June 9, 2016, - 7:13 pm
WTF?! Obama Pentagon Hires Muslim Abu Dhabi to Supply Microchips For Combat Jets, Missiles, Satellites
The Obama Pentagon will now rely on an Abu Dhabi-owned firm to supply microchips for our combat jets, missiles, and satellites. That’s insane and a major risk to our national security. And it’s also what happens when we live in a country that is no longer a manufacturing giant and doesn’t own many of the few manufacturing centers it has left.
Remember when President Bush wanted to give control of our ports to a Dubai-owned firm? That was insane and a huge risk to national security. But even more insane is the Obama decision to purchase microchips for our weaponry from Globalfoundries, which is owned and operated by the Abu Dhabi government. It’s a story that should be major news and the source of outcries. Sadly, instead, it’s something almost nobody has noticed or cares about.
Several Gulf states, including Abu Dhabi, are shipping points for nuclear weapons components headed to Iran. The countries, including Abu Dhabi, also enabled the 9/11 hijackers and resisted FBI investigations into their parts in the attacks. Abu Dhabi facilitated bank accounts and money laundering for the 9/11 hijackers. The Muslim country is also a backer of the Arab boycott of Israel. And, most important, Abu Dhabi was a major financial backer of ISIS and HAMAS.
This decision–to solely rely on Abu Dhabi’s Globalfoundries as its only microchips producer–is disturbing. It’s also incredibly stupid. Why on earth would we entrust a major component of our weaponry to a company owned by a country that isn’t exactly friendly to us, but is quite friendly to our enemies and the greatest national security threats facing the Western world? You can imagine the possibilities: Abu Dhabi’s company may deliberately make faulty chips that will cause jets to fail and combat pilots to die or get captured. Or it makes chips it can somehow access from elsewhere to sabotage missiles and combat jets and their missions.
The Pentagon knows this is extremely risky, which is why it claims it will not up its “vetting” (we know how well that usually works) of the chips and is trying to develop a “tagging device” that can be embedded in processors to detect malicious content. Um, if you have to do that, maybe you shouldn’t hire an enemy-owned company to make the chips. Just sayin’.
Yes, it is true that Globalfoundries has both its plants in America. But so what? It’s owned by a country that finances and otherwise enables Muslim mass murderers of Americans. You think that won’t get figured into the equation when Globalfoundries produces microchips to put in a combat jet that might fly over Syria and Iraq to take out ISIS–the same ISIS many Abu Dhabians fund? Think again. Abu Dhabi isn’t an absentee owner, either. It’s got several top Muslim officials overseeing the operations of the company. And it knows on which side its jihad is buttered.
Why not have competitive bidding? Why not have several sources to supply us with microchips? And why not insist on U.S. ownership of companies that produce our weapons components?
Maybe we aren’t doing any of those things because they would require common sense . . . something which is all too uncommon when it comes to government, especially where national security is involved.
Now take your shoes and belt off and enter the airport security theater scanner.
More:
The Pentagon has decided to rely on an Abu Dhabi-owned company to supply the most advanced microchips used in U.S. spy satellites, missiles and combat jets. A senior U.S. Defense Department official said in an interview that the Pentagon has reached a seven-year agreement with Globalfoundries Inc., one of the big four global chip makers, to supply the microchips. Terms weren’t disclosed. The agreement ends months of uncertainty over supplies of such chips but is just the first step in a broader effort to protect sensitive military systems from cyberattacks and other tampering.
A “first step”? In the wrong direction. Um, yeah, that’s how you protect us from cyberattacks and tampering: by hiring the enemy to make your chips. That’s the ticket!
Globalfoundries last year acquired from International Business Machines Corp. the two plants—in Burlington, Vt., and East Fishkill, N.Y.—that make the chips. IBM had been the near-monopoly supplier of the chips to the Pentagon for more than a decade and paid Globalfoundries $1.5 billion to take the unprofitable business off its hands.
Lawmakers and watchdogs such as the Government Accountability Office had expressed concern about the Pentagon’s reliance on a single source for some of its state-of-the-art chips. “Due to market trends, supply chain globalization and manufacturing costs, the [Defense Department’s] future access to U.S.-based microelectronics sources is uncertain,” the House Armed Services Committee said in a recent report.
