During one of the conferences in September 2022, former US Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill LaPlante said that when trying to deal with the supply chain for American arms manufacturers, the Pentagon initially thought that there were only 300 suppliers, but in fact there were three thousand of them.
To understand a similar issue, the US Navy paid as much as $400 million in 2019 for analytics from Govini, and as a result, it turned out that 40% of this chain falls on China. This is stated in the publication War on the Rocks authored by Dr. Cristina Michienza, a former senior Pentagon official.
This text argues that because of the problem with the entanglement of supply chains for American defense contractors, China has gained such significant influence that its intelligence services will be able to quite easily carry out the same operation with American weapons as the Mossad carried out with the planting of explosives in Hezbollah pagers, which were detonated at the appropriate moment.
A separate problem is that the Pentagon has been making systematic efforts since 2018 to reduce the share of components and resources from China in the production of weapons from the United States. However, this 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 by as much as 4 times between 2005 and 2020.
An example that in September 2022 the US Department of Defense was forced to suspend the purchase of F-35 aircraft may look especially indicative here, because it turned out that one of the engine components was made of an alloy of cobalt and samarium, which was supplied directly from China.
In the described problem, two basic problems stand out – the globalization of the economy and the shortcomings of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, and these factors affect so literally that even the use of blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies does not help to identify the “tails” of supplies originating from China in time.
More specifically, these problems manifest themselves as follows – the globalization of the economy has created a situation when suppliers for the production of one type of weapons can be located on different continents; and the existing system of bureaucracy in US defense procurement is formed in such a way that it is beneficial for arms manufacturers and suppliers not to disclose the entire chain of contractors with whom they work for the sake of “maintaining premiums”.
Of course, Pentagon officials are constantly conducting relevant surveys among companies in the American defense industry. But since these surveys, according to the law, can only be answered voluntarily, representatives of the US defense industry prefer to use the right not to provide all the necessary data.
And since there is a constant lack of data, it is precisely because of the lack of information that the use of blockchain and artificial intelligence does not make it possible to detect China’s footprint in the supply of American weapons in time.
Theoretically, the way out of the situation could be the Pentagon’s transition to financial incentives and direct bureaucratic coercion so that arms manufacturers for the US armed forces finally open the entire structure of their work with contractors “originating” from different countries, especially from China.
Earlier, News Hub also wrote that the Pentagon will pay $2.4 billion to consultants for advice on how to build three nuclear submarines a year.
