22bn in worthless paper we have given the Chinese, in return for valuable and useful stuff they have sent us. We are benefiting in these exchanges.

Meanwhile the price of Chinese goods keeps climbing as their population becomes more affluent and demands better compensation.(slowly for now I'll grant). Eventually things will stabilize when they can no longer undercut us on production costs, but at that point they'll be about as wealthy as us, and they've got us outnumbered 4 to 1. Do you really want to share your paycheck 5 ways as the wealth gets spread around? Not to mention they'll be the ones with all the existing industrial base.

So your true colors are showing: it bothers you that the Chinese are developing economically and are getting wealthier, and in order to keep that from happening, you want to sabotage their economy and global trade. And you base your dislike of that future on the mistaken assumption that there is a finite amount of wealth going around and that if the Chinese do better, we must be doing poorer.

Yes, in contrast to you, I hope the Chinese will become as wealthy as we are, as soon as possible, because we all end up being better off that way. The global economy is not a zero sum game.

And if, on the way to that future, the Chinese make lots of cheap stuff for us, even that's good for us in the short term.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[MickLinux]

All China has to do is....Walmart screaming...

Okay, so it sounds like a win-win situation. How soon can we start?

Okay, seriously, I think that restricting the free trade is the right thing to do, and the proper way to do it is to say, if the laborers cannot freely migrate and trade their labor freely, then the companies should not have a right to trade the products of their labor.

100% embargo, and we downscale our consumption and figure it out from there.

Oh, and if we're going to do that, we have to eliminate the profiteers who corruptly profited, so do like ex-soviet glasnost, and give all people an equal amount of credits to bid on EVERYTHING. Start over. Then let people figure out what they want to do.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Trogre]

That's true. However imported components aren't all sourced from China. Everyone stays well clear of Chinese electrolytic capacitors for example, the best ones coming instead from Japan.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

So - the money we give the Chinese bolsters their economy, allowing them to grow faster than they would without it, but it *wouldn't* do the same here if we had kept it? I'd like to see that logic.

I too would like to see the Chinese become as wealthy as we are, as fast as possible. But so long as they're growing partially at our expense we want to be cautious about our own long-term economic health.

>The reason the Chinese can produce and sell stuff cheaply is because their workers are willing to work cheaper, harder, and with fewer benefits than American workers. That has nothing to do with "external or socialized costs".

Really? Breathing toxic air and drinking polluted water aren't costs born by society to the benefit of those doing the polluting?
Yes, Americans have fought for and achieved better pay, a healthier environment, and more reasonable working conditions, but unless you're suggesting that we should change back into something more like China in order to be competitive I don't see how that helps your case. We worked hard to get to where we are, and there's no way we can compete with China in a free market unless we sacrifice those advances.

And while we're at it - how exactly are we supposed to earn the money to buy all our cheap stuff from China if we're not making anything ourselves? We have to be selling *something* to *someone* at some point, and Chinese competition is gutting our industrial base. Agriculture and oil, etc. exports will keep us for a while, but those industries employ only the tiniest portion of the population, most of whom aren't doing all that much better than anyone else. We can only employ so many people to provide services to them.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[XcepticZP]

A proper response would be not to weaken local regulations, but to impose tariffs on imported goods manufactured in conditions exploiting such socialized costs.

Do you know who truly ends up paying those tariffs you propose?

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[manu0601]

What is the alternative? If you refuse to use tariffs to even competition from foreign workers of much lower salaries, at some tim all your jobs will be outsourced abroad. That will be a 100% reduction of purchasing power.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Billly Gates]

All China has to do is....Walmart screaming...

Okay, so it sounds like a win-win situation. How soon can we start?

Okay, seriously, I think that restricting the free trade is the right thing to do, and the proper way to do it is to say, if the laborers cannot freely migrate and trade their labor freely, then the companies should not have a right to trade the products of their labor.

100% embargo, and we downscale our consumption and figure it out from there.

Oh, and if we're going to do that, we have to eliminate the profiteers who corruptly profited, so do like ex-soviet glasnost, and give all people an equal amount of credits to bid on EVERYTHING. Start over. Then let people figure out what they want to do.

The problem is we will starve. No jobs and no corps paying taxes to feed all the laid off workers. Corps will just leave the US market as Coke make as much if not more in China than here. It will takes decades to rebuild assuming anyone would have any money left to pay for it?

Besides crops our production would be about zero. It might even collapse western civilization Rome style. After all Republicans would tell everyone to get jobs with them all gone.
It took 10 years to move to China. It needs to take that long to come back

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

The US customers, obviously. If we're talking about leveling the playing field with China that will inherently be the case, whether it be via higher prices or taxes for subsidies. Though there is some debate as to whether they might actually win on the purchasing front as well - quality appliances, etc. tend to last significantly longer, often giving better value in dollars-per-vear than cheap Chinese stuff, so the consumer wins out even if they do have to be forced into it. Sort of like CFL light bulbs, where even if you had to replace them every year the total cost of ownership would still be less than an equivalent incandescent, you just pay a lot more of the cost up front.

Tariffs have two big advantages over subsidies to my mind:
- They're capitalistically "clean" - they don't pick any winners or losers within the domestic market, they just impose a cost upon foreign goods that they managed to avoid through conditions we don't want to allow here. I'm suspicious of any government program that puts large amounts of money in specific businesses pockets - they always seem to get a little too cozy with their beneficiaries.
- If crafted elegantly enough they could be used to level the playing field in the best possible way - by encouraging individual Chinese companies to raise their environmental and employment standards to be on par with our own. Sliding scale full supply-chain pollution and labor condition tariffs perhaps.

Actually I kind of like the idea domestically as well - instead of all these bans and regulations, if we as a society decide that we need to do something about X our first plan could be to implement a sliding scale tax to inflate the purchase price by what it would cost to do it the better way. We could still buy our incandescents for situations where they are indeed superior, but they would be as expensive as CFLs. And if you can do it better for less than the projected cost, well that's pure profit margin for you to leverage.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[rtb61]

Almost there, pretty bloody obviously cheap isn't the issue, profitable is the issue. Basically the corporations involved set out purposefully to short circuit the requirement for domestic production of military supplies in order to inflate profits. You bet your bottom dollar those items sourced from China where not charged at anywhere near the cost of production, so let's guess the profit margin on those items, 10%, 100%, 1,000%, 10,000%, I'm betting somewhere between 1,000% and 10,000% in order to be able to pay the bribes for the approvals.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Antique Geekmeister]

When you consider that the German Army, in both wars, had considerably better equipment than the countries they successfully invaded, you see the problem of relying on technical superiority. They became overextended, and could no longer supply the necessary armies occupation. Japan became similarly overextended: they started a fight with a much, _much_ larger nation. America's pre-deployed and quite expensive tactical reserve was devastated at Peal Harbor. Spending US military resources on a very, very expensive stealth fighter is analagous to buying one Oracle server running all my databases, when I can deploy 20 laptops running MySQL around the world for less money, better failover, and better local response times where the data is actually needed.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[stenvar]

So - the money we give the Chinese bolsters their economy, allowing them to grow faster than they would without it, but it *wouldn't* do the same here if we had kept it? I'd like to see that logic.

We don't "give" money to China. They produce goods cheaply and we buy them. And we both benefit from the transaction because they have a large supply of cheap, unskilled labor, something we can take advantage of. By trading and each doing what we do best, we both do better. It's not a zero sum game.

But so long as they're growing partially at our expense we want to be cautious about our own long-term economic health.

They aren't "growing at our expense"; it's not a zero-sum game.

Really? Breathing toxic air and drinking polluted water aren't costs born by society to the benefit of those doing the polluting?

And your evidence that Chinese goods are primarily cheaper due to pollution is... something you pull out of your ass. In fact, the Chinese are primarily manufacturing cheaply because the Chinese have a large number of low skill workers who are willing to work for very little money.

Yes, Americans have fought for and achieved better pay, a healthier environment, and more reasonable working conditions, but unless you're suggesting that we should change back into something more like China in order to be competitive I don't see how that helps your case.

The idea that good working conditions in the US are something we "fought for" and that they are maintained by force and regulation is another fabrication on your part. In fact, we have good working conditions because we have skilled workers who are internationally competitive, can demand such benefits, and can afford to work only 40h/week.

And while we're at it - how exactly are we supposed to earn the money to buy all our cheap stuff from China if we're not making anything ourselves?

We make plenty of stuff ourselves and sell it all over the world: drugs, movies, financial products, software, etc. All stuff that's a whole lot better than the kind of low-skill, low-pay jobs you are so enamored with.

and Chinese competition is gutting our industrial base.

The idea of an "industrial base" is another fiction. Even half a century ago, both Germany and Japan managed to turn from complete destruction and no industrial base into manufacturing powerhouses. Right now, the Chinese are willing to produce lots of stuff for us with cheap manual labor. If we ever needed or wanted to do that manufacturing in the US again, it would take at most a couple of years to gear up for it, most likely making extensive use of robotics.

