""products have consistently appeared in recovered Russian weapons. "
“Reports have shown U.S.-origin chips and other technology continues to be found in a wide range of Russian equipment on the battlefield in Ukraine, from drones and radios to missiles and armored vehicles, despite strict U.S export controls imposed in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
People never understood or forgot (from their school days, which was when I learned the art) that smuggling is inherently relatively easy, that addictive drugs, fine gemstones, electronic chips provide enormous profit potential, and so the desire to control all this misunderstands reality.
Legal prohibition interdiction works to impose significant risks and costs to smuggling, which is useful,. You need to hit the roots to stop the traffic.
One of the smaller islands part of the country of Grenada is reputed to be the hideout of the biggest Caribbean drug gang. The Grenada police has never been able to shut it down. The new police chief decided to close it down. He sailed to the island but he noticed they were in the midst of a funeral procession. Out of respect he decided to wait until it was over. After a while a boat came out to the waiting police chief, the man on board said: “We are waiting for you.” The police chief replied, “I’m waiting for the funeral to end.” The man replied, “Chief, you don’t understand, it’s your funeral. We are waiting for you!” The police chief sailed back to the main island.
Some chips are made in USA. Intel and TI for sure. Probably many more.
A better question is when were the chips made. During detente we were probably glad to sell chips to Russia. Recall in the Battleship Iowa disaster, the propellant used was made in 1938. Weapons sit on the shelf for decades–used mostly for training until there’s a war.
Chips can go obsolete. One of the things DoD has had to deal with is that Lockheed milked “development” of the F-35 so long that, by the time the thing was finally deployed, some of the chips used in the systems were obsolete and production being discontinued.
Generally chips used in embedded systems have a specified time to end of life in the contracts. So a CPU in a laptop might be for sale for 1 or 2 years since new models come out every year. Old chips, with high yields may be made and sold for another year or two. After that the company may make some repair parts for a year.
Embedded chip products usually are made with a minimum of 5 or 10 years till production stops and this is know when a design win contract is signed and a spare part inventory is usually ordered before production is stopped.
It would be interesting to see more detail on exactly what TYPE of chips are being found in the Russian gear. There are a lot of standardized IC devices that can be suprisingly simple from a technology standard but crucial to weapons systems that might be 40 years old or five years old but focused on simplicity (like many new drones).
Old 74xx series TTL (Transistor-to-Transistor Logic) or newer CMOS equivalent chips? These implement collections of NAND, NOR, AND and NOR gates along with simple binary counters, flip-flops, inverters and buffers that would be used in simple digital control systems.
555-series timer circuits? These use simple set-reset flip-flops to generate square wave timing signals that can provide a “clock” for a digital circuit needing to perform an operation on a consistent periodic basis or (gulp) implement a count-down mechanism.
Digital to Analog Converters (DAC) and Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) that convert digital values into continuous voltages or vice versa? These are used for controlling motors or acting as sensors.
While useful in old gear or new designs emphasizing simplicity, these parts are up to fifty years old and considered commodities. You can purchase them in bulk for anywhere from 20 cents to a dollar or two each. Every domestic firm I’ve used to buy parts for hobby work collects an affirmation that parts are not being exported – even for these “classic” parts. However, these are so small and devoid of any other characteristics or identifiers that would make them easy to find in shipments that it would be impossible to trace them beyond the first point where they are sold.
High dollar parts like CPUs, customizable FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) and GPUs (graphical processing units similar to CPUs but optimized for thousands of parallel matrix computations) and microcontroller SOCs (system on a chip) might have unique serial numbers that could be tracked from manufacturer through distributer to retailer to customer then cross-referenced if the chip turns up in a dud bomb dropped on a hospital in Ukraine but that level of tracking is not implemented.
Yes. The F-35 was in “development” for nearly 20 years. By the time deployment started, DoD had to make massive orders of repair parts, as the parts were going out of production.