Exploding Pagers Sound Global Alarm for Supply-Chain Security
September 19, 2024 at 1:43 PM PDT

•Blasts show that supply vulnerabilities can be weaponized
•Interdependence hard to escape amid global diversification

Thousands of pagers and other devices exploding in Lebanon this week mark a new and deadly escalation in the use of supply chains against adversaries, giving new urgency to global leaders’ drive to reduce their dependence on technologies from rivals.
Lebanese officials believe the gadgets were rigged with explosives as part of an elaborate attack allegedly by Israel on Hezbollah, penetrating the Iran-backed group’s procurement chain with links from Taiwan to Hungary.
While booby-trapped devices have been used in spycraft for years, the scale and violence of the attacks in Lebanon - which killed at least 37 people, including two children, and injured about 2,300 more - alarmed even some seasoned officials. They fear the globalized supply chains that help produce cheap goods and power global growth could become weapons in the hands of foreign adversaries.
“When you depend on other nations for key inputs or technology you give them a back door into everything you do,” said Melanie Hart, who until recently was a senior State Department official responsible for these issues and now is at the Atlantic Council. “This is a demonstration of what it looks like to weaponize that dependence.”
US officials have long acknowledged that the US is too dependent on China for a variety of goods and services and in recent years the government has begun seeking to move some vital supply chains, especially those that touch on national security, to the US, a process known as on-shoring, or moving them to friendly countries, known as friend-shoring.
“If Israel can do this, China can do it too,” said US Representative Seth Moulton. “Long, opaque supply chains leave gaps that can too easily be exploited, and we need a strategy for closing them in close collaboration with our allies.”
A former senior US intelligence official described the Lebanese blasts as just the latest and most dramatic of a number of supply-chain attacks underway around the world at the moment. They often take years to prepare and tend to be narrowly targeted to limit collateral damage, the official said, asking not to be identified to discuss matters that aren’t public. Interdiction operations - where goods are intercepted and tampered with before delivery to their ultimate recipient - are rampant, the former official said.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exploding-pagers-sound-global-alarm-204343080.html