This is the conclusion reached by WarOnTheRock, recalling Israel’s “pager attack” against Hezbollah and assessing the number of Pentagon contractors. During a conference in September 2022, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill LaPlante said that when trying to understand the supply chain for American weapons manufacturers, the Pentagon initially thought there were only 300 suppliers, but in fact there were 3,000.
To understand a similar issue, the US Navy paid a whopping $400 million in 2019 for analytics from Govini, and as a result, it turned out that 40% of suppliers in this chain come from China
WOTR claims that due to the problem with the complexity of the supply chain for American defense contractors, China has gained such significant influence that its intelligence agencies will be able to quite easily carry out the same operation with American weapons as the Mossad carried out with explosives in Hezbollah pagers, which were detonated at the appropriate moment.
Since 2018, the Pentagon has been making systematic efforts to reduce the share of components and resources from China in the production of weapons from the United States. However, this has led to the opposite effect, that is, an increase in the dependence of the American military-industrial complex on Chinese suppliers, the level of which increased 4 times between 2005 and 2020. In September 2022, the US Department of Defense was forced to suspend the purchase of F-35 aircraft, as it turned out that one of the engine components was made of an alloy of cobalt and samarium, which was supplied directly from China.
The globalization of the economy has created a situation where suppliers for the production of one type of weapon can be located on different continents, and the existing bureaucratic system in US defense procurement is formed in such a way that it is advantageous for manufacturers and suppliers of weapons not to disclose the entire chain of contractors with whom they work, for the sake of “preserving the premium.”
Comments are closed.