Secret supply chain wars: How nations play high-tech hide and seek

Earlier this year a high-tech operation (likely done by israel) knocked-out Hezbollahʼs communication system but this wasnt anything new in spy-games history

The US government now puts lots of money into fixing supply-chain problems: they started the CHIPS program made deals with Intel in Arizona and work with countries like Mexico and Philippines. The White House even made a special council for this but its kinda late to start caring about it now

• Department of Defense wrote its first supply chain plan
• Many new tech-making places are being built
• Government started checking weak points in the system

Back in Cold War times Vladimir Vetrov (a KGB spy) gave France about 4‚000 documents that showed how soviets were stealing tech secrets; This info helped CIA trick USSR with bad space shuttle designs and broken computer parts. The FBI also did cool stuff - they used an austrian guy to sell soviets millions of dollars worth of broken tech

Modern problems are way different though - Xi Jinpingʼs China isnt like old USSR. China makes stuff everyone wants and knows how to mix spying with normal business. They have a whole system where companies must help government spy when asked: thats why people worry about things like TikTok huawei and even those big cranes at US ports

The digital world changed everything too; The SolarWinds hack showed how one small software update can let spies get into many important places at once. Its harder to tell if someone is just looking around or planning to break things

Right now US government needs to work better with private companies because thats where most new tech comes from. About 85% of important stuff is owned by regular businesses not the government‚ so they need to be friends not just customers and sellers