Deliberate Sabotage, Probably For Propaganda Purposes

Supposedly Big News 6/27/2011 - The Navy Bought Fake Chinese Microchips That Could Have Disarmed U.S. Missiles

"Last year, the U.S. Navy bought 59,000 microchips for use in everything from missiles to transponders and all of them turned out to be counterfeits from China.

Wired reports the chips weren't only low-quality fakes, they had been made with a "back-door" and could have been remotely shut down at any time.

If left undiscovered the result could have rendered useless U.S. missiles and killed the signal from aircraft that tells everyone whether it's friend or foe.

Apparently foreign chip makers are often better at making cheap microchips and U.S. defense contractors are loathe to pass up the better deal.

The problem remains with these "trojan-horse" circuits that can be built into the chip and are almost impossible to detect -- especially without the original plans to compare them to."

Apparently either we have some real dumbfucks in charge or this was allowed to happen on purpose, because it was known for quite a while.
As I wrote over several years ago:

Manchurian Chips

Chinese spies may have put chips in US planes

"The Chinese cyber spies have penetrated so deep into the US system — ranging from its secure defence network, banking system,
electricity grid to putting spy chips into its defence planes — that it can cause serious damage to the US any time, a top US official on counter-intelligence has said.
“Chinese penetrations of unclassified DoD networks have also been widely reported. Those are more sophisticated, though hardly state of the art,” said National Counterintelligence Executive, Joel Brenner, at the Austin University Texas last week, according to a transcript made available on Wednesday."

So sniffs some spook spokesflack. Actually this was a huge story about two years ago when it was learned that millions of computers made by all the leading manufacturers had compromised chips in them, all made in China.
Termed the "call home technology", not only could the trojan horse chips snoop data, but could be flipped at any time by China’s military intelligence services, the PLA. Meaning every plane, train and automobile in the US military is at risk and it didn't take spies to do it.