Say What?

SayAnythingBlog has been doing a few posts on how Sioux Manufacturing of North Dakota systematically cheapened Kevlar fabric intended for use in body armor for our soldiers. Now a few things catch my eye about this, starting with the fact that it wasn't just Sioux that ignored the problem for a long time; it was also "Unicor Federal Prison Industries" and the Army itself.

For starters, this suggests that some heads way up need to roll for cheapening body armor. When every QC organization misses a problem, that at least suggests somebody up high was working to insure that things "slide by."

Worse, what on earth are we doing trusting prisoners to make body armor? We start with a group of people who are in that factory because of their disregard for life and property, pay them a pittance for their work, and then we're going to assume they're going to do their jobs as well as free men paid a real wage? I can understand license plates and picking up road trash--the penalty for failure isn't high. But body armor?

Leave it to government to make sure that we have plenty of potentially lethal lapses in product quality.