The Pentagon has had a dirty little secret for years now: Foreign suppliers are an increasingly important part of the industrial base upon which the U.S. military relies for everything from key components of its weapon systems to the software that runs its logistics. With the Air Force February 29 decision to turn over to a European-led consortium the manufacture and support of its tanker fleet – arguably one of the most important determinants of America’s ability to project power around the world – the folly of this self-inflicted vulnerability may finally get the attention it deserves from Congress and the public.

The implications of such dependencies were made clear back in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm. In the course of that short but intense operation, American officials had to plead with the government of Japan to intervene with a Japanese manufacturer to obtain replacement parts for equipment then being used to expel Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait.

The obvious lesson of that experience seemingly has been lost on the Pentagon. In the nearly two decades that have followed, it has sought to cut costs and acquisition timelines by increasingly utilizing commercial, off-the-shelf (or COTS) technology. Under the logic of “globalization,” COTS often means foreign-supplied, particularly with respect to advanced computer chips and other electronic gear.

Such a posture raises obvious questions about the availability of such equipment should the United States have to wage a war that is unpopular with the government or employees of the supplier. Then there is the problem of built-in defects such as computer code “trap doors” that may not become obvious until the proverbial “balloon goes up” and disabling of U.S. military capabilities becomes a strategic priority to foreign adversaries, or those sympathetic with them.

Even the Pentagon and intelligence community recognized that this sort of train-wreck was in prospect had Huawei, a company with longstanding ties to the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army, been allowed to buy 3Com. The latter’s “intrusion prevention” technology is widely used by the U.S. government to provide computer security in the face of relentless cyber attacks from, among others, Communist China.

Now, unfortunately, the Air Force has set in motion what might be called a “plane-wreck.” Opposition is intensifying on Capitol Hill, on the presidential hustings and across America to the service’s decision to make the European Aerospace, Defense and Space (EADS) consortium the principal supplier of its aerial refueling capabilities for the next fifty years.

There appear to be a number of questions about the process whereby the decision was made to reject the alternative offered by the Nation’s historic supplier of tanker aircraft – the Boeing Company. These questions (for example, concerning the ability to operate on relatively short and austere runways) seem likely to result in that corporation protesting the source-selection of a much larger Airbus aircraft over Boeing’s modified 767.

Even more telling, however, may be other considerations that argue powerfully against a reliance on the EADS-dominated offering. A number of these were identified in a paper issued by the Center for Security Policy in April 2007 and re-released last week but were evidently not taken into account by the Air Force: Continued...