BAD HARDWARE WEEK

Last September, Israeli jets bombed a suspected nuclear installation in northeastern Syria. Among the many mysteries still surrounding that strike was the failure of a Syrian radar--supposedly state-of-the-art--to warn the Syrian military of the incoming assault. It wasn't long before military and technology bloggers concluded that this was an incident of electronic warfare--and not just any kind.

Post after post speculated that the commercial off-the-shelf microprocessors in the Syrian radar might have been purposely fabricated with a hidden ”backdoor” inside. By sending a preprogrammed code to those chips, an unknown antagonist had disrupted the chips' function and temporarily blocked the radar.
French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum . If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, ”the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said.
The US DOD also maintained its own chip-making plant at Fort Meade, near Washington, D.C., until the early 1980s, when costs became prohibitive. But these days, the U.S. military consumes only about 1 percent of the world's integrated circuits.