Given U.S. military budgets, this seems like a rounding error. Especially as the article claims that this was over a five year period. Four mil a year in procurement fraud is probably a drop in the ocean.
This makes me sad. I get that rounding errors are a thing. However, a million here, a billion there, pretty soon, we're talking about real money.
In the real world, most people can't really comprehend the value of $1,000,000.00. One million might as well be one billion might as well be one trillion. At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
As a student of WW2, there's no indication that Ike was not serious about what he said in that quote.
In fact, he was offered and declined a presidential ticket immed. after WW2 to command NATO in Korea. So he wasn't politically-motivated.
One thing you could possibly fault Ike for is that when he criticized the military-industrial complex (MIC), he pulled his punches: he wanted to add Congress (a la MICC) but realized that doing so would make them feel defensive and reduce his support.
The reason Ike talked about the wastefulness of war was that the entire industrial outputs of the USA, Europe and Japan for almost a decade were wasted.
> However, a million here, a billion there, pretty soon, we're talking about real money.
While that may be true, the million won't have contributed to the problem in that case. :p
> At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?
We could have raised the annual salary of active duty personnel by almost three (3) dollars a year each.
I wonder how many "3 million dollar drops in the ocean there were".I bet if we totaled them all up service men could have gotten a very nice pay raise.
The U.S. military needs to stop shopping on Amazon. /s
In a way this is refreshing. When the U.S. military buys broken goods from a U.S. manufacturer, you get the sort of positive feedback loop that strengthens the military industrial complex. (I'm thinking the F-22 Raptor.) But when funds leak to China, that feedback loop is broken.
For the past 30 years (a very long period of time), the U.S. has bought mountains upon moutains of crap from China, in both military and civilian sectors. But there is not even a single high-profile hardware backdoor incident publicised, except maybe the Bloomberg big hack fiasco. This tells you something.
> But there is not even a single high-profile hardware
> backdoor incident publicised. This tells you something.
Not so much. If the US military found a hardware backdoor, would they want to publicly tell their enemy that their strategy is effective? Not only this, but if they tell their enemies which ones they find, by doing so they also tell them which ones they haven't found.
The only reason details of these fakes were published was likely because the Chinese company couldn't reasonably be considered as acting maliciously in this regard. Rather, they were just trying to turn a quick buck.
Sorry, I see you replied before I edited that out. Apologize.
They may not want to reveal details, but even not to the various Congressional committees for more funding (among many reasons) to fight back the enermy? The U.S. Congress could publicly condemn these kind of bad doings
by China without publishing details. Plus, in the U.S. information has lots of ways to leak out, from Snowden to some pesky jounalists.
>Not so much. If the US military found a hardware backdoor, would they want to publicly tell their enemy that their strategy is effective? Not only this, but if they tell their enemies which ones they find, by doing so they also tell them which ones they haven't found.
This thinking can be used to start real wars then, we know X has illegal weapons, trust us we have proof but we can't show it, sure years later after lots of deaths and bilions spent on war you find that it was all propaganda.
> This thinking can be used to start real wars then, we know
> X has illegal weapons, trust us we have proof but we can't
> show it, sure years later after lots of deaths and bilions
> spent on war you find that it was all propaganda.
That's not what I was talking about. What I discussing is security, you always need to assume the worst to build good defenses and information leakage only serves to help those who aim to break your security.
Going to war is another thing altogether. Having overly good defenses have little consequence (beyond primary resources such as time and money). The consequence of fighting a war without good reason can be extremely bad in every sense. That's why wars need to have consequences for those who incorrectly start them.
>That's not what I was talking about. What I discussing is security, you always need to assume the worst to build good defenses and information leakage only serves to help those who aim to break your security.
Assuming is not the same as accusing, I am OK if you say that for national security all sensitive hardware needs to pass some criteria, what I do not agree is "we know X has backdorrs,weapons but we can't show it to you because we don't want them to know what we know"
So instead they leave backdoors in thousands of servers, affecting almost 30 U.S. companies, storing personal and private data on millions upon millions of people?
Even if the US military wants to keep them in place, as to "not to tip off the Chinese", I'm pretty certain those companies CISO's would not go along with that.
All it would take is just one guy with access to the hardware to leak a sample of this imaginary "Chinese super chip" to then make the story: "US military forces US tech companies to keep Chinese spy-chips in place", the blowback to that would extremely nasty and uncontrollable.
