Over my 30 years of work for the DoD, the battle over counterfeit material has been constant and has real consequences for the military. The big defense contractors have to constantly maintain robust supplier quality programs not only to get parts made correctly but to prevent outright dangerous parts becoming part of a $100M aircraft.
At the same time that counterfeit Gucci bags and DVD were being sold, small components were being offered as specification compliant parts. In the 80’s there were so many counterfeit fasteners being sold to the DoD that it led to the Fastener Quality Act being passed to combat the proliferation of counterfeit parts.
The reason the sale of counterfeit fasteners is so easy is that the real counterfeiting occurs in the material used to make the screw, nut or bolt. Steel and other metals have grades of strength and without destruction testing, they all look the same. The DoD had to institute a vigorous and expensive testing of material to make sure that spare parts being sold were to specification.
Millions of dollars of material were found to be defective in the 80’s and 90’s and had to be traced back to the supplier. In many cases the supplier was not the manufacturer but a small business that was reselling parts. Most of these companies were relying on their supplier to get the right parts. However, there is such a network of suppliers of these type of parts, that the part was two or three companies removed from the manufacturers. Those manufacturers were the real criminals but the government went after the contract holder. Small business distributors found themselves in legal trouble over these parts.
What are the consequences of these bad parts? If a fastener fails, a plane can crash or a tank could break down in battle. Both commercial and military aviation worry about bad parts getting onto their aircraft. In 2011, the Navy found the ice detection systems on the new P-8 maritime surveillance aircraft was not working due to counterfeit parts in the system! Ice on the wings of any aircraft can lead to the plane crashing!! There have been reports in the media about bad computer chips in many sub-systems of today’s high tech aircraft and missiles. As more and more “black boxes” have been added to aircraft, counterfeit electronic parts have become just as big a problem as fasteners were in the 80s.
My experience was with DOD, but it is an issue that affects all government and commercial industry. As a small business entering the government market place to sell any parts, it is imperative that your company know what it is buying and who made the part. It’s important to keep accurate records because those records will become part of any investigation.