“Cotton presses Hegseth to review supply chains after F-35 parts ended up in China”, 29 September 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
The file on institutional accountability got three new pages this week, and none of them answer the first question anyone asked back in the spring.
The Pentagon has already confirmed it took months to discover a data breach that had exposed records on nearly 3 million people, the discovery late and the damage counted later still. Nearly five months have now passed since Secretary Pete Hegseth and General Dan Caine last stood at a podium and said how the Iran war is going for the more than 440 service members hurt in it since March. The corps built to answer either question is a fifth smaller this month, thinned under a new promotion test, while the department has frozen hiring for the civilian faculty who train whoever remains.…
…(cont) CBS News reported that F-35 fighter jet parts — shipped somewhere, tracked by no one who has said where — turned up in China's hands, the report surfacing the same week President Trump sat across from China's Xi Jinping. The department has not said how many parts are unaccounted for, or how many other programs run the same route.
It had been warned, twice, in writing. On September 3, Undersecretary of War Emil Michael posted, over his own name, that the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic remains a designated "Supply Chain Risk" to the department and the defense industrial base, a federal court's ruling notwithstanding. On September 14, the Department of Energy put money behind the same worry, offering $16 million for mining education programs meant, the agency said, to end China's control of the mineral supply chain. The department left the connection to its own fighter jet unspoken.
On Tuesday, Senator Tom Cotton, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, pressed Hegseth to review the military's supply chains. The request came after the parts had already made the trip. A review is not an inventory, and the department has not said which one it owes first — the parts, or the count.
The arithmetic isn't hard, even where the malarkey around it is thick: an institution that took months to notice a breach, five months to update on its wounded, and cut a fifth of its own generals' corps, now finds its own hardware inside a rival country and calls that an occasion for a memo.
In lieu of flowers, the department is asked to publish one number: how many F-35 parts are missing, and where the rest of them are.
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“They fire a fifth of the generals whose whole job was counting, and act shocked when the count comes up short — of wounded, of stolen hardware, of anybody left to answer for either. This isn't chaos, it's the design: thin out the watchmen first, and the parts walk out the door on their own. Somebody made money getting those parts to China, and it sure wasn't the guy paying for the jet.”
“Senator Cotton asking for a supply-chain review is oversight doing exactly what it's supposed to — Republicans catching this themselves, nobody covering anything up. It's not like the Pentagon lost the parts on purpose, and the breach, the five months without a briefing, the generals cut, that's — okay, hearing it all together does sound bad. But a review got requested, that's the story here, not what already left the building. Did I just say that part out loud? Strike that.”
Welcome to The Hill's Defense & NatSec newsletter {beacon} Defense &National Security Defense &National Security The Big Story Cotton presses Hegseth to review supply chains after F-35 parts ended up in China Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pressed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday to…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
