U.S. Pentagon faces difficulties in excluding Huawei from its work: Report

U.S. Pentagon is allegedly facing difficulties in completely pulling off Huawei from its operations. The latest information reveals that the U.S. Military Department is unable to fully avoid doing business with Huawei or companies that rely on it.

The Pentagon is the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defence in Virginia. It’s the world’s second-largest office building with 23000 military/civilian employees.

Inputs show that the U.S. Pentagon is now struggling with laws that restrict doing business with Huawei. As per a 2019 rule, the Pentagon can’t cooperate with any firm or company using Huawei network or any other technological equipment.

But it seems the headquarters is unable to comply with this law. The Pentagon is somewhat refusing the regulation and believes that it’s tough to avoid business with the world’s largest telecommunications provider – Huawei and its partners.

It’s so because Huawei holds one-third of global telecommunications equipment revenue. The Chinese tech giant is so well-established in foreign countries that it’s slightly difficult to remove it from scratch. It is also difficult to find Huawei’s alternatives.

The former Defence Department official – Brennan Grignon kept her concern. She said that though the authorities made laws based on the nation’s security in the past, they might have not thought of how it would result or affect in the time ahead.

“There are certain parts of the world where you literally cannot get away from Huawei. The original legislation had very good intentions behind it, but the execution and understanding of the implications of what it would mean, I personally think that wasn’t really thought through.”

As of now, the Pentagon is pushing for an exemption on this matter. However, the U.S. government believes that it would affect national security. The House and Senate committees further denied including a release in the 2025 National Defence Authorization Act.

Despite several trade export regulations and programs like ‘Rip and Replace‘, the U.S. is unable to abolish the complete effect of Huawei. Some countries even declined to participate in these programs as the U.S. doesn’t have good alternatives to Huawei.

Clyde Prestowitz – the President of the Economic Strategy Institute says that he has sympathy with the Pentagon as it has to form a big network for making connections in Asia-Pacific and Europe. But they are quite lazy.

“For companies in those areas, to have a big business with the US Department of Defense is important. And I feel that we should be taking every step to eliminate Huawei where we can.” – Clyde

Although most of the U.S. military personnel still depend on Huawei networks worldwide to carry out major operations. The Pentagon also believes that the release in this matter would help the U.S. to purchase many items that may help in U.S. security interests. It won’t extend the release to the risk extent.

(Source – Bloomberg)