We can only employ so many people to provide services to them.

Ah, the typical stupid question "where are the jobs going to come from". Variously, our jobs are supposedly threatened by automation and by trade and by the Chinese and by dumping and by whatever fabrication you people can come up with to justify your self-serving trade restrictions and special interest subsidies.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Cytotoxic]

if the laborers cannot freely migrate and trade their labor freely, then the companies should not have a right to trade the products of their labor

Sooooo..... all other countries should boycott the USA until they change their immigration policy to an open border policy to allow the free migration of labor? I don't think you'll get much traction on slashdot with that line, judging by the normal response to H1b visa discussions.

That's a surprisingly libertarian view for someone who would write your final paragraph.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[KingMotley]

There isn't a 14nm fab (or better) outside the US, currently so I call BS.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Cytotoxic]

Your understanding of the mechanisms of corporatism are shakey. "Those regulations" are put in place in a circle of power that has the government gaining more power which those with wealth and power (corporations and unions) use to gain advantage for themselves. Why do you think the health insurance industry didn't fight Obama on his "healthcare reform"? They have massive amounts of capital. Why didn't they spend it defeating Obamacare? They were in the room the whole time, locking in advantages for themselves.

The solution to regulatory capture isn't to give the regulators more power. That just gives those with something to lose/gain more incentive to influence the system to favor their interests.

Unfortunately the cycle of government power / corporatist favors seems to be a one-way ratchet. Ever more power, ever more abuse of that power to protect the 'haves'. It works at all levels of government. Just look at cab services or getting a flower arrangement in your local neighborhood. These are among the myriad of things that are protected by a wall of licensing that is purely designed to eliminate competition and protect the entrenched businesses. If you can't take your 2005 Honda Accord and pick up extra cash giving rides on the weekend because of the taxi cab lobby in your city, what do you think is happening to businesses that want to compete on a national scale?

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[couchslug]

"The US is in the process of destroying its economy."

US productivity is quite high, and foreign manufacturers like Continental Tire who are building a half-billion dollar plant in South Carolina might disagree with your assessment. Continental did not get to where they are by making unwise bets. They survived the fall of the Kaiser, the Great Depression, and the Second World War among other little speed bumps.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Cytotoxic]

China has a recently minted middle class that is larger than the entire population of the US. They are already showing signs that they are not going to remain silent little workers. Before long the pressure on the government to clean up the environment will become too great for them to ignore. Whether you are in Pittsburgh or Shenzhen, poor people don't have much time for complaining about pollution. They have other priorities. The very wealthy can trundle off to their mountain estates, whether the Biltmore house near Asheville or the Dayi Villa in Guangzhou. The middle class... they have to live where they work. And 400 million pissed off people with disposable income is going to be hard for the central government to ignore. I have a feeling that the Chinese will be forced to clean up their act much more rapidly than the US did.

Perhaps that's another business opportunity... selling clean tech to the Chinese. Wanna bet there's folks from General Electric over there right now trying to drum up sales for their clean coal technology?

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Luckyo]

I don't think anyone is talking about elimination of power of money. We are talking about reducing it to sustainable and tolerable levels, which it hasn't been on for decades, causing severe crises all over the world.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Luckyo]

I have a better one for you. Masses voted for what their centralized, deregulated and privately owned media told them to vote for.

Re-institute media laws that require properly decentralized media and see the situation slowly change back to far more reasonable voting behavior.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ppanon]

Apparently you are blissfully unaware that China used predatory pricing on rare-earth metals to put every other non-Chinese rare-Earth mine out of business or mothballed quite a few years back, and then parlayed that into a monopoly in powerful magnet production by squeezing out every other manufacturer once they had the monopoly on the raw materials.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ppanon]

No, what happened is that the Chinese used predatory pricing on rare-earth minerals to put nearly all other world production out of business and discourage exploration. Then, with control of the raw materials, they nearly shut off the tap on the raw materials to everybody else and insisted that everybody by the higher-value finished high-field magnets from them.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[LifesABeach]

What is amazing is that the U.S. went to China and said, "Please."

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Antonovich]

This is a complete and utter non-issue. Start getting worried when the US isn't in a position to build or convert existing plants to make whatever they want. "Yeah but it's not economical! It will take far too long!". Not when we start 3D printing most of the necessary parts, and not if there is a real need. Don't forget - if there is ever a *real* need to do something and do it quickly, the government doesn't ask and it doesn't issue tenders. It rings up and says "you're coming to work for us today, further instructions when you arrive at 9am". The guys arrive at 9. By midday they have made a list of what they need and by the end of the day suppliers have a list of things they need to provide by the following day. "The nation's security is in jeopardy, we must save the children...". No one kicks up a fuss, it's "to protect our way of life from the barbarians". The US still has a good proportion of the world's top grey matter and until that changes then there is nothing for you to worry about.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Luckyo]

Vast majority of organisations do not have money in amounts significant enough to impact democratic control over the state. Entities which do are quite rare. As a result, reduction of control doesn't need to be absolute - it merely needs to control the most flagrant abusers.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[XcepticZP]

I'm glad you know the answer, as I've come to realize that the majority of people I talk to about import duties/tariffs don't.

It may very well be the case that quality products are better, and consumers will pick them. But what often happens is that tariffs/duties are applied flat out on broad categories. So if your country doesn't make the product, even an expensive and environmentally friendly one, then you're out of luck and you have to import the product with the tariff on top of it. This is the case of where I live currently, South Africa. Have you ever wondered why so many Asian sellers on eBay advertise "customs tracking and services"? It's their way of saying, 'we'll lie on the packaging for you so you don't pay tariffs'. This isn't the only bad thing that ends up happening to most tariffs. They usually also don't even apply on a country by country basis. So if I were to say import an American product over a Chinese one, I'd pay regardless if I pick the 'environmentally' friendly country. I'd argue that this is specifically because tariffs are protectionist rather than being some type of 'ostracism' or 'moral' enforcement.

I wouldn't quite say that the solution is 'capitalistically clean'. It ends up being a usage tax because it gets imposed on those products that people want/need and end up buying. In that sense I would argue that it already picks the winner, and that is the individual who doesn't buy it. As well as making the foreign producer a 'loser' in that they have a loss of sales. I don't think it can encourage foreign countries' producers in changing their standards. Their standard is what it is, and what you're seeking to do is to raise their general level of prices. From their point of view it's unfair, and I agree with that. The west had it's manufacturing revolution at the expense of the world's environment, so why shouldn't they. It may not have the best end result for the planet, but protectionism is a cat & mouse game with no end in sight until we stop meddling with the playing field entirely.

At the end of the day, these tariffs are a convenient political 'point' that politicians use to incense/rile the populace over, and to pander to the unions and special interest groups who are somehow no longer competitive on the global marketplace. With the added benefit of the tariffs lining the tax coffers at the expense of the local populace. And yes, this also hurts the foreign individuals. You know, the ones we so desperately want to get out of 'poverty', 'child labour' and 'unsafe work conditions'. We do so by putting their employers out of business, and then we wonder why the people there become more and more desperate for work, at the expense of lower wages and work conditions.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[ickleberry]

They don't make discrete semiconductors or capacitors. No China == no more electronics for us. Even the stuff that Intel make in the States is often shipped to Malaysia or the People's Republic to be put in a case and shipped back.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

Who ends up paying the tariffs? The people making the product in question, the people buying it, or the people buying the alternative whose price has climbed to just below the price of the imported product?

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

China doesn't have the west by the balls. I'll put it this way.

If you owe a government $10,000 and don't pay, you've got a big problem. If you owe the government $1,000,000,000,000,000 and don't pay? Then, the government has a big problem. China has a big problem if they piss us off and we walk away (so do we of course).

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

I make a specialty, custom, niche product that is very dependent on quality. My market is relatively small. China doesn't compete because it's not worth their time, and because they aren't capable.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[khallow]

US productivity is quite high, and foreign manufacturers like Continental Tire who are building a half-billion dollar plant in South Carolina might disagree with your assessment.

Productivity is also high in regions that don't have the labor costs of the US. I notice that Continental Tires also has manufacture in Mexico and South America (so whatever factors led to them building a plant in South Carolina also led to them building plants in other places). And that they received considerable subsidies from both the state of South Carolina and the county government.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Immerman]

As far as the fairness of our industrial revolution - I agree entirely. However, our (Western World) reckless behavior brought a thriving global ecosystem to the edge of collapse, we can't afford to let China with a comparable population do the same now, no matter how unfair that may be. I think we should all be thinking long and hard about other alternatives we could offer. On that front I think incentives would be the right answer, after all we're all fat with the wealth that we accumulated at the expense of the environ

I agree they tariffs to be used as a blunt instrument, but that's by political choice, and the fact that historically they were used strictly for strictly protectionist reasons. That doesn't mean a more subtle approach couldn't be far more powerful.

