It is still unclear how many members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah were killed when thousands of member pagers exploded simultaneously. Just the next day, Hezbollah walkie-talkies suffered similar malfunctions. Sadly, news of bombings, explosions, and death is commonplace in 2024 in the Middle East. But this latest operation, likely at the hands of Israeli intelligence tacticians, has news outlets and pundits questioning the role of of global supply chains, rightly or wrongly. 

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The majority of electronics manufacturers outsource production to multiple companies along the supply chain. In the case of the Hezbollah pagers, they were manufactured in Taiwan, assembled in Hungary, and eventually found their way to Lebanon. 

In a related story, a US congressional investigation has found that Chinese cargo cranes used at seaports throughout the US have embedded monitoring technology. There is no direct connection as of yet to Beijing, but an environment where third-party companies are regularly handling critical components with questionable or no oversight shows how difficult monitoring the supply chain can be.

In recent years more and more firms have been tasked with policing their supplier chains. Human rights abuses were historically at the forefront, where companies were pressured to ensure products were not being sourced or manufactured by workers subject to inhumane conditions. In 2017, France was the first country to mandate supply chain policing, and the European Union has done a good job of promoting more stringent supervision.

Stateside, California enacted the Supply Chain Transparency Act with the objective of “eradicating human trafficking and slavery.” In 2021, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was passed by Congress, banning imported goods from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, home to the Uyghr people who have undergone extensive state suppression.

While cracking down on inhumane pratices has become commonplace, ensuring every actor along a supply chain has only the product’s best interest at heart is an ambitious task. In the case of the Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, it is likely that Hezbollah simply purchased them from a shell company run by Israeli intelligence. Intercepting an order that large and manipulating the pagers with explosives in a short-period of time would have required an agency or team much larger than anything Israel currently has access to. 

There will be plenty of articles and commentary on the fragility of supply chains and their relative opaqueness. While this might be true to some extent, Hezbollah exploding pagers did not explode due to failures in global supply chains.