Sorry, but no matter how "The Big Hack" is spun, it remains a prime example of FUD [0].
On that basis, you shouldn't trust any chip on any piece of hardware out there, ever.
It's also not "me" speaking on authority, I'm merely going by what the actual authorities and responsible people are saying [0]. I mean, this was months ago, still no actual samples of that chip, still no CVE out about any of it.
We've (the "community"?) have been trying to build/have built phones without baseband backdoors/hardware killswitches, chips without Intel Management Engine, etc.
Feel free to check out those threads if you've missed them.
This isn't about a specific case, by the way. This is the reality of the state of chip production.
I'd say that the most important military gear is probably still made in China, smartphones, computers, routers. But I don't really know what I'm talking about, never been in the military.
29 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 69.8 ms ] threadIn the real world, most people can't really comprehend the value of $1,000,000.00. One million might as well be one billion might as well be one trillion. At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?
—Dwight D. Eisenhower
Not that someone can't regret having to do something they don't see an alternative to, I just wonder how sincere he was.
Please, please read this to get a better understanding for yourself: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp
In fact, he was offered and declined a presidential ticket immed. after WW2 to command NATO in Korea. So he wasn't politically-motivated.
One thing you could possibly fault Ike for is that when he criticized the military-industrial complex (MIC), he pulled his punches: he wanted to add Congress (a la MICC) but realized that doing so would make them feel defensive and reduce his support.
The reason Ike talked about the wastefulness of war was that the entire industrial outputs of the USA, Europe and Japan for almost a decade were wasted.
While that may be true, the million won't have contributed to the problem in that case. :p
> At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?
We could have raised the annual salary of active duty personnel by almost three (3) dollars a year each.
In a way this is refreshing. When the U.S. military buys broken goods from a U.S. manufacturer, you get the sort of positive feedback loop that strengthens the military industrial complex. (I'm thinking the F-22 Raptor.) But when funds leak to China, that feedback loop is broken.
This is bad form.
> But there is not even a single high-profile hardware
> backdoor incident publicised. This tells you something.
Not so much. If the US military found a hardware backdoor, would they want to publicly tell their enemy that their strategy is effective? Not only this, but if they tell their enemies which ones they find, by doing so they also tell them which ones they haven't found.
The only reason details of these fakes were published was likely because the Chinese company couldn't reasonably be considered as acting maliciously in this regard. Rather, they were just trying to turn a quick buck.
This thinking can be used to start real wars then, we know X has illegal weapons, trust us we have proof but we can't show it, sure years later after lots of deaths and bilions spent on war you find that it was all propaganda.
> X has illegal weapons, trust us we have proof but we can't
> show it, sure years later after lots of deaths and bilions
> spent on war you find that it was all propaganda.
That's not what I was talking about. What I discussing is security, you always need to assume the worst to build good defenses and information leakage only serves to help those who aim to break your security.
Going to war is another thing altogether. Having overly good defenses have little consequence (beyond primary resources such as time and money). The consequence of fighting a war without good reason can be extremely bad in every sense. That's why wars need to have consequences for those who incorrectly start them.
Assuming is not the same as accusing, I am OK if you say that for national security all sensitive hardware needs to pass some criteria, what I do not agree is "we know X has backdorrs,weapons but we can't show it to you because we don't want them to know what we know"
Even if the US military wants to keep them in place, as to "not to tip off the Chinese", I'm pretty certain those companies CISO's would not go along with that.
All it would take is just one guy with access to the hardware to leak a sample of this imaginary "Chinese super chip" to then make the story: "US military forces US tech companies to keep Chinese spy-chips in place", the blowback to that would extremely nasty and uncontrollable.
Sorry, but no matter how "The Big Hack" is spun, it remains a prime example of FUD [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
Please do not speak generally and authoritively.
It's also not "me" speaking on authority, I'm merely going by what the actual authorities and responsible people are saying [0]. I mean, this was months ago, still no actual samples of that chip, still no CVE out about any of it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/13/tech-g...
We don't, from what I've seen.
We've (the "community"?) have been trying to build/have built phones without baseband backdoors/hardware killswitches, chips without Intel Management Engine, etc.
Feel free to check out those threads if you've missed them.
This isn't about a specific case, by the way. This is the reality of the state of chip production.