For example - let a company's production be certified on a multi-tier environmental ranking - done as cleanly as the US? No tariff. Done completely nasty? Full tariff. Somewhere in between? Tariff based on tier. Companies could then improve to the next tier to reduce the tariff on their goods in the US and, this is the important bit, *still* have an advantage over US factories. After all they are operating in the midst of a much less expensive economy, where their clean factories can be built on the backs of the nasty factories next door.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

Not possible. Our brilliant education system has decided jobs making stuff aren't worth a shit. The mechanical ineptitute of you people today is shocking.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

Oops, you=young. Damn uneditable comments.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[khallow]

The US economy is doing just fine, despite morons like Obama and you trying to wreck it.

I'm curious. Why do you think I'm trying to wreck the US economy.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[shutdown -p now]

Do you really think that they don't have anyone capable among 1.5 billion people? I assure you that is not the case. That it's not worth their time, yes, that would help. But such things can change overnight.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[alexander_686]

I have a slightly different experience. It is not about buying a representative; it is about renting them for a specific issue. Let me try to illustrate my point with the tax code. We would be better off with a simpler tax system. However, special interest groups carve out special rules for their causes. I am sure justification could be found for each carve out and expectation, but taken together they are a mess.

I put a good chunk of the blame on the primary system, which in recent years have been delivering more extreme candidates who are less willing to negotiate to a centralist position. I kind of like the system with an open primary and then the top 2 candidates progress to the top. In the initial phase you get less negative advertising and more coalition building.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[alexander_686]

http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42729
Bottom 20% up by 18% from 1979. Another era of high unemployment.
As for doctors, today we call them registered nurses. Maybe Pas. But they did not have computers. Car, telephone, air-conditioning, home, and T.V. ownerships rates have risen.

As for you moral position that the current generation is debase and materialistic – well – that is your opinion of what is valuable. Society as a whole disagrees with you. While I might agree with you (and I kind of do) it is kind of arrogant to say that the progress that has been made does not count because you don’t value it.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[bhiestand]

I agree with about everything you said, but feel it is worth noting that the Slashdot consensus was: "Cancel the F-22, the F-35 is plenty capable"

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[sjames]

Consumer debt is also at an all time high. Do you really own your home if it will go away when you stop paying? Same for the car. It is easier to own a TV outright though.

The rest was not so much a moral judgement as a quality review. Stuff that falls apart too easily is more akin to rental than ownership. It is also a judgement that you can't eat a pair of sneakers.

As for your link, too bad inflation since 1979 is significantly more than 18%, especilly for essentials. Real income is down for all but the 5th quintile. Even there it's flat for all but the top 1%. Like I said, Wall Street is doing fine. All but the inflation observation is according to your link.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Hognoxious]

1949? I know cause precedes effect, but not by 60 years.

As for Israel, I don't see how they caused the Arab spring uprisings either. Unless it was a mossad plo @,.9 n o c a r r i e r

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[manu0601]

The idea of the tariff is that the consumer either choose a national product (no tariff, the extra cost goes to wages, is spent again, and remains in the national economy), or a foreign product (the consumer pays the tariff, giving the state some money to offset the damage done to national production. As a citizen, please control it is wisely used).

But now the national and the foreign product cost the same to the consumer, the national product may try to bring quality upwards, instead of always trying to cut costs through lower quality and lower wages. In other words, tariffs, helps moving the competition on quality instead of price.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Runaway1956]

If it is merely your position that the United States is greedy, and willing to kill off any number of people who happen to interfere in our "interests", you and I may find a lot of common ground.

But, you seem to be saying that the United States has actually caused the underlying reasons that so many millions of people around the world have killed each other. You lose me there. How did the US cause Idi Amin to come to power? Or, Pol Pot? Or, Joseph Stalin? Restricting my questions to more modern-day mid-east countries, you might begin to make sense. The UK caused the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. European and US powers have constantly interfered in the mideast since then. But - even then, you completely ignore the power struggle between factions of Islam, you ignore the non-theists who have ruled parts of the mideast, and you further ignore all of the peripheral powers in the mideast. You have heard of the Phalangists, have you not? The Bedouin? The Kurds? Do you realize that Turkey is a power aside from Islam, with a lot of influence and power throughout the region? Have you considered the friction between Persians and Arabs?

We, the west, bear a lot responsibility for things that are happening over there. We destabilized a large portion of the world when we destroyed the Ottoman Empire. But - that responsibility is far more limited than you would propose. Or, did you somehow assume that life under the Ottoman was serene, simple, peaceful, even idyllic?

I suggest that the Ottoman had a full time job keeping the lid on the sprawling diverse nation that they ruled over. All the tensions and strife that we witness today has it's roots in history that preceded even the Empire.

Yeah, we may be bad guys in a lot of instances, but we would be the most arrogant fools in history to claim responsibility for all the problems in the mideast. Those people have histories that go back ten thousand years, compared to our ~250 year history.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Runaway1956]

Please look at the TPP being hammered out right now. There is nothing of democracy there. Corporate interests are shaping a treaty that will simply eliminate any democratic approach to determining copyright law, trade law, tax and tariff law, and much more.

Corporations are actively working to ensure that governments don't have the tools available to structure their laws democratically.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[Luckyo]

No offense, but you started off as suggesting that democracy is "reduction of sovereign control over people" and that South Korea is a functioning democracy rather than a standard "Americanized anti-communist East Asian state built on Japanese model and largely ran by local conglomerates with some surface democracy" - something that most South Koreans would agree with. This would suggest that your experience is perhaps not something one should trust on the issue.

That said, I don't per se suggest that not being able to push your grievances to politicians is a good thing. It's not. I'm suggesting that direct access to politicians and effective near total control exerted by certain corporations with massive amounts of power, effectively slowly transforming Western democracies into a mix of corporatist and fascist state as democratic control declines and corporatist control strenghens. A good example here would be the recent banking crisis and absolutely no meaningful changes taken by politicians in spite of massive political pressure by the people to do so. It's a good example of just how far corporatist control over state has advanced and how far democratic control has declined. This is not an issue unique to any single country - this problem was suffered equally on both sides of the Atlantic which were both hit hard by the crisis in question.

It's also worth noting that I'm not here to polish various talking points on US politics which are designed to distract from the main issue, such as issues with the system of having only two parties. These are irrelevant to topic at hand.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[MickLinux]

Sometimes a jubilee is the most libertarian thing you can do.

If you visited the ex-soviet states in the ten years after their release (1990-2000) and before their entry to the EU, you'd know what freedom was.

The key to libertarian should not be libertine, or contract law, but "liberty". âoefreedom".

That said, I find it quite unlikely, given our capitalist state. US Capitalism and libertarianism really shouldn't have much at all to do with each other, and only are shoehorned into appearing to coincide under Pekhoff Randism. US Capitalism has more to do with what the Federal Reserve does.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[cheesybagel]

You don't know the economic history of South Korea very well. Read about how Samsung or the other chaebols started out. Nearly always it was with monopolies or state protection.

Re: Don't imagine it stops there.

[cheesybagel]

It was also high in the 50s and 60s I believe. The debt is not as much of a problem as the lack of being able to service it.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

Why should I improve the quality of a product if a tariff is keeping competition at bay? I don't need to compete on quality or price. Why bother with a tariff? Let's just just have a centrally controlled pricing structure for all consumer goods. If someone's not making enough profit, we'll just command a price increase. Too much profit? Cut prices.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[manu0601]

That implies the central structure has to deal with all supply/demand in society, which is usually not very efficient. And moreover, the central structure ought to be democratic, otherwise it will be illegitimate.

Some communist countries have been regulating everything down to the price of a hair-cut. Such setups have merit on education or health fronts (hint: Cuba), but I would not call hair-cut price regulation a success.

Re:Don't imagine it stops there.

[Bartles]

Where do you live?

It would be cheaper to cancel the program.

[__aaltlg1547]

And maybe better for national security.

Russians too?

[danceswithtrees]

Do the Russians also make their war machines using components from potential rivals or is this purely an American thing?

Re:Russians too?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Components. American components, Russian Components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!"

Re:Russians too?

[ebno-10db]

Taiwan wouldn't be quite so bad - at least they're a US ally.

Re:Russians too?

[tftp]

If the USA is attacked, do you expect Taiwan to declare war on the attacker, or to send troops? If not, Taiwan is not an ally, but a protectorate.

Re:Russians too?

[Bite The Pillow]

It's not an American thing, that's why there is a law. It had to be waived because unimportant parts from the supply chain were not domestic-only, and replacing the parts on principal is a stupid waste of time and money.
I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you. This is the best I can do. I'm pulling for ya, kid- just hang in there.

Re:Russians too?

[gman003]

In a fight of China vs Taiwan? Probably, but I'd give even odds of it becoming something like the Winter War - China wins, but with massively disproportionate casualties and expenditures. The PLA is massive, but their quality is an unknown factor.

