The DoD maintains its own registry of hardened container images they call the Iron Bank. I guess they can't issue guidelines to the general public that you should use these, but the DoD has to use them. Which kind of sucks, because they may be hardened, but they also break all the time because the people responsible for hardening them can't possibly understand all the myriad subleties involved in building and deploying software packaged with dependencies in the same way the actual software vendors do. They make some serious rookie mistakes, like just straight copying executables out of a Fedora image into a UBI images, which works perfectly fine when a brand-new UBI release happens and it's on the same glibc as Fedora, then immediately stops working and all your containers break when Fedora updates.
They may suck at building containers, but this also sounds like a release management issue. Both the producers and consumers of the release need a test suite to validate the new artifacts before they can make it into a pipeline to eventually deliver to a customer use case. (But also they should 100% not be copying random binaries)
For what it's worth I've seen worse from corporations. Bad hires lead to bad systems.
I work on Platform one and we use and deploy new versions of these containers weekly and have never had them break in that way. In the Beginning when I was on the Kubernetes team we struggled with the containers just not working at all but they have gotten better.
Now I work on deploying and we run every container from IB and have few issues. If you find them report the images and they will fix them pretty quick.
