By: Christine Michienzi
On September 7, 2022, the Department of Defense (DoD) halted deliveries of the Lockheed Martin produced F-35 aircraft after finding an alloy used in producing magnets in the engine on the fighter jet was made in China. This was in direct violation of a Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement that prohibits using Chinese sources for these magnets in defense systems. Deliveries were eventually resumed with a one-time waiver, but not until it was determined there was no negative effect on the performance or safety of the aircraft.
In June 2020, 1st Lt. David Schmitz was killed in an F-16 accident when his ejection seat failed. An Air Force investigation discovered that several key electrical components in the seat may have been counterfeit, which was revealed in a federal lawsuit brought by the family.
These are headline news stories, but similar incidents occur all too frequently in our critical defense systems. Today’s supply chains are increasingly complex, with critical components often sourced from adversarial or single-source entities. The risk of disruption is high – one misstep and a critical component can shut down an entire program. There is also a risk that an adversarial source could tamper with a component, with the potential for the DoD system to malfunction. Unfortunately, DoD and the aerospace and defense industry do not have the necessary, complete picture of their supply chains to prevent these scenarios from happening.
The Pentagon’s top acquisition official, Bill LaPlante, admitted how difficult it is for the services and the defense industry to track materials through the supply chain. He told Bloomberg News, “I had [a] CEO tell me two weeks ago that he thought he had 300 suppliers and he discovered when he counted all of the suppliers, he probably had 3,000 …”
And it’s not enough to know who the suppliers are – so called ‘supply chain visibility/illumination’, which has been the focus of the past two Administrations, it’s also necessary to know where the materials and components are coming from, what actually goes into them, and how they are being made – so, the complete provenance for everything that makes up a system that DoD uses is known. In a few months we will have a new Administration; there should be a push to expand the aperture, so we don’t just know the ‘who’ for DoD suppliers, but the what, the where, and the how, and that we know it with complete certainty. Only then can you be assured that those materials and components are from reliable, reputable, non-adversarial sources, and that the systems they go into are secure and will function as intended.
The Provenance Chain Network (PCN) provides that holistic solution. Their Commercial Trust Protocol focuses on the four ‘Ps’ – People, Places, Products, and Processes – so you know the complete picture of all the parts of your system. Using their Requirements, Incentives, Claims, Evidence (RICE) methodology, they work with DoD and aerospace and defense industry customers to identify requirements their suppliers must meet. Those customers then incentivize the suppliers to provide claims and evidence showing they meet those requirements. All of the data and intellectual property is protected – only the data owner has permission to share it, and it does not reside in a centralized database where there is danger of unauthorized access. This system, if implemented DoD-wide, would ensure that incidents like those cited at the beginning would not occur again.
Comments