If the US gets involved? Then it gets very expensive, very fast, for everyone. I won't bet either way, which normally means neither side would risk such an uncertain war. But we've gone so long since there was a full-blown military conflict (last one was Korea), it's possible both sides think they're invincible, and while I can't speak for Chinese politics, there's enough hawks in Congress that they might start a war regardless of what the actual military thinks.

Re:Russians too?

[redlemming]

Do the Russians also make their war machines using components from potential rivals or is this purely an American thing?

Specialization is a reality of the modern economic world, and has been for over a century. Few nations make everything needed to build the tools to build the tools to build the weapons, and even fewer have all the raw materials needed. This was true even when the weapon systems were much simpler.

Also, even when a nation can produce things in small quantities, it can't necessarily produce them in large enough quantities needed to make up for the attrition of war.

During WW2, for example, Russian manufacturing and logistics depending upon foreign aid for the vast majority of the supply of ball bearings, most of the machine tools, the vast majority of the rail and truck stock, the chemicals and chemical processing tools needed to produce high grade aviation fuel, enormous quantities of food and winter clothing, and lots of other stuff.

Many references exist if you're curious about this, such as the books by Weeks and Van Tuyll.

In short, without the aid of their capitalist rivals, the Russian armies would have gone into battle starving and freezing, and massively under-equipped in tanks, planes, artillery, and ammunition.

Dependence on other nations was by no means a solely Soviet phenomenon:

"The bleak historical truth is that those great symbols of British myth, the Battle of Britain Spitfire and Hurricane, and their Merlin engine, were largely fabricated on foreign machine tools; more, their armaments and much of their instrumentation too were foreign in design, and, in the case of their earlier production batches, foreign in manufacture as well." Correlli Barnett, "The Audit of War", pp 134.

In general, only a long lasting war, or the immanent threat of such a war, can force a nation to develop its internal resources towards self-sufficiency.

Re:Russians too?

[dywolf]

Hey hey hey! We already made this joke two weeks ago in the story about the fuel pump causing problems on a satellite.
No double dipping.

Exaggeration much?

[Nemyst]

Assuming that there is any sort of provision to waive the restriction under chosen circumstances (and if there aren't, then the law could use a bit of a fixing), we're talking about magnets here. This isn't as though they're using a whole PCB from China with their firmware or something. Magnets. You can't do much spying with a piece of metal. If the random testing they do on all components anyway passes, I don't see any reason to find this problematic. China already has a near monopoly on rare earth materials so it's not particularly surprising that this is happening.

The good thing to do would be to try to plan ahead and develop internal facilities so that eventually it's roughly breaking even to use US magnets instead. The danger isn't in the magnets but in the dependency on another country.

Re:Exaggeration much?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that danger is actually quite grave.

Grave? Really? Quit trying to pump up the importance of the F-35's radar system, landing gear and other hardware. /sarcasm

Re:Exaggeration much?

[PPH]

Even better would have been not to have sold Magnequench to China in the first place.

But they are only a manufacturer that takes rare earths as an input. Had their prices for RE been pushed up, they'd be out of business anyway. What we need is a domestic supply of RE ores.

Re:Exaggeration much?

[ebno-10db]

they are only a manufacturer that takes rare earths as an input ... What we need is a domestic supply of RE ores.

We need both. Oddly, we used to have both. Then we decided to sell the country at fire sale prices. Have you seen a check for your cut of the proceeds of that sale?

Re:Exaggeration much?

[Bite The Pillow]

Because the intent of the law is to ensure domestic sourcing, and a foreign supplier could decide to end America's military power by refusing to sell magnets. The law covers all parts, including things like helium and rare earth metals which actually are a problem, in addition to magnets that are no issue.

The waiver does not change the law. It recognizes that an unintentional inclusion of $2 magnets harms no one, and the rare metals were of no consequence. They were installed, then discovered and reported. Here's the article...

------
The documents reviewed by Reuters show that Northrop first discovered the use of non-compliant Japanese magnets on the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar it builds for the F-35 in August 2012, alerting the prime contractor, Lockheed, which then told the Pentagon.

A subsequent investigation of all parts on the F-35 turned up two more cases in which non-U.S. specialty metals were used on the F-35's radar, and on target assemblies built by Honeywell that are used for positioning doors and landing gear.

Northrop's radar was also found to contain $2 magnets made by Chengdu Magnetic Material Science & Technology Co, in China's Sichuan region, according to the documents.

The magnets used on the Honeywell target assemblies were acquired through Illinois-based Dexter Magnetic Technologies Inc.

Re:Exaggeration much?

[Rich0]

we're talking about magnets here

And magnets are unimportant? If you think so, you aren't familiar with their importance.

I think you're missing the point.

There is a security risk from using Chinese magnets in the F-35, and it is that if we get into a war with China they could cut off our supply of magnets and we would be unable to build more F-35s (at least, not until we find a new source of magnets). That is a risk, but if the magnets are the only part not produced domestically it probably isn't a big deal, especially if they look to correct that while they're at it.

The bigger security risk is with actual assembled electronics of any kind. Sourcing those from China would require providing specs on those parts to China which means the Chinese government would have access to them. Also, there would be a risk of undetectable sabotage in a complex component (I'm taking ICs here, not resistors). If you buy an entire chip from China you have no way to know if what you asked for is what got delivered, unless you open them up and check with an SEM/etc.

The reason that military contracts are supposed to be supplied domestically is to ensure that our military isn't susceptible to blockade/etc. Something like an aircraft could conceivably be supplied by every industrialized nation on the earth, and I'm sure this happens for most civilian aircraft. That means that you have supply chain problems if you go to war with just about anybody.

If you don't think that you risk sabotage by buying computer parts for a strategically-important project internationally, just talk to the Soviets, who had a major oil refinery destroyed by the US in the cold war by a subtle act of sabotage. Or talk to the Iranians about their centrifuges (or anybody dealing with STUXNET elsewhere). Or just read the latest headlines about the NSA. The US doesn't want to be vulnerable to these kinds of attacks precisely because it KNOWS it is possible having done it themselves.

So, the guy's point wasn't that magnets weren't important in general, but simply that they're not really a suitable vehicle for sabotage. A magnet has fairly simple physical properties, which means that a quality inspection would be likely to uncover any attempted sabotage. An IC for a radar system could be designed to pass every single test until some modulated signal is received on the antenna, and then it could do anything possible within the limits of whatever it is hooked up to (disable the radar, broadcast a homing signal for enemy missiles, overheat the radar unit and set the plane on fire, etc).

Re:Exaggeration much?

[BradleyUffner]

I think you're missing the point.

There is a security risk from using Chinese magnets in the F-35, and it is that if we get into a war with China they could cut off our supply of magnets and we would be unable to build more F-35s (at least, not until we find a new source of magnets).

If we were unable to find a source of magnets domestically then we wouldn't have these planes to begin with. If China were to cut off our supply then we might not be able to make more planes, but at least we would have the ones we already made. Some are better than none.

Re:Exaggeration much?

[Rich0]

If we were unable to find a source of magnets domestically then we wouldn't have these planes to begin with. If China were to cut off our supply then we might not be able to make more planes, but at least we would have the ones we already made. Some are better than none.

Sure - wasn't really debating that point. However, it is still a risk, and a domestic source should be obtained ASAP, or mitigation strategies might be pursued such as finding a diverse set of international sources, stockpiling, etc.

Also, while some F-35s are obviously better than none, a destroyed set of F-35s with no way of replacing them is probably not as useful as a destroyed set of F-16s with the ability to replace them. Retirement of existing aircraft is based on the assumption that their replacements will fulfill the same mission, which includes the ability to be manufactured after destruction.

Again, I'm not suggesting that the F-35 be halted, but this problem probably shouldn't just be glossed over either.

Imagine a world...

[Rick Zeman]

...where we'd outsourced defense materials to the Soviet Union. That would rightfully be called "freaking insane."

This isn't too different.

Re:Imagine a world...

[Anonymous Coward]

During the height of the cold war, around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the US built the SR-71, which was designed to spy on the Soviet Union, out of titanium supplied *by* the Soviet Union, which at the time had a near-monopoly on titanium.

Re:Imagine a world...

[mnooning]

Yes indeed.

After the war of 1812 it became clear to Britian that the US was becoming a major force. Over the ensuing decades Britian spent a lot of effort to contain us militarily. We did not care because we had no external designs. China is in our old position. We are in Britians. Let us act on our hopes, not our fears. On the other hand, China already seems to be trying to take control of vast sea and island areas. Ouch.

Re:Imagine a world...

[ebno-10db]

Out of temporary necessity, the titanium was bought through third parties without the USSR knowing what it was being used for. The supply situation was also rectified ASAP.

Re:Imagine a world...

