Say Anything Blog

July 21, 2006, there was a raid on the Sioux Manufacturing (SMC) plant in Ft. Totten, ND which is on the Ft. Totten Indian Reservation.  SMC is a company owned by the Spirit Lake Sioux Indian tribe and has had government contracts since it opened.  Specifically, since 1994 they have been manufacturing the Kevlar armor needed for our combat soldiers including those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No reporters or journalists showed up to cover the event because when it comes to Indian country, the press just waits to be told whatever the government wants them to know.  The only information about the raid that was reported came from a press release issued by the government:

“The government’s investigation determined that from 1994 to 2006, the company sold finished aramid cloth—or Kevlar—to UNICOR Federal Prison Industries, which then used it to manufacture Personnel Armour System Ground Troops helmets. With each delivery of the Kevlar, Sioux Manufacturing certified its product met the required military specifications, one of which dictates a specific number of woven yarns per square inch of finished cloth. The investigation found evidence that, on occasion, the company knowingly delivered cloth that did not meet specifications.”

If you read the court documents that describe the Qui tam (whistleblower) filing, and you read the partial transcripts of the recorded conversations with SMC’s quality control person, you realize that these lapses in product quality were not “occasional” but rather an ongoing fraud upon the government and our soldiers whose lives and limbs depended on the product being made by SMC.

The government was quick to minimize the severity and longevity of the inferior products to make this ugly situation go away.

In the world of government contracts, politics is king.  Often retired military brass get lucrative jobs lobbying or procuring for the military.  Political cronyism runs rampant, even where lives are at stake, and the safety and security of our nation is at risk.  The dollar is God. 

Most interesting is this: The U.S. Attorney in ND, Drew Wrigley, said several federal agencies had concluded that the weaves were inadequate, but did not result in any harm to U.S. troops.  Yet according to inspection logs the Kevlar produced by SMC routinely fell short of standards.  Instead of 35x35 threads per inch (a standard required by military standards for Kevlar armor and helmets), some batches were in the low 20’s or less!

I would be interested to know who conducted any tests, and what the parameters of those tests were, that proved no one had been harmed by these inferior products.  The only way to prove it, and the military owes it to the soldiers and personnel who were put at risk to prove it, is to take the equipment worn by every soldier that was injured or killed and see a) If that equipment was indeed one of the hundreds of thousands of inferior products and b) whether or not it failed.

No other ‘test’ is really durable under the scrutiny of common sense and diligence. 

But the US Government is the kind of club where they get to investigate themselves, their friends and their partners and deliver, without question, a result that makes no sense.  It would seem that the only truly bullet proof part of this are the contractors and vendors and the lucrative millions that flow between them.  Sioux Manufacturing continues to produce products for the US military, including Kevlar body armor, to this day.