Sounds logical, you're probably right. This is probably just more political posturing. But that said, why make it easy ya know? F em. Sorry dude.... I'm not a big fan of China (the govt at least) at the moment.
Unless you are considering Taiwan to be "China", which I don't think is fair in this context, CPUs for the F-35, which is the only impacted weapons system I know of, don't contain components made in China, they're made in Taiwan by TSMC. Taiwan is one of our very close allies although we haven't repaid the favor over the last 50 years. The bullets thing I've never heard, all the bullets I ever used were made at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Missouri which as far as I know makes something like 99% of the bullets used by the U.S. military and is a U.S. government facility. If you have a source on that I'd love to see it? I spent 2 years working in procurement, there are literally thousands of pages of restrictions on buying military hardware from any non-U.S. company and if it happens it's gotta be exceedingly rare. I can tell you we paid far more than we should of, often were stuck with sub-part equipment, and had major issues with entire airframes that suffered maintenance availability issues because of those restrictions. So in short pathological insistence on U.S. only supply chains makes our military far less effective because we have parts shortages, we can't afford as many parts, and we get crappier equipment.
US put China-made parts in F-35 fighter program https://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/03/us-put-china-made-parts-in-f-35-fighter-program.html Exclusive: Chinese raw materials also found on U.S. B-1 bomber, F-16 jets https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...-s-b-1-bomber-f-16-jets-idUSBREA291UK20140310 Backdoor Found In China-Made US Military Chip? https://it.slashdot.org/story/12/05/28/1454222/backdoor-found-in-china-made-us-military-chip Counterfeit Chinese Parts Slipping Into U.S. Military Aircraft: Report https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/coun...us-military-aircraft-senate/story?id=16403599 Dealer Accused of Selling Banned Munitions to Army https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/washington/21arms.html Would you be able to comment on these? Are those components all made in Taiwan? Not just the ones for the F-35 but also the ones for the B-1 bomber and the F16's and also the ones that contain possible secret remote access capability "backdoor" that can be shut off and be reprogrammed without even being detected? Are those all made in Taiwan? If so, why are they causing such concern if Taiwan is considered a US ally? And the last article regarding bullets being used by the US army in Afgan missions, I would like to hear your take on this. How was it resolved? What are some of the preventative measures that have been put in place? See this is what Donald Trump wants to change and why he thinks it needs to be so urgently changed. Manufacturing for essential and life-critical items cannot be relied upon foreign sources of countries, especially countries that have values and philosophies of life that we do not agree with and do not even want to agree to disagree. This is why high-quality LOCAL manufacturing at sustainable cost needs to be established. You are seeing abandoned ghost towns that used to enjoy prosperity from being established local manufacturing sites, with highly skilled and experienced labour forces sitting idling by, not able to contribute in any way and not able to pass down their skills and life-long experience to the next generation when these resources could've been better utilized to make the West self-reliant and self-efficient again, not just in the field of military but in all aspects of our lives. The West might not have the population for the economies of scale but the West has the skill for quality and productivity that should more than make up for the relatively smaller economies of scale. This is probably what Trump meant by "Make America Great Again".
Well let's start with the ammunition side because it's so clear cut. The NYT article was about a dealer who was criminally charged for illegally selling foreign made ammunition to the U.S. government. He was charged because what he was doing was illegal, meaning we've already got the laws and processes in place to ensure we aren't even using Chinese ammo let alone dependent on it and obviously in this case those processes worked to catch this guy (and btw, this ammo was for arming Afghan troops, it was never intended to be used by U.S. troops). It's absolutely not the case that the U.S. military is dependent on the Chinese for ammunition, in fact as I pointed out 99% of U.S. ammo is made in a government run facility in MO. That's simply false and the quoted story in no way changes that fact. So really, you need to drop that from your narrative, it's simply not in any way remotely true. The aircraft stories are a mixture of again, banned parts being found through the extensive system set up to detect them and parts that don't support the narrative of "dependence" on China. -The first 2 articles are about the same $2 magnets that came from China. I don't think that indicates "dependence", do you? Probably not any backdoors in those $2 magnets either. Should we have let LM buy them in China? Absolutely not and you won't find me ever defending LM who pulls crap like this a lot. But it doesn't indicate any level of "dependence" in any universe. -The third article is about an alleged backdoor that it turns out didn't ever exist. Nothing more to say there. -The fourth article is about counterfeit parts. That's a huge problem, and it's not just China that engages in it. We had an entire counterfeit parts division at the aircraft overhaul facility I worked at and they found an unacceptably high number of counterfeit parts, the vast majority of which came from U.S. firms. Note that the word "counterfeit" used in this context is