[codegen]

During the latter part of the cold war, some older search radars used by the US and Canada used vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were no longer manufactured in western countries and were only manufactured in Czechoslovakia which was part of the communist block at the time.

Re:Imagine a world...

[ebno-10db]

After the war of 1812 it became clear to Britian that the US was becoming a major force.

Hardly. The US military was still a joke compared to the UK's. The miracle is that we fought the War of 1812 to a draw instead of going back to being a British colony. Much of that was due to the fact that the UK was tied up in the Napoleonic Wars at the time. The War of 1812 was an all consuming war for the US, and a sideshow for the UK.

Over the ensuing decades Britian spent a lot of effort to contain us militarily.

Examples?

Re:Imagine a world...

[PPH]

We could have bought it from Canada. Had we not fucked over their military aircraft program for the benefit of US arms manufacturers. That ill will must run deep for us to have to turn to Russia for our supply.

Re:Imagine a world...

[JoeMerchant]

I don't know how true this is/was, but I read a story about the Soviets sourcing natural gas pumping systems from the U.S. (potentially stealing, not sure...) anyway, U.S. intelligence got wind of it and planted malicious control software in the systems - made a big, expensive boom.

This was "Cold War" stuff, we have too much active trade with China to be doing stuff to actively hurt them.

Re:Imagine a world...

[Immerman]

>Let us act on our hopes, not our fears. On the other hand, China already seems to be trying to take control of vast sea and island areas. Ouch.

Take control from who? A handful of neighbors that they've been at odds with forever? Or from some other superpower that tries to exert authority over everything not absolutely locked down as belonging to someone else (and quite a few things that are).

As unnerving as I find the prospect of China as a military superpower, I find is slightly less frightening in the long-term than having only a single global superpower throwing its weight around unchecked. And from a strategic perspective can hardly blame them for wanting to seize control of the islands off their coast - so long as they are controlled by a potentially hostile foreign superpower China can be effectively blockaded - there are precious few viable overland routes out of China. And as anyone who has ever played GO or planned a siege can tell you, if your enemy can be contained then you've already won, only the timing and concessions remain to be discussed.

Re:Imagine a world...

[ebno-10db]

Take control from who? A handful of neighbors that they've been at odds with forever?

Yes.

Or from some other superpower that tries to exert authority over everything not absolutely locked down as belonging to someone else

Don't overgeneralize - we're not talking about Iraq here. Those islands belong to various countries in East Asia and the surrounding waters. Yes, most of them are US allies, but they're becoming more strongly allied with the US because they're afraid of China. Vietnam an ally? Fact is stranger than fiction. The Philippines making contingency plans to let us return to Clark AFB and Subic Bay (bases that we left in an entirely peaceful way at the request of the Philippine government). Yeah, they're more concerned about China than the US - and with good reason.

Re:Imagine a world...

[ChrisMaple]

FWIW, the War of 1812 was in large part caused by the British practice of stopping US ships and taking any sailor suspected of being British. Britain did this because they were engaged in war with France. The conditions leading to the "miracle" of Britain not defeating the US are the same conditions that lead to the Britain-US conflict in the first place.

No war with France ==> no impressing sailors ==> no War of 1812. (==>Andrew Jackson never becomes a military hero ==> he's never elected president ==> US becomes a better place than it has.)

Re:Imagine a world...

[Immerman]

Who is overgeneralizing? The US has been actively engaged in pressuring, subverting, or overthrowing governments around the world to promote our own agendas since shortly after we joined The Great War a century ago. The Middle East just hosts some of the most egregious examples. Or do you suppose Australia signed on to the extremist US copyright treaties because they thought it was such a good idea for their nation? Military force is hardly the only way for a superpower to inflict its will on other nations.

If China were only fighting with those they've been fighting with forever I doubt anyone would care. How involved do we get with the constant warfare in Africa?

And yes, obviously the small nations surrounding China are allied with the US out of fear of China, especially those affected by China's openly declared intent to reclaim regions that were once part of the empire. The question you need to ask though is why is the US allied with them? What's in it for us? We want to keep China boxed in, and are willing to make some rather dubious alliances to do so.

We can hardly blame China for wanting to get us off their doorstep - how long do you suppose a Cold War alliance between Canada and the Soviet Union would have gone unchallenged by the US? We did everything we could think of to disrupt Cuba's ties, and they're just one little island off one small section of our coast - it could never have be more than a tactical strike base, whereas our allies allow us the option to completely blockade China.

Re:Imagine a world...

[citizenr]

US already has a MIG29 squadron for deniable wet works operations.

Re:Imagine a world...

[Solandri]

...where we'd outsourced defense materials to the Soviet Union. That would rightfully be called "freaking insane."

We've already done that. Most of the titanium used in the A-12 and SR-71 was covertly acquired by the CIA from the Soviet Union.

Re:Imagine a world...

[ebno-10db]

Whatever the reason for the demise of the Avro Arrow, I doubt it would have kept Canada from selling titanium to the US. The US has been Canada's largest trade partner for decades, and last I checked NORAD is a joint US-Canadian operation. Canada also buys US aircraft.

Re:Imagine a world...

[mnooning]

The ensuing decades I mentioned came after the war of 1812, not during. Part of what both you and ebno-10db above are saying is true nonetheless, but only during the years around 1812.

As far as might is concerned, in the 1776 war only 1/3 of our population was for the war and the British still could not win. By 1812 almost all Americans would stand together as one, and America was much more populous as well as prosperous. It would have been impossible for the British to take us on in a land war.

I remember from history class that the British were worried because our merchant vessels seemed to be present no matter what port their ships visited. They knew we were growing in pretty much every way one could think of. I believe my analogy with the China of today fits as far as xenophobia - fear of the unknown - is concerned.

Re:Imagine a world...

[ebno-10db]

Who is overgeneralizing? The US has been actively engaged in pressuring, subverting, or overthrowing governments around the world

You're still the one overgeneralizing. In pursuit of making one point that suits your purposes, you're ignoring the complexities and inconsistencies of history. While the US has been guilty many times, there are many times where it hasn't. For example, have you noticed that Japan became an independent country after one of history's most benign occupations?

promote our own agendas since shortly after we joined The Great War a century ago

After the Great War the US actually became more isolationist. The examples you're looking for pre-date WWI and post-date WWII. It's important to know the "details" of history, lest one make inaccurate inferences and generalizations.

Or do you suppose Australia signed on to the extremist US copyright treaties because they thought it was such a good idea for their nation?

And what do you think the US would have done if Australia hadn't agreed to that? China is Australia's biggest export market, and Australia is one of the few countries the US runs a trade surplus with. Just because many Australians don't like the policy, doesn't mean the Australian government is opposed. Or do you think there aren't policies opposed by Americans that the American government happily adopts?

obviously the small nations surrounding China are allied with the US out of fear of China, especially those affected by China's openly declared intent to reclaim regions that were once part of the empire

It's even worse than that. They're trying to claim places that were only ever part of the Chinese Empire in fantasyland. If they ever get more serious about reclaiming their ancient empire, it will include Vietnam. They already control Tibet, and have made some scary noises about diverting the flow of rivers that are essential to India and Southeast Asia. Where do you think India's and Southeast Asia's hostility towards China comes from?

how long do you suppose a Cold War alliance between Canada and the Soviet Union would have gone unchallenged by the US?

How long do you suppose a split of Europe between the Eastern and Western blocks would have gone unchallenged? Yet, despite all the defenses and posturing, it remained a cold war for over 40 years. Neither the US nor the USSR was crazy or egotistical enough to change that. Let's hope the same is true of China.

Re:Imagine a world...

[PPH]

And Boeing is full of Chinese. They are still in business.

I worked with some people who were on the BOMARC program. The whole spies thing was just part of the US propaganda to sell their shit. BOMARC was a 100% political gift to the Air Force to get them a piece of the missile defense pie. And everyone on the program knew that.

Re:Imagine a world...

[ArbitraryName]

It's not a secret that the US owns MiG-29s so that doesn't seem like the best "deniability". Heck, there's at least one civilian flown MiG-29 in the US and a US military contractor that flies MiG-29s (among others) to provide OpFor training for the USAF/USN.

Re:Imagine a world...

[Immerman]

>After the Great War the US actually became more isolationist.

For a very brief time perhaps, but when it turned out the war wasn't actually over (because realistically WWII was a continuation of WWI after a period of wound-licking and ongoing demands for crushing reparations, not an independent event) we pretty much threw isolationism out the window. Prior to WWI I can't think of many examples of the US intervening in the internal politics of other nations, but I'll freely admit ignorance on the subject. And post WWI we were dealing with a world that had just been carved up to the benefit of the Allies, even if the US was perhaps not directly involved in managing the puppet governments.

