Highly reminiscent of Ken Thompson's "Trust in Computing" speech where he talks about how you can't trust anything you have written yourself from scratch, down to the compiler, even if source is available: <a href="http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html" rel="nofollow">http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html</a>
Interesting. I'd expect that sort of thing to mainly be an issue with multinational platforms, like JSF, but the DARPA writeup makes it sound like a more widespread problem.<p>The Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations are looser about it than I expected, too. There's a whole section dealing with foreign suppliers, but the only absolute ban I see on a foreign source is for China: <a href="http://www.acq.osd.mil/dpap/dars/dfars/html/current/225_7.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.acq.osd.mil/dpap/dars/dfars/html/current/225_7.ht...</a><p>That's the evolving battlespace for you, I guess. Wars fought by hackers and robots--coming soon to a theatre near you! It seems weird that such science fiction is already real.
At least most electronics can be made very small, as in they could always develop a backup system from a different contractor if something was important enough.
Mix this kinda stuff with corporate espionage and corrupt insiders, and you are not too far away from the future described by (among others) William Gibson where corporations, not nations, rule and fight wars.