We require material certifications WITH parts attesting to the source of materials, as well as Lockheed and Boeing approved sources when it comes to any processes performed on these materials.
I don't know what this article is talking about, but I have first hand experience in this area and see the documentation for materials that go into fighter jets, missiles, helicopters various weapons systems, motion control devices etc, and they meet the domestic source requirements.
I recently rejected and returned thousands of dollars worth of gears from a supplier who mistakenly used alloy steel from Taiwan.
I've never seen any materials come from China.
Perhaps our government and the ChiComs are too smart for you.
You are an inspector for A company. There are other companies involved in these contracts and you can't know what they're bringing in and inspecting.
Maybe you haven't dealt with the servo-motors area much.
Parts is parts.
Your component-suppliers... likely utilize raw material (comes in a powder form) from wherever. [ Do your shippers tell you where their fuel to do the shipping comes from...? No. ]
Furthermore, the stringency you are assuming isn't real-world. Specifying 'domestic' materials is not consistent with the 50% domestic content on overall system sourcing for defense contractors. Remember when House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter tried to up it from 50% to 75%? The Shit Hit the Fan at the White House. The President threatened a veto...(his first and only such threat until the Dubai Ports debacle).
The DOD would not so restrict a contract on components derived from rare earths. Quite a number of materials supplies are just not in the U.S. Chromium for one example. And Titanium for another example. Remember when the SR-71 was built? We bought most of the titanium for its fuselage on the sly from the Soviet Union. I doubt they ever would have sold it if they knew what a major advantage we were realizing from their sale...
The Chinese on the other hand, know precisely how critical these super-magnets are to our aerospace, with superior power to weight ratios and vastly greater resistance to heat and vibration. The Chi-Comms have been manifesting all the classic signs of trying to monopolize the supplies of the ores. They tried to snap up UNOCAL last year. And Deng Xiou Ping openly bragged of making China the "Saudi Arabia of Super Magnets."
And a big Part of that "glut" in the market another freeper alludes to is...a product of Chinese dumping to dry up the foreign operations...drive them out of business. He also alludes to infringing on the patents...well guess who is the biggest infringer of all. Yep. China. Puts further pressure on the survival of U.S. and Western supermagnet operations...with their intellectual property interests in the dumpster.
And the U.S. government is frankly AWOL when it comes to IP enforcement against China...or protecting our defense and security industrial supply-chain.