>They're trying to claim places that were only ever part of the Chinese Empire in fantasyland.
But does that actually change anything, really? Anyone in the claimed area is especially worried, and the line between history and fantasy is a bit blurry to begin with. Its pretty normal for any large powerful nation surrounded by smaller, weaker ones to expand, that's how they got so large in the first place after all - just look at the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, the Soviet Union, the Romans, and pretty much every other large nation in history - barring internal collapse they tend to stop growing only when they run up against major geographic boundaries or neighbors that aren't worth fighting. But that's still nothing to do with us. China is unlikely to risk a major nuclear war, and anything else is a strictly regional dispute.

Which brings us back to my central point: Why are we military allies with these countries? They get protection from us, but what do we get in return? The ability to blockade China at will is the only big one I see. Now from a "We're on top and want to stay there" position that makes perfect sense, but there's not much moral high ground to be had.

As China approaches First-World status it is going to reasonably demand a place at the table of international politics consummate with its wealth, population, and power, which may well eventually eclipse our own. And I don't see any way they can ever get that while we have them completely boxed in militarily, not unless you want to suggest there will never be another major war, ever? I'd say the best we can hope So they are going to insist that we stop interfering with local politics that are none of our business except for our desire to keep them contained. Could we make this into another big Cold War scenario where the world perches on the edge of Armageddon for decades? Certainly. But is it really worth it? Or would it be more valuable to start establishing a more equitable relationship now, while we have more leverage to extract concessions in a lasting peace?

Or here's an idea - if you don't want to let China conquer at last its most tactically dangerous neighbors because "after thousands of years wars of conquest are suddenly bad. Why yes I'm on the top, what's your point?" there's another way we could even the playing field. Give them a knife at our throat as well. Maybe a few large chunks of some interior states? Or how about the rights to build offshore military bases all along the west coast? Of course they might demand the East coast instead - the potential damage of a blockade is more comparable to what we could do to them.

Re:Imagine a world...

[shutdown -p now]

The invasion of Canada happened after a declaration of war by the US. And the declaration of war by the US happened after several years of British impressing American sailors into service, and other overtly hostile acts (like suppying hostile Indian tribes in the west with weapons with explicit intent that those would be used in raids on US soil).

Re:Imagine a world...

[shutdown -p now]

. Prior to WWI I can't think of many examples of the US intervening in the internal politics of other nations, but I'll freely admit ignorance on the subject.

Monroe Doctrine and its applications?

(though that just goes to reinforce your original point - US has considered the Americas its "turf", while disclaiming any desire to meddle in overseas politics)

Re:Imagine a world...

[Harlequin80]

Why have my mod points expired!

Australia has a vested interest in strong IP laws as believe it or not Australia generates income due to those laws. Yes it spends money as well but it isn't one way. What chance do you think the CSIRO would have had in collecting its wireless patents royalties if we didn't have an IP law agreement with the US? (Don't confuse this with my believe copyright laws aren't broken in their current form)

As for China and it's claims on the surrounding areas, this is a chicken and egg situation. China feels pressured by the US so it makes claims on territory surrounding it. The US feels pressured by China so it economic policies and military positions are shifted to push back against China. Then China feeling pressured organises a military exercise to show how strong they are. Then the US flys B52 bombers through airspace claimed by China while saying "come on Bring it". Then China does....

You get the picture. The only real question is who felt the pressure being applied first and was that pressure real. Usually these things start from nothing and escalate.

Re:Imagine a world...

[citizenr]

Its one think to have planes, its other to operate secret squadron out of Area 51 ( 6513th Flight Test Squadron ), Squadron that was supposedly deactivated in 1992, except they still operated in 2006 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTVgPw7TR_k )

Re:Imagine a world...

[Immerman]

Sanction? No. Risk WWIII over if they decide they're not going to let us keep a noose around their neck? Also no.

The US expanded aggressively, conquering every nation in it's path until it reached the natural boundary of the Pacific ocean, and the political boundaries of an enemy it grew tired of fighting in Mexico and an ally it wasn't interested in starting a fight with in Canada/France. By what right or rationale do you expect China to do differently?

The parts were not a secret

[Karmashock]

the parts they sourced seem pretty harmless and they are only doing this for the test phase... the main production will be all US parts and again these weren't secret parts.

Re:The parts were not a secret

[Richard_at_work]

The F-35 is already in production and has been for several years - its in a phase called Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) and the aircraft produced under is are indeed final production examples (barring any rework needed) rather than test aircraft.

100 production standard aircraft have been produced to date.

Re:The parts were not a secret

[JoeMerchant]

I believe the magnets could be called a "rare commodity" - something that we should probably be buying from overseas in bulk to help keep it expensive for everyone else. There are U.S. sources, but why use up those when you can reduce other countries' supply instead?

Re:The parts were not a secret

[Karmashock]

Do you think we gave the chinese compromising technical knowledge of the plane by sourcing some magnets from chinese companies?

I don't.

I think for FUTURE planes they should be sourced entirely from US production. But since they made a stupid mistake they should just leave the chinese parts alone assuming they were accurate when they said it was only simple non-classified parts.

Re:The parts were not a secret

[Richard_at_work]

Do you think we gave the chinese compromising technical knowledge of the plane by sourcing some magnets from chinese companies?

I never said the US were giving any technical knowledge away, I was merely pointing out that the F-35 program is well past just "testing" airframes at this point, so your assertion that "they are only doing this for the test phase... the main production will be all US parts" is completely false.

Re:So I'll ask the one question that really matter

[mcgrew]

Read the article, they are indeed following the law.

Magnaquench

[ebno-10db]

Wasn't it a clever idea to let Magnaquench be sold to China? For those unfamiliar with it Magnaquench was one of, if not the, pioneer in rare earth magnets, and their use in various applications, including military. Here are links to articles about it in two websites that are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Anything that the Heritage Foundation and DailyKos agree on is definitely worth considering.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/05/magnequench-cfius-and-chinas-thirst-for-us-defense-technology

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/05/03/508203/-Magnaquench-160-Weapon-technology-with-a-bow-on-it

Dangerous path

[Sla$hPot]

Frank Kendall allowed two F-35 suppliers, Northrop Grumman Corp and Honeywell International Inc, to use Chinese magnets for the new warplane's radar system, landing gears and other hardware

That is worse than buying the whole plane, because the weakest link, in this case magnets, will end up being a critical factor anyways.
So you might as well save taxpayer money by purchasing whole planes.
Perhaps it is time to figure out an alternative source of rare earth minerals instead.

Re:Dangerous path

[ImOuttaHere]

... and China _knows_ about it's advantage in rare earth minerals. What will happen when that precious supply is mysteriously interrupted?

It's a very similar situation to what the CIA and NSA currently find themselves in with regard to optical quality glass for lenses. Nearly ALL of it comes from China. Consider satellites and lenses for spying and you'll perhaps begin to see just how ridiculous the West's dependance on China has become. Makes a person question the role of Nation States in terms of "national security" when they allow businesses in their own countries to ship jobs offshore in short-term attempts to drive down costs.

Re:Dangerous path

[Immerman]

Yeah, because it's so easy to install a kill switch/monitoring hardware in a piece of magnetized ceramic...

No argument about rare earths, except that we already know of lots of alternative sources - the only problem is that now that China has a stranglehold on production they can make it impossible for anyone else to open an economically viable mine - start building a mine and China drops the price of rare earths until you give up. They can even sell below cost knowing that they can ratchet up the price later to make back any losses. It would be easy enough to break the stranglehold if companies were willing to commit to purchasing from the competition despite higher prices, but why would any single company sacrifice their competitiveness like that?

Re:Dangerous path

[sumdumass]

start building a mine and China drops the price of rare earths until you give up. They can even sell below cost knowing that they can ratchet up the price later to make back any losses.

I think that is one of the purposes behind laws saying supplies must be sourced in America or specific close allies. It is to guarantee a supply to some extent by mandating a buyer when it isn't profitable for on the open market. In a closed system like that, even if it costs 10 times as much, they can charge 10 times as much simply because the cheaper alternatives are supposed to be off limits.

As for a kill switch, what if the magnet was configured in a way that allows a certain high frequency radio transmission of a certain strength to either cause it to shatter or emit a background noise that makes the component it is used in useless (sort of like an RFID works). I don't know exactly how practical that would be in operation but I doubt it is completely impossible.

Re:Dangerous path

[Immerman]

You are quite possibly right, and that's a much better reason to do so than fear of hijackable magnets.

The kill switch though - it might be technically possible, though I don't see how, but in use that magnet is probably going to be surrounded by a a pretty decent faraday cage of metal parts, and any interference it could generate powered by the incoming signal would likely be dwarfed by the interference created by the signal itself. I suppose they could plant a bomb, battery, or other sophisticated mechanism within the magnet, but I would really hope that, if there is a security concern, they would test the magnets to make sure they're nothing more than a chunk of magnetized ceramic. Shouldn't exactly be hard to detect micro-engineered details from a combination density check and chemical analysis, and that's if they couldn't be detected by the same cheap and easy ultrasound check that would reveal any large-scale internal mechanisms.

