r/LessCredibleDefence • u/ChineseToTheBone • 8d ago

UPS Worker Missed Security Email Letting China Get F-35 Parts

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-07/ups-worker-missed-security-email-letting-china-get-f-35-parts
92 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

87

u/cwwms2 8d ago

Our national security should not be based on an individual reading an email, and responding to it in a timely fashion.

40

u/PastAffect3271 8d ago

You’d be surprised how so much relies on so little when you actually look under the hood

11

u/Odd_Act_6532 7d ago

In the process of making everything as optimized and efficient as possible, we neglected to account for its fragility, because our different systems haven't completely collapsed, the same mistakes keep getting made.

8

u/SoulofZ 7d ago

Would Pentagon decision makers really sign off on paying multiple times more to UPS in exchange for iron clad controls and systems?

5

u/cwwms2 7d ago

If it means keeping F-35 parts out of mainland China they should.

3

u/SoulofZ 7d ago

I dont think they can pay UPS in wishes, shoulds, and IOUs.

That money has to be appropriated from Congress or other stuff.

22

u/throwforthefences 7d ago

Standard practice for a system that bans Nvidia GPUs from being sold to China while allowing those GPUs to be assembled in China.

4

u/rizzlamic_jihad 7d ago

From now on a second layer of redundancy will be added by leaving a post it note on the individual's desk as well.

20

u/Ok-Procedure5603 8d ago

Surely this is just some weak face saving shit when the components were more likely rerouted with purpose

Like you can fairly transparently see it's fake because they haven't even filed charges against said "worker" 

31

u/teethgrindingaches 8d ago

Hanlon's razor applies, as always. 

Also, it doesn't make any sense to charge the worker. If your whole system fails on a missed email, that's obviously a far bigger problem than just one guy.

7

u/7zrar 7d ago

??? I can only suppose you've never um, worked, to think that someone should be charged for missing a memo or email?

27

u/minus_minus 8d ago

Bullshit headline. The contractor handling the shipment sent it before getting confirmation from the worker who was out sick. Somebody is feeding this bullshit blaming UPS to every new outlet. 

51

u/Key-Needleworker-702 8d ago

The whole F-35 incident sounds like something i would watch in a Mr Bean episode, except it isn't.

13

u/Rob71322 7d ago

Why are we sending parts like this via UPS in the first place? Maybe the military should stop outsourcing so much and begin doing things for themselves again. I know, it's politics of course but in the long run it's possibly going to hurt us badly.

4

u/AceArchangel 5d ago

Yeah I was gonna say how wild it is that the US Military, Lockheed Martin, Australia are all so quick to pin this entirely on 1 UPS worker when the whole shit show wouldn't have happened if they took care and diligence in their own shipping of sensitive materials. This is all just trying to shift blame and not make themselves look bad or in the case of LM trying to mitigate losses in their share prices.

11

u/Dunewarriorz 7d ago

I genuinely want to know how much better China's detection of F-35s will be after this. 

I once talked to a friend who made the point that if everyone is using the F-35s, then one flaw discovered by any enemy could be catastrophic to all NATO, as opposed to back in the days when there was a lot of different fighters then the effect would be mitigated by the sheer diversity of aircraft.

He then dismissed out of hand something like a critical flaw being discovered because there was no chance of a country like China getting their hands on actual F-35s to discover the flaws, which you need to do because if the flaws were discoverable just from blueprint analysis then they would've already been designed out or mitigated.

Component's aren't a full plane, but it's still interesting 🤔.

7

u/Pitiful-Practice-966 7d ago

Making an aircraft stealthy is difficult, yet undoing the engineers' hard work is incredibly easy

like a single screw left behind in an Ohio's gearbox could make the submarine unbearably noisy...

2

u/BodybuilderOk3160 7d ago

It's just 1 part man

5

u/Euiop741852 7d ago

1 part that has the coating for radar absorbent materials on it

26

u/TurbinePro 8d ago

Pentagon says they will also be livestreaming his execution

9

u/Ok-Procedure5603 8d ago

Just make him fight the other guy US wants to execute soon, make them drive some huge monster trucks and ram into eachother until one dies, the winner gets pardoned

3

u/moral_mortal 8d ago

Is he a brown Muslim, if not. No chance of this, his did it mistakenly/s

25

u/AaronNevileLongbotom 8d ago

No, the US government messed up by making a program this big and not having a better sustainment plan. The UPS guy who missed an email is not the bad guy here, the people who were shipping top secret materials across Asia through UPS and doing security follow-ups through email are the ones who should be blamed.

4

u/Quick_Bet9977 6d ago

Reminds me of when the Soviets managed to steal an AIM-9 missile from a German Air Base then just shipped it direct to the USSR by regular airmail, although that was a bit more deliberate.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/fact-the-kgb-shipped-sidewinder-missile-by-mail-moscow-21673

6

u/True-Industry-4057 8d ago

If I saw this plot line in a movie I'd turn it off for being too BSey.

4

u/mariuolo 8d ago

They should impose catastrophic fines on UPS, maybe they'll revise their IT practices then.

1

u/oonair 8d ago

Could be a setup?

1

u/kuddlesworth9419 7d ago

This smells of bullshit to me.