The Defense Department weakened our national security on Feb. 29, when it gave a $35-billion contract to a European group for the creation of a new fleet of aerial-refueling aircraft, rejecting an offer from Chicago-based Boeing, the longtime supplier of the airplanes.

By purchasing aircraft from the group, which featured Boeing's France-based rival Airbus, we are contributing in a major way—the deal could swell to $100 billion—to outsourcing our national security. It's similar, although on a larger scale, to the decision to give the contract to develop the new fleet of Marine One presidential helicopters to a foreign conglomerate rather than the longtime producer, Stratford, Conn.-based Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.

These deeply flawed contracts provide rich stimulus projects to foreign countries at the expense of our aerospace industry and its high-skill workers.

Not only should we refrain from deals like this with corporations that are not based in the United States, we should not have be reliant on other countries to supply us with aircraft or services vital to our national security.

Rather than dismantling our industrial base and sending funds for major projects overseas, full production and maintenance capacity—including facilities that smelt the steel used to create these aircraft and companies with work forces that are experienced in making and repairing them—should be in action here in the U.S.

While international trade is vital to our world's economy and can raise living standards for people worldwide, we need to more thoroughly recognize the difference between trading for goods and services that are, say, sold at neighborhood Costco stores and those that we rely on for national security.

Our government needs to understand this difference, as do corporations that pursue financial interests even if state secrets and national safety are compromised.

A good example of stopping a bad plan occurred in 2006, when the Teamsters Union led a campaign to stop the United Arab Emirates-based DP World from taking over the operations at six U.S. seaports.

Last month, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States made the right call by seriously scrutinizing the sale of the U.S.-based 3Com, which creates equipment used by the Pentagon and federal agencies to stop intrusions into secure computer networks. The sale was scrapped because the group bidding on 3Com included China-based Huawei, which has associations with the Chinese military and was linked by several intelligence reports as recently as 2004 to being a defense contractor operating in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

The outsourcing of aircraft maintenance is another major concern—just ask the United Airlines mechanics and related workers. Some 9,300 of these skilled workers resoundingly chose to join the Teamsters last month because we understand the real danger the outsourcing of aircraft maintenance poses to national security.

From 1996 through 2006, major U.S. airlines' outsourcing expenses increased from 37 percent to 64 percent, and the number of foreign repair facilities grew from 344 to 698 over a comparable period.

As outsourcing expanded, regulatory standards and oversight have failed to keep pace. Background checks, duty-time limitations, and alcohol and drug testing are much more lax at foreign stations than they are in the United States. For example, supervisors and inspectors who sign off on maintenance work at foreign repair stations are not required to hold a Federal Aviation Administration repairman certificate or an airframe and power-plant certificate, and neither are mechanics working on the aircraft at these facilities.

Increased outsourcing is a domestic security risk. In the U.S., FAA-certificated repair stations have standards for personnel background checks and restricted access to aircraft. Foreign repair stations lack these precautions. Outside of our borders, only flimsy safeguards prevent a terrorist from exploiting an opportunity to do us harm by tampering with airline systems or inserting explosives into aircraft while they are undergoing maintenance. (Despite a mandate in 2003 to create a security standard for repair stations and audit foreign stations, the Transportation Security Administration has yet to do so.)

Continued outsourcing of maintenance and awarding defense contracts to foreign-based companies are bad for our national security.