Laws

[XcepticZP]

Laws like this are generally only enforced when it is convenient for those that make the rules. When they are no longer convenient, they go out the window.

Re: So I'll ask the one question that really matte

[ebno-10db]

Someone using the term "Slashdot-tards" complaining about "hate filled rhetoric"? Since you read carefully, I presume you're familiar with irony.

Magnets? How about jet engines?

[ebno-10db]

If you think the magnet thing is bad, how do you feel about G.E. to Share Jet Technology With China in New Joint Venture? No dual use there, right? An easy field to develop expertise in, right? Which explains why the three major Western jet engine manufacturers (GE, Pratt-Whitney and Rolls-Royce), have been in control of the field since WWII. This is not something you figure out overnight. It's also no secret that jet engines are the biggest obstacle to developing "all Chinese" fighters.

Re:Magnets? How about jet engines?

[ebno-10db]

I mean your older posts ...

Your older posts are all over the place, judging by the ones from "Anonymous Coward". If you want to debate, why don't you get a name here instead of hiding behind anonymity?

You have a hard on for hating on China today don't ya? I mean your older posts were also filled with Asia-hate

Do you know the difference between China and Asia? Talk about racist. I guess they're all the same to you.

racists gonna race

Assuming that you've now learned the difference between China and Asia, racist would be bashing East Asians, not China. And if I had concerns about Russia, would you accuse me of being racist against white people?

Moreover, where have I displayed any hatred towards the Chinese people or their cultures? Oh, that's right, nowhere. But if you don't have a valid criticism, you can always fall back on the race card. Some unthinking people might even buy into it.

Lastly, as should be obvious to any thinking person who has read my posts, my concern is with the policies of the Chinese government. Even those are concerns about a potential adversary. Where have I been "hateful"?

Re:Magnets? How about jet engines?

[muecksteiner]

Hey, but think of the bonuses the managers will be able to pay themselves for all the "growth" they are instigating. Suddenly makes the whole thing seem logical, no?

Re:Magnets? How about jet engines?

[yoshi_mon]

It was my understanding that the problem with all Chinese made jet engines was the tolerances on the fan blades. Which to me makes no sense because such things have been made since WWII and the tech on them must be pretty well known at this point.

It may be that it is not that they could not make WWII (or slightly more advanced versions) of jet engines but they just can't make the state of the art stuff. Which I can buy to a degree but it can't be that they are that far behind.

So it's all about the politics and

[Jawnn]

...the contractors "saving face". Reliability and performance are secondary considerations, at best. Color me unsurprised.

China vs. Japan

[Fnord666]

I like the part where the article's headline specifically calls out the Chinese sourced magnets even though in three of the four violations cited the magnets came from Japan, not China.

What's New??

[jmd]

American Gov't always speak with forked tongue.

Re:What's New??

[TheloniousToady]

Don't you mean "folked tongue"?

(sorry, couldn't resist)

Re:So I'll ask the one question that really matter

[PPH]

Does the law as written actually permit the granting of waivers

Yes. If a manufacturer can demonstrate that some resource or component is not available domestically, they can seek a waiver.

The sad part is having worked for a DoD contractor that, upon identifying technologies with potential national security applications, crate it up and ship it offshore before it gets identified and put under ITAR restrictions. Its more profitable to sell the product worldwide from overseas locations and back into a US defense program with the waiver than to get it stuck on American soil.

It is how to address national debt

[EngineeringStudent]

US to China: you stole the result of a $400 Billion warplane technology development process, so we are writing that value off of what we owe you in national debt.

If we billed them for IP stolen then we would very quickly make up the $16 Trillion we owe.

Re:It is how to address national debt

[Cytotoxic]

China only holds about $5.6 trillion in US debt, per the last estimate I saw. Far from the whole $16 trillion. Still, since we just passed a budget that will offer up another $7 trillion in government bonds for sale over the next few years, they have the opportunity to push that total up!

As long as they don't know it's F-35 parts

[wjcofkc]

When the request for parts comes in, or on the bill of sale for that matter, I wonder if it says "Lockheed Martin". Or if they use another company to purchase the parts. It's not like the Chinese are building engines and navigation systems for the F-35. If they don't know what the parts are for, this might not be so bad. If they do know, that is bad. Of course, now that it's a story on the internet, I suppose the cat's out of the bag anyway - which I am not comfortable with.

Not electronic equipment

[elbonia]

From the article it seems that the US is not using any electrical equipment from China. The waiver seems to be for raw materials needed for the plane like magnets and specialty metals for the landing gear.

We'll be sorry...

[russotto]

When the shit hits the fan and a US pilot is in a dogfight with a Chinese pilot, and the Chinese pilot throws the switch which tuns off the magnets in the US plane...

Re:We'll be sorry...

[ka9dgx]

They thought the Civil war in the US would be over in an afternoon. People rushed into WWI, because the didn't want to miss it. The Germans thought they could roll through and capture Russia before taking over England, etc, repeating the mistake of Napoleon.

It's not about the first weeks of war... it's about the long fight that they all turn into... sure, we could have millions of cheap fancy Chinese made gizmos in our arsenal... but what happens if the war lasts long enough to need resupply?

The fighter that can't fly in the rain

[plopez]

The F-35 is a huge threat to US security. It is bankrupting the nation, incapable of doing the job, and every squadron that adopts it becomes immediately non-operational due to all of its problems. If a foreign government did this to the US the cruise missiles would have been launched long ago. Kill the program!.

Re:The fighter that can't fly in the rain

[dkleinsc]

What? Are you crazy? Putting a stop to the F-35 would end a large component of the American Way of Life (TM) - taking ridiculous sums of taxpayer money to pay a small set of favored contracting companies to build a bunch of military stuff at ridiculously inflated prices that may or may not work, in exchange for bribes^Hcampaign donations to the politicians who made the decision to engage in this policy.

This policy isn't about protecting the American people, and hasn't been since at least 1989.

Re:The fighter that can't fly in the rain

[plopez]

You can probably go back further than that

See Eisenhower's farewell address.

Re:The fighter that can't fly in the rain

[dywolf]

"The fighter that cant fly in the rain" was the F22, though really its about any stealth aircraft, as the rain defeats the stealth.
Basically your comments are baseless, ignorant, and compeltely devoid of anything approaching a fact.

The program behind it is full of several major flaws, that all chiefly point to how in dire need of overhaul the of the government's acquisition process is, more so even than the healthcare.gov fiasco. But the aircraft is not the program, and the F35, if it survives to make it ot the fleet, is a fantastic aircraft.

Re:So I'll ask the one question that really matter

[bill_mcgonigle]

The Venn diagram for "U.S. Waived Laws" and "they are indeed following the law" isn't a popular meeting place.

But how is a summary titled, "F-35 Manufacturers File for Parts-Sourcing Waiver" going to get clicks? Why not be misleading and sensationalistic if you're going to generate views?

Told you so

[ka9dgx]

I told you this would happen last year.

There is nothing over which to fight China.

[couchslug]

The US has no national interest in Asian wars. (Any war which does not benefit the general public is recreational.)

If China's rich neighbors want it restrained, they ought to arm themselves with nuclear weapons and be ready to implement MAD, for nothing else but will to exterminate your existential enemy even if you die where you stand restrains serious foes.

The US military-industrial complex is not concerned with the national debt so it is delighted at being built up even when it defends one set of our economic competition from another.

Why should Americans die to separate squabbling Asians?

Think it through.

[Frosty Piss]

we're talking about magnets here.

Exactly. Magnets with backdoors. All the sudden, just a hunk of ceramic and metal, and next thing you know the Chinese are pouring over the boarder.

Re:Think it through.

[sumdumass]

Heh.. imagine magnets with RFIDs built into them and sending a strong enough signal generates enough frequency inside the shielded parts to cause enough interference that the parts no longer work properly.

I know that sounds insane, but think about it. It could effectively achieve a back door of sorts if it was possible. Just attach a strong microwave transmitter to your surface to air missile and boom. It would be like having the VT fuses on anti aircraft guns in WWII.

Re: So I'll ask the one question that really matte

[sumdumass]

While Slashdot-tards might be annoying, they do not have the power of law over your life. If you are trying to equate the two (slashdot readers commenting without reading and lawmakers passing laws they didn't read), you couldn't be more wrong. Your kid not doing their homework doesn't affect me. You getting a news paper only because you need lining for your birdcages and never reading anything doesn't affect me. By default, every single law passed does affect me because in the US, we are presumed to be allowed to do anything as long as a law doesn't disallow it. That is what is known as freedom- you can act unless a law prevents you from doing so. So by default, any law passed takes freedom from you -even if you didn't or never would use it, even if it gives you something you couldn't otherwise afford, it takes some freedom away.

Not reading the laws before passing them is orders of magnitude worse then some random stranger making snark remarks about something they are completely clueless about due to their own intellectual laziness and not reading the story.

