Remember
the part in Iron
Man where Robert
Downey Jr.'s military convoy gets blown up in the desert, and then he
realizes that the terrorists blowing him up are doing so with his own
missiles? Well, perhaps it's not as stark for GIs in Iraq and
Afghanistan, but our military technology is being sold unwittingly to
foreign nations and is now available for use against our soldiers and
even potentially civilian targets.
Last
week, a House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee held a hearing to
determine the methods and extent of commercial sales of military
technology that could end up in foreign or enemy hands. Giving
testimony were two officials from the Government Accountability
Office, one from the Department of Commerce, and three from military
contractors and reseller companies. High tech military technology,
they all said, while heavily regulated in direct export, was
dangerously unregulated with regard to domestic sales.
What
this means is that foreigners who want U.S. military-grade equipment
can't buy it from the manufacturers if they have an out-of-country
address. What they can do instead is move to the U.S., buy it here,
and then ship it out of the country themselves in a USPS box. Not too
hard, right? Well, the GAO decided to find out exactly how hard it
was to set up a shell company with a shipping address and a credit
card under a fake name, and then buy military equipment and ship it
to Southeast Asia. Turns out, it was embarrassingly easy.
The
Forensic Audits and Special Investigations arm of the GAO, led by
Gregory Kutz, was able to purchase a number of so-called “dual-use”
items from military contractors such as body armor, night vision
equipment, triggered spark gaps (used in detonating nuclear bombs),
gyro chips (used in smart missiles), and even an F-16 engine
computer. In more than a handful of instances, all they had to do was
provide a name, address, and credit card number to buy them. In other
cases, they had to sign a certificate that, as Rep. Greg Walden of
Oregon quipped, might as well have read, “I promise not to use this
for nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons - honest! Signed, Osama
bin Laden.”
Next came another round
of chastisement from GAO, courtesy of the Director of Acquisition and
Sourcing Management, Anne-Marie Lasowski. She testified on ill-used
and outdated export controls, which date back to the Cold War and
have on-the-books references to defunct international trade
organizations.
The DOC representative
and two tech company bosses played a little CYA before ultimately
admitting that we need a big-time legislation change and that current
policies can leave the U.S. wide open to attacks using our own
technology.
The Department of
Commerce, nominally in charge of export control, has a Bureau of
Industry and Security (BIS) that has limited capability to track
shipments of goods to sanctioned or embargoed countries. But
legislative limits and poor jurisdictional communication severely
hamper its ability to provide acceptable security.
Michael Alvis, Vice
President of for Business Development at ITT Industries, called
attention to his company's sales record of night vision equipment:
only .04% of its night vision manufactures are commercially available
to anyone, and the crucial parts aren't even military grade. John
Roush, Senior Vice President of Perkin Elmer, touted his company's
2003 “red-flag” citation and sting operation (in cooperation with
the BIS) of a fictitious company ordering two hundred triggered spark
gaps ultimately destined for Pakistan. Nevertheless, this only
further shows that the burden is on the manufacturer or reseller to
be ethical about their sensitive technology sales, something which a
Binghamton Craigslist seller who advertised military tactical body
armor as “a must-have for any gangster” obviously didn't take
upon himself.
Even so, that burden is
a difficult one to bear properly. Nicholas Fitton, CEO of Section 8
(a military surplus reseller), gave testimony that when he attempted
to verify the identity and background of a potential buyer of a
discontinued aircraft engine computer, he had limited resources to do
so and was forced to be more resourceful in his efforts to conduct an
ethical transaction than I think many people would have been in his
situation. He called strongly for “more formal guidelines...to be
set as to what is expected of resellers and end-users.” He also
took the government to task for being resellers being unable to
access background checks in the same way gun resellers are. He summed
his situation (and the situation of many other military vendors) up
as follows: “What we are dealing with is not an inability to
enforce security measures, but a lack of policies and procedures to
enforce.”
That's just the thing:
it would be easy to follow security policy if there were any. This
isn't a tough problem to solve, but it's another example of why
national security can't be addressed with bigger guns and more walls.
It has to be solved by being smarter than the guys who are trying to
kill us and constantly examine how they could to get to us and do
away with that. Because when you're the biggest, baddest superpower
in the world, the number one enemy to your national security is
yourself.
Get our Newsletter!
Click here to sign up and stay informed
Also Interesting: