Trusting China with Chip Making

Dan Nidess had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today that seems perfectly intuitive to anyone doing information war.  He says, in short, Don’t let the Chinese make chips for our military and points to some of the bad things that can happen when a country does.  His example of some chips sold to the US military which would stop missiles from firing, is a good one.

So, I wonder, how is it that the military in any country would buy chips made in China?  I used an earlier example of some chips counterfeited in China, then slightly altered.  That story was in my first book, and in the second edition coming out early next year, I showed how the Chinese were buying up chip making facilities over the last 3 years.  That is now under some scrutiny.  What we have to wonder is how those chips get into the supply chain of any military.

One reason is we don’t look at third tier subs on government contracts.  Not just the Chinese take advantage of that.  They sell these chips to companies that need chips, sometimes not knowing where they will be used.  They probably know what system the chips will be used in - say an F-35 fighter - but may not know what country bought one or where that aircraft will be.  They probably don’t care or need to know that to sabatoge F-35 fighters.  Do them all and sort that part out later.  But let’s be clear here, they build a chip that they can control performance of.  They aren’t doing it to sell chips in the world market and increase market share.  It isn’t normal business.  It is war business.

Nidess may well be right that the militaries of the world should not buy anything made with chips from China, but that means redirecting manufacturing back to countries who have given it up to China.  That is a long, slow slog.  In the meantime, the Chinese deny any involvement in the remote hack of Intel chips leading to remote hijacking caused by a flaw in some Intel chipsets which are said to go back to 2010, when Intel started making chips in China.  There is some urgency to getting that manufacturing capability back for at least some critical components of weapon and command and control systems.  We are responding to mistakes made 10-15 years ago and the legacy of those mistakes will be around for along time.