Counterfeit Chips Plague U.S. Missile Defense
Phony electronic parts have wound up at the U.S. Missile Defense Agency seven times in the past five years, its director told Congress on Tuesday. None of the fakes were actually deployed in active combat situations. But if they had, it might have imposed “a cost that could be measured in lives lost,” Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly warned the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday.In one case, 1,700 supposedly-new memory parts from an “unauthorized distributor” showed signs of previous use, prompting the Missile Defense Agency to have to call for almost 800 parts to be stripped from the assembled hardware. In a stockroom sweep, 67 frequency synthesizer parts had been found to have been “re-marked and falsely sold as new parts.”