August 24, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR
Pentagon’s acquisition chief wants microelectronics production to return to the US
Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The microelectronics industry is at an “inflection point, and the U.S. government must implement policies to entice companies to do more manufacturing within American shores, the Defense Department's chief weapons buyer said Thursday. Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said on a webinar that her office is taking a look at how to entice companies to bring microelectronic production and testing work back to the United States, where the Defense Department can more easily verify the security and reliability of the hardware. Microelectronics are the cornerstone to advancing emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and 5G wireless networks, as well as critical components of weapons systems. But the Pentagon is concerned that the current market — where the majority of production and testing takes place outside the United States — allows for adversaries such as China to introduce backdoors that will harm U.S. national security. “We can no longer identify the pedigree of our microelectronics,” Lord said at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Electronics Resurgence Initiative summit. “Therefore we can no longer ensure that backdoors, malicious code or data exfiltration commands aren't embedded in our code. While we develop the ability to identify the technical path to ensure all components, circuits and systems are clean regardless of their manufacturing location, we need to find a path to domestic sources to provide a secure and resilient supply of legacy, state-of-the-present and state-of-the-art microelectronics.” The United States is one of three countries with advanced microelectronics manufacturing capabilities. Increasingly, American microelectronics manufacturers have moved microchip fabrication plants abroad, according to a 2016 report from the Congressional Research Service. To pull the microelectronics manufacturing back within U.S. shores, Lord proposed creating public-private partnerships. “The U.S. government can provide a demand signal and can also infuse some capital to overcome some of the activation energy, if you will, to get the whole process rolling — of manufacturing, packaging, testing here in the states,” Lord said. “And then we partner with other industrial sectors to sustain that.” Lord listed several reasons why companies had gone abroad, such as environmental regulations, local and state taxes, and economic pressures such as a wages. https://www.c4isrnet.com/newsletters/daily-brief/2020/08/20/pentagons-acquisition-chief-wants-microelectronics-production-to-return-to-the-us/