Re:Mountain Pass

[Bite The Pillow]

Considering: The heritage piece was an opportunist hatchet job to discredit all democratic presidential candidates, based on a Clinton advisor leaving. Drudge up the past to the politically connected woman loses because no one is going to vote for the black guy.

And Kos is so vague that I would argue it is wrong, and clearly given the date a pro-Obama job.

I considered it, but given different agendas and audience, I see editorial opportunism in both. So what is the point? Are they both right?

You did not mention closing the mine instead of having the processing come up to regulations. Without sourcing, no one can care about domestic suppliers. Magnequench might be a non issue at this point. Neither article went there, inexplicably- Kos due to missing facts, and Heritage because it would have weakened the Asia connection which was key to its presentation. So I still don't think I have a clear picture, and yet you feel that you do

Holland has bought a few of these

[Optali]

Our politicians told us that the JSF would bring a LOOOOOT of jobs to our country... to shut us up.
so, now it seems that the job opportunities this fancy toy will create will be in Beijing.

Re: All about money.

[sumdumass]

The interesting thing is that congress actually controls the courts to a degree. So if there ever was a threat that made domestic resources critical or likely critical, congress can simply pass a law forbiding the courts from taking lawsuits up concerning any aspects with recovering those resources.

This was done with the NSA spying back in the Bush years when it was revealed that the telecoms were helping the NSA intercept phone calls. The interesting part is that the lawsuits being brought against the telecoms and government were over constitutional violations and congress simply said no court can hold a case pertaining to the operation.

Of course it would take some sort of clairvoyance in order for congress to act and actually have the ability to recover the resources when needed as the operations usually take years to get recovering usable amounts.

Re: No

[Bite The Pillow]

You said it would be a supply issue. This was not a supply issue. You weren't necessarily wrong then, but you are definitely wrong about being right then.
Seems you have plenty of company, so don't feel bad about not understanding what happened here.

Is funny, da?

[dogsbreath]

From the Department of FWIW.

In the 1970's the semiconductor revolution was well established but there was still a lot of vacuum tube tech around, especially in the military. Equipment such as radio transmitters and high sensitivity receivers still used tubes because of unique properties they afforded or just because the tech just had not been updated.

By the mid 70's it was difficult to get a reliable tube supplier located in a NATO country. Soviet Russia was still firmly in the heated glass bottle camp with a high level of supply capability.

That's when the USSR became a NATO supplier.

From personal experience, I know much of civil and military stock of NATO vacuum tube parts were sourced from Russian or other Warsaw pact sources.

Mind you, I never saw a Soviet back door in a 12AT7. Neither did I see any performance issues or increased in-service failure rates. More stuff failed right out of the box but that was the case with the old stock we had that was sourced from Canada, the US, the UK and so on.

Re:Is funny, da?

[the eric conspiracy]

Rare earth magnets aren't likely to contain back doors either.

Re:Is funny, da?

[dogsbreath]

Yup, exactly. Bad wording on my part.

Some of the fellas around me speculated that the "commies" sent us the rejects. I think things were just what they were with no evil planning.

I never saw any news stories about the issue but this was pre personal computing, pre widespread internet, and news gathering was a foot-and-mouth issue. The magnet item would never have surfaced. Probably because it is and would have been a non issue.

Cheers

Laws.

[ryanvanderzanden]

What's the point in having laws if they can be "waived" away?

Re: So I'll ask the one question that really matte

[El_Oscuro]

You mean like obamacare?

Re: All about money.

[ArbitraryName]

You'd better let Molycorp know. They've put a lot of time and money into it and are finally getting US production back on line.

Re:Mountain Pass

[ebno-10db]

The heritage piece was an opportunist hatchet job to discredit all democratic presidential candidates

That must explain their crediting Hillary Clinton with having raised a legitimate concern, and their incredibly partisan conclusion that "it is not clear from the record that either Republicans or the Democrats, Bushes or Clintons, have the intestinal fortitude to take the steps necessary to monitor problematic foreign investment in America's high-technology manufacturing sectors".

Kos is so vague that I would argue it is wrong, and clearly given the date a pro-Obama job.

Yes, they're guilty of making incredibly vague statements like "in 1995 The Clinton Administration approved the sale of an Indiana company that made guidence systems for smart bombs to a Chinese led consortium". How could you even attempt to verify that?

I see editorial opportunism in both

Yes, citing facts to bolster an opinion is clearly opportunism.

So what is the point? Are they both right?

That wouldn't be surprising\, given that they both mention the same facts and concerns.

The US has a rare earths source now.

[Animats]

On December 19, 2013, Molycorp started up their rare earths separation plant. It's in Mountain Pass, California. So now there's a US source.

It's not that the US lacks rare earth metal resources. It's that, until recently, China was a cheaper supplier. Then the goverment of China tried to keep the price up and insisted that Chinese companies sell motors and other completed products, not raw materials. Some rare earth metal prices shot up by a factor of 20. So the Mountain Pass mine, closed in 2002, was cranked up again, this time with new equjpiment better pollution controls.

Pollution controls for a rare earth mine are a big deal. "Rare earths" are present in low concentrations, which means that a mine generates a small amount of product and huge amounts of toxic sludge. The big rare earths mine in China has the world's largest sludge pond, and it leaks. This created an environmental disaster area for tens of kilometers around. Villages have had to be evacuated because of sludge pond leaks. The Mountain Pass, California mine is less than a mile from I-15 between Barstow and Las Vegas. The US EPA, California regulatory authorities, and the Sierra Club all had to be satisfied that this project wouldn't create a big mess. That was done.

Now Molycorp complains that smuggling of rare earths out of China is pushing the price down, but they're digging them up, processing, and shipping them. Problem solved.

They're never going to fly anyway

[gelfling]

So no harm no foul. The F-35 JSF program is so absurdly over budget, late and has so many profoundly crucial problems with basic technology it will never see active service. The next President will kill it off.

blame the unions?

[whistlingtony]

I've heard it reported that Union jobs make about 30% more than non union jobs. So lets say they're making $26/hour instead of $20.

The incentive to ship jobs to China is a lack of environmental regs and the ability to pay workers approximately $1.50 to $2.20 an hour. Union or not, those jobs were going there. Unions had nothing to do with it.

The companies saw a chance to increase their profit, and damn the workers or the consequences to the American economy. And you blame the Unions... The ONLY people fighting to keep your wage high. Awesome.

Next up, Prostitution is the fault of Prostitues, and Slave Labor is the fault of children....

Re:MAGNETGATE

[sumdumass]

There have been many other opportunities to impeach the Commander in Chief should congress actually have the stones to do so.

They haven't so they will not. I understand you are trying to be derisory, but at least think a bit to make the troll work.

DailyKos plays for the same team as Heritage

[Uberbah]

Anything that the Heritage Foundation and DailyKos agree on is definitely worth considering.

They're both right wing, neo-con, neo-liberal organizations. The difference is that Heritage doesn't lie to the public or to themselves as to who and what they are. Case in point, the constant "look at how much Obamacare saved Joe Blow" stories you see there every week if not every day.

Obamacare is based on Romneycare. Which is based on a plan written by the...Heritage Foundation.

yes, the US JUST finished building their first and

[raymorris]

Yes, these magnets are indeed not available domestically.
It was just three months ago that Molycorp completed the first and only rare earth mine in the US. Very soon they'll have full production capability to manufacture ready-to-use magnets.

Re: All about money.

[iserlohn]

There's nothing wrong with monarchy as long as it is constitutional. Much of Europe are still monarchies.

I wonder ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

... I wonder if there is someone in charge of "the Pentagon". Who would that have been, I wonder, in 2012 and 2013?

Magnets

[MatthewSamuelSaks]

Just magnets. China spent the last few decades selling neodymium at a loss to destroy mining in the rest of the world. You don't have much of a choice.

DoD MIC like to FuckUS

[OldHawk777]

The DoD MIC are full of FuckUS traitors. GOP-TP politicans, GSA, FDA, DoJ, and DoD management fully allows industry to FuckUS with malicious software, hardware, policies, laws .... It ain't illeagal, it ain't treason, it is just good business ... in the real national interest treason against "We The People!"

Trust me I'm the enemy ;-)

[doccus]

Look, Chinese *people* are definitely our friends, but in a warfare situation, it's definitely going to be China VS the "West". And both the US defence dept, and the Chinese defence dept kows this. So, knowing this, as.. 1) The Chinese, could you pass up placing a "bug" aka "gremlin" in the supplied parts, and 2) The US: are you F#$$%^^& NUTS?

Infinite delay

[sydbarrett74]

The federal government needs to impose an 'infinite delay' on the F-35 -- i.e., scrap the fucking thing. Even most quarters within the Pentagon don't want it. It's a big white elephant that needs to be put out of its misery.

WCPGW?

[DarthVain]

What could possibly go wrong?

"Fire twin hell fire missiles at target epsilon!"
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."