Here’s a crazy story.
Apparently, the Navy purchased 450 counterfeit, VHF/UHF antennas for $165,000. Now, that in itself is pretty crazy. That works out to nearly $370 per antenna. But, these are special, wearable, presumably very high-reliability antennas, so maybe that’s OK. (You can get them online, in single unit quantities, for $450 each.)
What happened here is that the purchase required that the antennas be bought from a small manufacturer or distributor. Mastodon, the manufacturer of the antenna, previously qualified for this designation, but they were recently purchased by a larger defense contractor and lost that status.
Somehow, a small company called Vizocom got wind of this and jumped into the breach. Instead of purchasing the antennas from Mastodon, however, they bought knockoffs from China. Vizocom paid just a little over $12,000 for the antennas that they resold to the Navy for $165,000.
The reporters discovered that Vizocom was just a shell company. It has no real offices. The company operates out of a single-family home in El Cajon, CA.
I know that $165,000 is a drop in the bucket, compared to the overall defense budget, but you’d think that the Armed Forces would have better incoming quality control, wouldn’t you?