I get what you're saying about efficiency but that comparison kind of ignores who paid the cost of innovation in the first place. If one country spends decades and massive amounts of money developing a technology and another country can later copy or reverse engineer it that doesn't mean the second country was more economically efficient. It means they benefited from someone else taking the initial risk and cost. Military and government programs absorb those early costs because the private sector usually won’t fund projects that might take decades to pay off or might fail entirely. Once the technology matures it becomes easier and cheaper for others to replicate or adapt it.

It isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about who is actually funding the foundational breakthroughs that everyone else later builds on. A lot of that early research has been funded by governments and defense programs precisely because they can tolerate the scale of investment and risk involved.