—”Raytheon Electronic Systems “
An old engineer I worked with had previously worked for Raytheon, not a storyteller, but he had one questionable tale.
The story was that some early missile systems used core memory that was hand-assembled... but they could not find Americans skilled in the work and were allowed to ship it to Taiwan...and the Taiwanese, in turn, subbed it out to the Chinese!
So our early missile memory systems were MADE IN CHINA!
Possible?
Dubious. I recall around 1998 the Defense Department made everyone at Raytheon take ethics training because some jerk at Beech (a Raytheon subsidiary at the time) had used Chinese parts in a training plane manufactured by Beech. Burned me that a government controlled by William J. Clinton was making me, a survivor of 12 years of Catholic schooling, take ethics training.
The Patriot Engagement Controller (semi trailer loaded with electronics and two officers that interfaces between the ground radar and firing units) incorporated Chinese made LCD numeric displays because China was the only country making them. That required a life-time buy of spares at initial acquisition.
I also worked on the Taiwanese Surveillance Radar System, the world’s largest and most powerful UHF radar (Muscled up version of PAVE PAWS.) It has something like 6,000 400 Watt power amps, and they go through a lot of high power transistors, needing regular replacement. The Taiwan Air Force, God bless and keep them, took over many maintenance tasks from Raytheon. Raytheon was doing a lot of this maintenance in country, with local suppliers performing routine tasks like replacing burned out transistors, but the TAF wanted to do it “in house”, with TAF personnel. They had trouble obtaining parts, and they have a strict no Chinese content policy. I wonder where the Raytheon contractors got their parts from?