This topic appears on Tom’s regularly. As usual, most folks here are off base. I’ll try to explain why this happens. Yes, this is my first post to Tom’s.
Let say some weapons program needs a hardened, quad-input NAND that is no longer manufactured. I just picked a part off the top of my head. Some weapon systems currently in use still use parts that were manufactured in the 60s and 70s and are no longer produced, or no longer produced to the original specification. Without re-qualifying a part, which is expensive, they can must use that specific part or a recognized equivalent.
Congress mandates that a certain percentage of work go to ‘women or minority owned’ firms. This is one of many social engineering mandates from Congress. So the program goes into the govt’s parts database (FedLog, or whatever it is called now) and looks for an approved supplier. Some of these have the ‘women or minority owned’ box checked. They get the business.
These firms are mostly small businesses run out of someone’s garage. They have never produced anything in their lives. So they go to eBay or, if they speak Chinese, call over to some supplier/recycler that has these parts. They’ve never produced the parts either.
As most of these parts haven’t been manufactured in three or more decades, what they usually get is a recycled civilian electronics part that has been re-marked to the mil-spec markings. The govt receives these parts, and some drone puts them on a shelf in the same big warehouse where they keep the Ark and the aliens. These are the vast majority of the counterfeit parts cases. It is not that Boeing or Northrop or Lockheed are purposefully ordering cheap parts to save $.05 on the cost of a missile.
It is much harder to counterfeit currently produced items, where you have an intact, documented supply chain. Yes it can happen, it is just harder to do.
My $.03 (inflation). Feedback welcome.
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