Unfortunately, we’re not talking about potato chips. We’re talking about the kind of chips that run American guided missiles. Yo, Navy, ever read the tale of the Trojan Horse?
The Business Insider chips away at the story:
Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China.
Wired reports the chips weren’t only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a “back-door” and could have been remotely shut down at any time.
If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it’s friend or foe.
In other words, a guided missle run by one of these chips is no longer “guided”. Not by our side, anyway.
Apparently foreign chip makers are often better at making cheap microchips and U.S. defense contractors are loathe to pass up the better deal.
Reminds us of the guy afraid to cross a bridge: all he could think of was that the contract to build it went to the lowest bidder.
The problem remains with these “trojan-horse” circuits that can be built into the chip and are almost impossible to detect — especially without the original plans to compare them to.
Suggestion: buy useless junk like Obama’s golf equipment and booze for Nancy’s Pelosi’s 757 from the cheapest source possible but buy important microchips only from reliable vendors.
We’re all for saving money but we’d prefer Obama’s putter fails than a Cruise missile.
– Written by Bonfire of the Absurdities
Source: Business Insider
