Has Our Siegfried Line Been Penetrated?

Way back before WWII, the French built the Maginot line to keep German troops out of France. The line was impenetrable...but it didn't matter. It couldn't move. So those Germans...they just went around it.

Yet knowing this, Hitler ordered the building of the Siegfried Line (well, to the Germans, it was the West Wall), opposite the Maginot Line, and expected it to keep out the French troops who might want to invade Germany.

So - he knew static defensive lines were no good, but he ordered one built anyway and apparently expected his static defense line to work better than the Maginot line.

We, the US, are in a similar predicament.

Many years ago, and I can't remember where I heard this... the Russians bought electronics from us for the Siberian pipeline in 1982. Reagan (allegedly) ordered the electronics doctored so that they would short out at a given moment, and sure enough a few months later the Russians' pipeline would go down. And, in 1982, it did.

Now, for the last several decades, our military has been buying electronics for their weaponry, from the Chinese.

How in the world could we even think of doing that????

But we did it.

Now it turns out, apparently, that lots of the stuff we've been buying from the Chinese is no good...

And I'm like...is anyone actually surprised by this?

Anyone but the idiots who bought the stuff and the idiots in our government that authorized the purchase of this stuff, I mean.

The headline of the story -- and it's dated today -- "US Weapons 'Full of Fake Chinese Parts' -- Thousands of United States' warplanes, ships and missiles contain fake electronic components from China, leaving them open to malfunction, according to a US Senate committee."

And then a pull-quote here from the story: "However, Song Xiaojun, a former Peoples' Liberation Army officer who has become a nationalistic commentator in the Chinese media said the US had 'got itself into the position it is in. The US has been dismantling its factories since the 1960s. And since the Clinton government, the US has turned a blind eye towards military requisitioning. As it keeps cutting its procurement budget, weapons dealers will keep providing cheaper quality products. This attack on China is political, given the forthcoming elections. But it should not be blaming China, this is a free market issue. The only solution the US has is to buy its components from Korea or Japan instead, but then its costs will rise a hundredfold.'"

So this ChiCom guy is saying the US, since Clinton, has been cutting its defense budget, been closing our own manufacturing factories. You have to go overseas to get this stuff. We've been buying stuff from the ChiComs. They're manufacturing cheap stuff, and some of the parts are fake. Some of the electronic parts are actually fake. They don't function. Some of them are in jets. Some of them are in missiles. Some of them are in ships. Fake electronic components. And the ChiCom guy, "Hey, this is the free market at work. If you want stuff that works, go to Korea or go to Japan. But you're gonna pay a lot more there."