The new Globalfoundries agreement, which was previously undisclosed, runs until 2023. Meanwhile, the Pentagon will seek to identify more suppliers and expand protections needed to prevent chips from being tampered with or falling into the wrong hands. The Pentagon also is moving away from a reliance on purely U.S.-made chips, widening its net of vendors to keep up with changes in commercial technology that are outpacing the defense world. “Our goal is to look globally,” Andre Gudger, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for manufacturing and industrial base policy, said in an interview. “We want access to the latest and the greatest.”
The plants where chips are assembled have long been viewed by the Pentagon as a vulnerable part of the military supply chain. The biggest concerns were over technology theft and any insertion of rogue elements that could be remotely triggered to access equipment, or so-called kill switches that render equipment useless.
In 2004 the Pentagon launched a vetting system of what are now more than 70 companies, including about 20 so-called trusted foundries. But the two heavily guarded former IBM factories in Vermont and upstate New York produced almost all of the custom-made chips used in the most sensitive weapons systems, effectively leaving the government reliant on a single supplier in the U.S.
With the semiconductor industry’s center of gravity shifting to facilities in Asia that churn out hundreds of millions of chips for consumer-electronics devices, the Pentagon has much less influence on an industry it helped fund and develop in the 1960s and 1970s. While military users accounted for as much as one-quarter of global chip demand in the early 1980s, that had fallen to less than 0.1% by the turn of this decade, according to the Trusted Access Program Office, which coordinates buying for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
The military relies on customized chips rather than the mass-produced ones used in cellphones. For instance, while the new F-35 combat jet contains several hundred advanced chips—manufacturer Lockheed Martin Corp. won’t disclose the exact number—production runs for the most sensitive military-grade processors range from a few dozen to 1,000. That compares with tens or even hundreds of millions for consumer-electronics devices.
Chip makers have shifted their focus to the larger consumer market, where competition led to technology being refreshed in months or weeks, while military chips ordered in small numbers might be upgraded once or twice a year, industry officials said. “We have fallen behind in what our typical electronics have in them,” said Bill Chappell, a program director at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa.
Opening the military market to more producers of the most advanced commercial chips, would allow the Pentagon to keep pace with technology developments, officials said. But that also will require new ways to monitor chips to ensure they haven’t been tampered with, whether manufactured in the U.S. or overseas. For example, Darpa is developing a tiny tagging device for chips that can be embedded in processors from any manufacturer and used to detect malicious content or an attempt to tamper with the technology.
“There’s a lot of wariness and concern, but it’s a great opportunity to open the door to a much greater supply chain,” Mr. Chappell said. Mr. Gudger, the Pentagon official, said the Darpa technology is only one avenue being explored. While others are largely classified, options include “blind” manufacturing where chip makers produce individual parts that are later assembled in a secure facility. The work on vetting and tagging chips has also attracted interest from other industries, including utilities and financial services, looking to counter the rising threat of cyberattacks.
Globalfoundries—which has expanded through acquisitions and has significant operations in Germany, Singapore and upstate New York—provides the Pentagon’s immediate needs. But a coalition of U.S. chip makers including Cypress Semiconductor Corp. has been pressing the Pentagon to help fund upgrades to fabrication plants owned by U.S. companies to allow them to take on the most sensitive work.
For some, the main safeguard remains keeping the trusted-foundry program focused on domestic manufacturing. “That [chip] foundry needs to be in the U.S.,” said Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff from 2008 to 2012 and now president of Business Executives for National Security, an industry trade group.
Again, it’s not a matter of just that the plants are on U.S. soil. That’s irrelevant because the owners of the company fund and enable our enemies around the world. Borders are irrelevant to them. Their borders are the four corners of each page of the koran.
And the outer edges of the microchips they are producing for our weapons systems.
P.S. This isn’t a case of “keep your enemies closer.” At least, not on our part (but maybe theirs).
More like barbarians INSIDE the gate.
Tags: Abu Dhabi, Globalfoundries, Islamic Terrorism, microchips, national security, Pentagon, terrorism
Hi Debbie,
What are your thoughts on recent passing of Mohamad ali who’s now enjoying his 72 virgins and 28 boys in jannah? I’m surprised you haven’t written about it.
PS: Great article! Screw Barack Hussein Osama
Hank on June 9, 2016 at 8:46 pm