A load of F-35 spare parts meant to move faster from Australia to the US was diverted through Hong Kong after a United Parcel Service Inc. employee missed instructions banning passage through countries covered by US International Traffic in Arms Regulations. China ended up with the parts.
The shipment was supposed to follow a shortcut route to San Francisco, stopping in South Korea and Taiwan, but it did not stay on that path. The freight forwarder DSV A/S had already flagged the box as carrying an F-35 cockpit canopy and a weapons-bay door, both treated with radar-absorbing material, and had done so while acting for Lockheed Martin Corp. when it warned handlers about the ITAR restrictions.
The reason this matters now is that Pentagon officials laid out new details during an approximately hour-long Sept. 29 briefing with staff from the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees, adding fresh weight to a case that had already surfaced last month. Lockheed manages a large share of the global spare-parts pool that keeps F-35s flying for the US and 19 other countries, so even one lost shipment ripples beyond a single route.
That wider system also explains the friction in the handling of the case. Lockheed said it could not discuss which logistics partner was involved and, when the new timeline was put to it on Wednesday, said it had nothing to add or correct. United States Transportation Command said it was not involved in the transportation or coordination of the shipment in question, while the Defense Department described the parts as unserviceable.
Erica Plath said she had assembled a team taking steps to prevent a repeat, and the Pentagon said it was actively working with US authorities and industry partners to retrieve the components, investigate the incident, and place safeguards to avoid a future occurrence. The open question is not whether the shipment went wrong; it is how a box that had already been flagged, and then routed under export controls, still ended up in the wrong hands.
