U.S. Corporations Outsourced National Security to Russia

Yesterday I carped about how American companies have been outsourcing manufacturing and tech jobs overseas, and how they've begun firing Americans working in tech jobs and are replacing them with immigrants with H-1B visas.

Russian RD-180 Rocket Engine Being Test-Fired at NASA

It's gets worse. To boost profits and shorten development time, American aerospace companies outsourced the construction of rocket engines for launching U.S. military and intelligence satellites into space. But here's the rub:

After Russia annexed Crimea last year, Congress passed legislation that forced the Pentagon to stop buying Russian rocket engines that have been used since 2000 to help launch American military and intelligence satellites into space.

Now, that simple act of punishment is proving difficult to keep in place.

Only five months after the ban became law, the Pentagon is pressing Congress to ease it.

I'm all for cooperation in space -- the joint missions at the International Space Station with Russia, Japan and Europe are a great way to advance human understanding of the cosmos. But outsourcing the engines for our military rockets is stupidly greedy.

Of course, conservatives are all bent out of shape by this. After vacillating between hardons and hatred and for Vladimir Putin, they are blaming it all on Obama:

“I don’t know what the Pentagon’s position can be, except for them and the Obama administration trying to placate Putin,” Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said. He predicted that the legislative fight would intensify in the months ahead.

But corporate greed and laziness are responsible for this debacle. The Republicans' pals in the defense industry decided to put profit before national security.

The companies that formed United Launch Alliance, the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that has a monopoly on military and intelligence launches, decided to buy rocket engines from a state-owned Russian company called Energomash in the 1990s. They didn't want to continue to build their own engines for the Atlas rockets -- they could make more money by using cheap Russian labor to build engines for our military rockets.

You know how American rocket scientists and engineers are -- they're all worried about safety and stuff, and they live in liberal California where houses cost a million bucks. They're so arrogant, they think they know everything and you have to pay 'em so much. It's much cheaper using Russian engineers who get paid peanuts, drink nothing but vodka and live in barracks in Samara (yeah, I'm just making that last part up).

Fortunately, SpaceX, the upstart company founded by Elon Musk, has now been cleared to compete with ULA for launching these sensitive payloads. And Musk's launch vehicles -- made in America -- are cheaper than ULA's Russian-based rockets.  If Congress doesn't pass a bill to allow ULA to buy Russian rocket engines, ULA will be out of a job and SpaceX will have the monopoly on launches.

Rocket engines aren't the only place we have a technological vulnerability. Our entire computing infrastructure is dependent on semiconductors, computers and networking hardware made in foreign countries, primarily China.

The United States invented semiconductor and networking technology, but to increase profits corporations sent the vast majority of semiconductor manufacturing overseas, mostly to China. Design centers soon followed, and now the United States is totally dependent on Asia for our computing hardware.

There's no way to know whether the state-owned Chinese corporations that build this equipment have installed backdoors in the chips, computers, and network routers our military is buying.

The lesson? Corporations have no loyalty to America. They're in business -- they keep telling us -- only to "increase shareholder value." Can you really trust people with our national security when they tell you straight to your face that the only thing they care about is money?

This is another reason not to be so trusting about free-trade treaties -- not only are we forcing American workers to compete with low-wage workers in countries like Vietnam, but are we opening the door for them to compete on contracts for critical military infrastructure? We don't know -- the treaty's secret!