I can understand outsourcing the manufacture of things like air conditioners or door knobs, but what are the legal issues surrounding the outsourcing of manufacture of military hardware?
I don’t see how it could be legal for the US government to have tanks, jets, rifles, ammo, etc. built in a foreign country, especially a somewhat hostile country like China.
So are there laws mandating that military hardware be manufactured in the US, or can it be manufactured overseas?
If it can be made overseas, are distinctions made between allied nations, neutral and hostile nations?
If I recall correctly the US military will not allow any chips made overseas to be allowed in any military equipment. The fear of backdoors and rootkits that are almost impossible to detect.
I can’t quote the exact rule of law, but everything military must be made domestically. Even simple things like uniforms and boots must be American made.
Back when the US Army made the switch to berets for everyone, the Army needed to field a shit ton of them. Some idiot ordered like a quarter million dollars worth of them from some Chinese company. A watch dog group found out and reminded them of the law. So the entire order was canceled. And I think they prepaid, so it was a big waste of money.
This is all from memory, so take it for what it’s worth. And maybe it’s just a rule and not a law per se.
The US State government willl even block a takeover if it feels that the result is that key military manufacturing technology will be owned by a foreign company.
ITAR addresses this to some extent, I think. Many things military are very much restricted by this agreement. It also covers a lot of NASA’s outsourcing of things it needs, even though it is non-military (per se).
ETA: copied from the wiki article: For practical purposes, ITAR regulations dictate that information and material pertaining to defense and military related technologies (for items listed on the US Munitions List) may only be shared with US Persons unless authorization from the Department of State is received or a special exemption is used
Well we seem to have a problem getting a secure supply of rare earth magents; which are used in about just everything high tech that the military uses. I can recall when GM sold its interest in rare earh magnets to China in the late eighties and we all shook are heads at the logic of this; why the fuck were we selling this technology to the commies? Greed and short sighted thinking thats why; but the reason GM gave was that they couldn’t meet EPA requirements to produce them in the US and make a profit.
There are several considerations here, the major one being that the various laws that require the government to buy from American sources should not necessarily be read at face value.
In general, the Defense Department is supposed to buy items that are made in the United States. There are various exceptions, such as if there are no domestic producers of a certain item, if the need is so urgent that the government cannot wait to buy something, or if the item is only going to be used overseas.
So, what does “made in America” mean? For manufactured items, the law states that “substantially all” of the components are made in the US. The thing is, “substantially all” has been defined to mean a simple majority of the components.
Furthermore, what does “America” mean? The law actually allows certain countries (think NATO countries) to count as being part of the United States, generally due to reciprocal military trade agreements. For example, we may say to Britain: look, chums, if you buy $1 billion of US-made defense articles, we’ll say that $1 billion of UK-made defense articles are as good as made here.
In reality, therefore, there’s a fair bit of leeway in what “Buy American” law really means. However, in the real world, practical considerations are often just as important. As was said before, DOD generally don’t want chips built in countries in which we may be concerned about malicious engineers putting backdoors into them or whatever. Also, if a European company stands a chance of winning a major defense contract, they may move production to the US in order to gain political benefit for creating jobs in someone’s congressional district.
For instance, our military’s Italian-designed Beretta pistols and Belgian-designed machine guns, and the Coast Guard’s French-designed Dauphin helos, etc., are mostly made in the USA under joint-venture agreements, and few people complained much. However when a similar arrangement was sought in order to use an Airbus plane for a new Air Force tanker, you bet Boeing pulled in as many outstanding chits as they had to in order to stop that. So it works various ways, specially if it’s life-or-death for a production line.
Not quite correct. The military uses a whole bunch of PC’s made by Dell, HP, etc. Standard Intel & AMD processor chips inside them. Many of those chips actually made in foreign foundries.
But those chips were designed in the USA, and the masks used to produce them were done here. So presumably that ensures against planting backdoors or rootkits into the processor. (Frankly, on modern processors, I don’t know where anyone would find physical room on the chip to plant such malware!)
I was going to say exactly this. Virtually all of the computers the US Army uses these days are commercial off the shelf products. Laptops from dell, PDAs from HP, etc. Are any of the components in an average Dell business laptop actually manufactured in the US?
Of course, since virtually all NATO countries buy shit tons of defense materiel from us, that effectively means we can buy as much stuff as we need from them.
I’d be surprised if they actually do buy anything from us, as in actually made here.
A common theme in the papers and politics here is, “British defence equipment is crap, it’s overpriced, it’s never delivered on time, and it doesn’t work as well as off-the-shelf foreign equivalents. We should close down the entire defence industry and buy it all from other people, because it’s cheaper that way and it’ll work better. Besides, making defence articles is immoral anyway.”
That’s a common theme everywhere- the “everyone else does it cheaper” bit, at least. The US doesn’t buy that many “finished goods” from the British defence establishment - mostly Rolls-Royce aero engines and Martin-Baker ejection seats for aircraft, AFAIK.
My comments (and I believe the comments of the other poster) were directed towards military-unique equipment, not commercial-off-the-shelf items.
For example, if we buy a radio with some type of cryptological capability, you better believe that every single facet of the design and components are thoroughly approved down to the tiniest specification, and the US government would simply not accept some random commercial chips from a Chinese manufacturer for use in such a piece of equipment. In addition, if we intend to export something that uses sensitive technology, we would require that the US manufacturer of the equipment incorporate various “anti-tamper” features into the components to prevent someone from pulling it apart, analyzing it, and either building their own or finding out the vulnerabilities in our electronic systems. Obviously that isn’t the case with laptops, telephones, Blackberrys, or other commercial items.
They seem to buy all sorts of licenses to manufacture British designs, though. The M119 howitzer was designed in the UK but produced under license in the US, for instance. Same thing with the Harrier and Chobham armour on their tanks.