[metaphor]

DoD primes integrate COTS systems, many of which heavily integrate COTS components, e.g. FPGAs designed by Xilinx and manufactured by TSMC.

What the parent is referring to is DMEA's Trusted Foundry Program[1], of which TSMC is not an accredited supplier of foundry services.

[1] https://www.dmea.osd.mil/otherdocs/accreditedsuppliers.pdf

[genmud]

Which ironically they are trying to move away from(custom ASICS), towards more fpga based systems, since they can be somewhat harder to reverse engineer (battery back your memory/processor and scramble the bitstream when the device is tampered with).