For those who dare to remember history older than the yesterday NYT they're wrapping garbage in, there were two big scandals over high end VAXes being shipped to Russia back in the eighties when such machines were much sought after. In one instance, there was great wailing and gnashing of teeth, in the second instance, it was quietly handled with people fired and a couple of OEMs in the US and Europe put out of business.
Come to find out, in the first instance the machines had some flawed components to have a high failure rate when the machines were operating near capacity, as well as components with known flaws that were extremely hard to detect once those components were integrated into a system.
In the second instance, three US and European OEMs got together and set up an elaborate scheme to have the machines go through multiple hands and end up in Russia in a way they thought couldn't be traced back to them but a source inside Russia reported the arrival of the machines and their scheme things were tracked back to the OEMs involved.
Whether the components involved are critical or not is a whole different matter given the fact that most of the fabs, even for specialized military equipment, are no longer within the US anyway. Given that fact, knowing exactly how many of a given component is produced, and especially, how many of the components that are discarded due to defects are actually defective is nearly impossible.
Sometimes when public hand waving over such things is done it's justified, sometimes it's done to focus attention on anyone other than those really responsible, and sometimes it's to try and help convince the final recipient that they've gotten what they paid for without looking at it too closely.
Given the fact that there's a Presidential election campaign in full swing, it's hard to say which hand waving category this is in. I hope that if it's justified everyone involved is tracked down and actually punished to the full extent of the law rather than having a harshly worded letter sent to them by some regulatory body.
Fair enough, although I will say that if the culprit was China I doubt some folks would be so “reticent.”