Breaking Defense:
WASHINGTON: If China and Russia’s spies have been doing their jobs well they might well have been able to compromise some of America’s most important satellites, including the missile launch detection birds known as SBIRS.
A report out today from the Pentagon’s Inspector General says that Air Force Space Command’s failure to safeguard its supply chain means that “an adversary has opportunity to infiltrate the Air Force Space Command supply chain and sabotage, maliciously introduce an unwanted function, or otherwise compromise the design or integrity of the critical hardware, software, and firmware.”
Of course, as Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies notes:
“This is really an audit report on whether AFSPC complied with the DoD supply chain risk management policy, and clearly there were issues. It is important to note that just because proper policy and procedures were not followed does not necessarily mean that the system was actually compromised.”