a bit different than what we use in normal conversation, usually a "counterfeit" part is one that doesn't match the service life history that's provided with it often showing fewer hours or cycles than it actually has or claims to be overhauled when it hasn't been or hasn't been tested per the mil spec. This is certainly dangerous, but it's not probably what you're thinking when you and I would normally think "counterfeit"; something like a Chinese factory turning out power turbine blades made from pig iron in a clandestine factory. More importantly though, we again are in no way "dependent" on these parts and in fact for years have had a robust, very large infrastructure in our supply chain to detect and eliminate these parts which are and have always been unambiguously illegal. Trump had fuck-all impact on that effort and certainly hasn't helped it in any way. So you're basically running with this narrative that the United States has lost our military industrial capacity to China and depend on them for manufacturing our military hardware.....but not a single one of the articles you quoted actually supports that narrative. And Trump again not only doesn't care about the intricacies of our military supply chain but frankly doesn't have the mental capacity to even have the most basic understanding of it. He's certainly not performed a single action to impact the use of Chinese parts in our military supply chain...mostly because there are decades of laws and thousands of us who labor (labored in my case) away every day to make sure they aren't in the supply chain and have for decades before Trump and will for decades after so it's completely unnecessary. If you think the U.S. should be forced to do more manufacturing than that's a valid argument. Seems rather anti free market and anti capitalism to me, but that's just an honest disagreement. But you have to abandon this false concept that we are in any way "dependent" on China for anything crucial in the military supply chain. That's simply utterly and completely incorrect and not only is it incorrect but frankly it's quite insulting to the thousands of us who worked and work so hard to keep it that way and do a pretty damn good job of accomplishing that without requiring an ounce of Trump's jingoism. So please, just stop with that already.
By the way...Did you read about the next swine-flu variant coming out of China? What is it with those guys? https://www.biospace.com/article/a-new-h1n1-strain-from-china-may-trigger-another-pandemic/
I appreciate hearing your perspective on the extent of US military's usage and inclusion of China-made components and it's certainly comforting to know that it's not the majority of the cases and is only in some isolated instances. I regret that my impression from this information of the US military's usage of foreign-made parts caused any feeling of insult to you as that was never my intention. It is not every day that we hear from somebody who actually worked with procurement in the US military to comment on the aspect of US military equipment development and its dependence or absence of on foreign-made parts. What we hear and see more often from the media are articles such as what I have presented previously that raise the question of the potential vulnerability of the US military due to its inclusion of these foreign-made parts that come from countries with which US doesn't always share the same value. And from these articles, it's very difficult to deduce the prevalence and the extent of usage of these components in US military equipment. So far, from these articles, we already know that the same component is used in F-35 fighter jets, B-1 bomber and F-16 figher jets. How many of them were that that were impacted? Is it all of the F-35 jets, B-1 bombers and F-16 figher jets? How much of that make up the US airforce? The articles did not specify and all it reported that there were investigations and studies launched to study these situation. And I certainly agree with you that no matter how small the number of usage, it is certainly no excuse to use foreign-made parts from adversarial countries as the potential vulnerability that US military can be exposed to from using these foreign-made parts might be substantial. It's not that I think US should be forced to do more manufacturing but I think in many cases it's now a question of necessity. As I have also mentioned in my post, the case illustrated by the severe shortage of PPE for healthcare workers in the West during this coronavirus pandemic and the complete dependence on China for its procurement to the point that US procurement personnel had to fight against other countries in many cases who are actually US allies to obtain these critically needed PPE. Yes I can see now that this would not happen in US military but this is certainly proven to be the reality in other aspects in this case in healthcare sector which could also be vulnerable to potential warfare. And it was not just the US who was in that desperate situation, pretty much the entire western countries were all in the same situation. All we saw from the news headlines during the pandemic were countries after countries in western Europe and in North America crying for help in securing PPE. I am sure you can agree with me that this situation is certainly alarming and unacceptable. True I agree Trump's execution of his plans of rebuilding local manufacturing is not perfect and in many cases not effective but I still believe his idea is correct and is warranted. Perhaps he needs experts like you who are experienced in establishing supply chain infrastructure to be his advisers to help him? As this has nothing to do with capitalism or free market; this has to do with survival. Not everything can be resolved or governed by capitalism or laissez-faire free market.
There is even a better flu drug developed by the Japanese that's even more effective in dealing with flus; it can eliminate the flu in a shorter time of just 3 days.