U.S. DoD bought phony military gear made in China

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

—Dwight D. Eisenhower

> However, a million here, a billion there, pretty soon, we're talking about real money.

While that may be true, the million won't have contributed to the problem in that case. :p

> At the risk of being cliche, if we did not have the loss of the $4 million per year (of just this one specific thing), what else could that money have been used for instead?

We could have raised the annual salary of active duty personnel by almost three (3) dollars a year each.

Sorry, I see you replied before I edited that out. Apologize. They may not want to reveal details, but even not to the various Congressional committees for more funding (among many reasons) to fight back the enermy? The U.S. Congress could publicly condemn these kind of bad doings by China without publishing details. Plus, in the U.S. information has lots of ways to leak out, from Snowden to some pesky jounalists.

>Not so much. If the US military found a hardware backdoor, would they want to publicly tell their enemy that their strategy is effective? Not only this, but if they tell their enemies which ones they find, by doing so they also tell them which ones they haven't found.

This thinking can be used to start real wars then, we know X has illegal weapons, trust us we have proof but we can't show it, sure years later after lots of deaths and bilions spent on war you find that it was all propaganda.

So instead they leave backdoors in thousands of servers, affecting almost 30 U.S. companies, storing personal and private data on millions upon millions of people?

Even if the US military wants to keep them in place, as to "not to tip off the Chinese", I'm pretty certain those companies CISO's would not go along with that.

All it would take is just one guy with access to the hardware to leak a sample of this imaginary "Chinese super chip" to then make the story: "US military forces US tech companies to keep Chinese spy-chips in place", the blowback to that would extremely nasty and uncontrollable.

Sorry, but no matter how "The Big Hack" is spun, it remains a prime example of FUD [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt