That’s the wonderful title of a post by a former US Navy officer now writing at his own SubStack account as Cdr Salamander, and it’s based on a graph that he obtained through a chain of other writers but which was actually produced by a Pentagon-commissioned company:
The report was issued by Arlington, VA-based Govini which was awarded a five-year $400 million contract from the Pentagon in 2019 to deliver data, analysis and insights into DoD spending, supply chain and acquisition
Behold the horror
And if that’s too dense for readers to take in, here’s a bullet-point summary:
- The diagram reveals an extensive network of Chinese suppliers integrated into critical U.S. weapons systems supply chains.
- Suppliers are mapped by component category, with Electronics, Data Links, and Fuze & Detonators having the highest counts of Chinese suppliers.
- Major defense prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and others all have Chinese suppliers in their armament supply chains.
- Well-known missile systems like JASSM, JDAM, LRASM and Tomahawk have significant numbers of Chinese suppliers providing key subcomponents
Salamander has a couple of other, easier-to-read charts that are scarier because of their simplicity, such as showing the number of Chinese semiconducters in various classes of US warships (the latest Ford-class carrier has about 6,500), and that 41% of them support DOD weapon system supply chains.
I enjoy his snark as well:
This report was funded in 2019 and delivered in 2024, 150% of the time it took for the USA to defeat Imperial Japan in the Pacific.
…
As a Southerner, going to war against your own industrial center is a Lesson Learned, and yet here we are.
AUKUS? “Pacific Pivot”. What are they?
And although I didn’t see “Virginia Class Nuclear Attack Submarine” on that list, it would probably pay for the Aussies to check that out before they take delivery of them.
No Minister 
Exactly. And exactly why the US needs to bring manufacturing of mission critical stuff back onshore.
It stuns me that the US Military could be so stupid as to ignore sourcing as a critical part of its ability to conduct effective operations.
God knows what remote triggered flaws are in chipsets the US has in its equipment and vehicles…
Thank you very much for that Tom, you are highlighting an important topic very few people care to think about. But I wonder if you have considered the full implications or considered them far enough.
If American security is compromised because their defense industry is maybe ~10-15% Chinese, then surely Australia’s defense is compromised even worse because their defense industry is ~95-99% American and New Zealand is in an even worse position than that because our defense industry is ~99.5-99.999% American Australian British and assorted European.
Now it could be that Washington D.C. truly is the fountain from which all goodness and righteousness flows, and that it can never make a mistake and can never lead us wrong. Maybe Washington deserves to be our master.
That is theoretically possible.
However, it is also possible that Washington D.C. is neither the Messiah nor the end of history, and that New Zealand must make its own decisions based on what is best for our own people and is not the slave or concubine of either Washington or Canberra.
That is also possible.