Subscribe to the Blunt Force Truth podcast

USS John McCain Collision A Cyber Attack? 1 Million Counterfeit Parts In Military Equipment

On Monday the USS John S. McCain suffered serious damage to its hull when it was rammed by an oil tanker near Singapore.

The seas were calm and the visibility was unrestricted at the time of the collision.

FOX News reported:

The seas were relatively calm, and visibility was unrestricted. The bow of the container ship, the Philippine-flagged ACX Crystal, slammed into the Fitzgerald’s right side above the waterline, quickly flooding several areas inside the ship, including a berthing, or sleeping, area.

Seven sailors drowned.

According to FOX News, the US military ordered an investigation to determine the factors behind the collision – including a review into the possibility of “cyber intrusion or sabotage.”

This was the fourth Navy collision of this type since January.

A senate investigation in 2012 found over one million counterfeit parts used in the US military.

CNN reported:

The results of a more-than-year-long Senate investigation into counterfeit parts being used in U.S. military equipment were released Monday and – as they had from the start – investigators are putting most of the blame on China.

“Our report outlines how this flood of counterfeit parts, overwhelmingly from China, threatens national security, the safety of our troops and American jobs,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which launched the investigation.

The probe began in March of 2011. But it was not easy for the committee staffers to conduct because the Chinese government refused to grant visas to committee staff to travel to mainland China as part of the investigation.

Last year, as the committee was still pushing for the visas, Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, the committee’s rankling Republican, said, “It should be in Chinese interest not to have counterfeiting of these electronic parts going on because it would harm legitimate Chinese companies as well.”

The committee reviewed in detail approximately 1,800 cases of suspect counterfeit parts. All told, the 1,800 cases involved more than 1 million counterfeit parts.

The investigators dug through the supply chain for three types of suspected counterfeit parts on U.S. military aircraft:

The SH-60B is a Navy helicopter that hunts for enemy submarines and assists with surface warfare. The investigation found that a part that compromised the copter’s night-vision system contained counterfeit parts that investigators traced back to China.

The probe found counterfeit parts in the systems that tell pilots of the C-130 and C-27 cargo planes about the aircraft’s performances. The part could have caused those systems to go blank. Again the part in question was traced back to China.

The P8-A is a Navy version of the Boeing 737 used for anti-submarine warfare and other duties. The Navy is testing the aircraft now and intends to buy more than 100 of them. But the test planes contained a reworked part that never should have been on the airplane. The part was used but made to look new. The part, investigators found, originally came from China.

Hat Tip Bill

(First reported by The Gateway Pundit)http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/08/uss-john-mccain-collision-cyber-attack-1-million-counterfeit-parts-china-found-us-military-equipment/   (August 22, 2017)


Want more BFT? Leave us a voicemail on our page or follow us on Twitter @BFT_Podcast and Facebook @BluntForceTruthPodcast. We want to hear from you! There’s no better place to get the #BluntForceTruth.