Military Outsourcing Far Worse Than Just The ITT Night Vision Scandal

The U.S. government took punitive actions against military contractor ITT for outsourcing what it claimed to be "sensitive" night vision technology to Chinese manufacturers to increase profits. However, night vision technology is hardly the worst example of U.S. military contractors using outsourcing to maximize profits.

A far more serious example has existed in U.S. defense cotractors using Chinese factories to produce the electronics for U.S. military missile systems. Yet, there has never been any U.S. government attempt to control this serious security issue. Yet the far less important night vision technology issue has become important is a huge question.

With outsourcing of missile electronics, it is possible for the Chinese military to not only copy the same designs and produce missiles of identical capability, but also to develop weapons to undermine these missiles and render them totally ineffective. It is also possible to undermine U.S. defenses against the Chinese Silkworm antiship missiles. During the short war in Lebanon last year, Israel had a warship badly damaged by a Chinese designed antiship missile fired by suspected Iranian soldiers. Israeli defenses were not able to detect or protect against the missile until the damage was done.

For the sake of profits, American military contractors may be significantly undermining our security with outsourcing. Much of the military hardware such as antiship missiles are from China that Iran owns. Britain and the U.S. may have greatly endangered some of their ships by too much outsourcing by military contractors, and could suffer some unexpected losses of some smaller warships because of this.

During WWII, the U.S. stupidly lost many merchant ships by allowing open shipping logs to be open by insurers, which allowed German spies to arrange for the sinking of many ships. In a conflict with Iran, many ships may be at risk because of the outrageous outsourcing of technology simply for profit.

The American government should have realized this problem long ago, however greatly relaxed standards from 1970's levels that once prevented even French ownership in Jeep because of security concerns. How far in the wrong direction this has gone.