Adversaries are developing key hardware and software for the United States Department of Defense. The Defense Science Board Task Force (dsbt) issued a September 2007 report warning, “The United States must now confront—and plan for—the reality that adversaries may well be supplying the key hardware and software on which the U.S. bases its military and economic superiority.” The primary fear is that foreign-developed security software may come preprogrammed with backdoors and malicious code that would allow hackers to steal information or sabotage the system.

Because it is cheaper to do so, the U.S. has outsourced much of its government software development, including Department of Security software, to foreign nations—primarily India, China and Russia. While the U.S. saves money in this arrangement, it is likely to pay in national security.

“While the United States still has preeminence in computer science, Asia is rapidly gaining,” the report says. “The United States retains a pool of talented computer scientists and engineers, but the natural tendency of the industry is to seek the lowest cost supply of talent. In recent years that has been primarily in India, while China and Russia are on the rise.”

A generation ago, America’s adversaries were wary of U.S.-developed software because they knew it might be used as a weapon against them. Now the tables have turned. Task force chairman Robert Lucky said in an introductory letter to the dsbt report that low-level malicious technologies have already infiltrated sensitive, yet unclassified, Department of Defense systems.

The ease with which foreign-developed software could be hacked by the developer nation’s computer scientists could well leave the United States vulnerable to attack. “Globalization of software development, where some of the United States adversaries are writing the code the [Department of Defense] will depend upon in war, creates a rich opportunity to damage or destroy elements of the war fighter’s capability,” the report says.

The United States’ reliance on foreign computer security systems may prove to be the seeds of its downfall. As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has written, “We could lose the next war before we even begin, if somebody breaks our military codes.”