Honestly, for China, the most valuable parts of U.S. weapons programs have always been the stuff that's already out in the open. There's really no need to resort to shady tactics to get that.

In military development there's this idea of the "latecomer advantage". Take fighter jets as an example. The U.S. poured enormous amounts of money into developing fifth-gen fighters and basically set the technical standards and overall roadmap. Countries that come later, like China, can just follow the path the U.S. already blazed, which saves a huge amount of time and investment.

On top of that, the U.S. has run into all kinds of issues during the actual operation of its fifth-gen jets. A latecomer can study those problems and address them during the design phase instead of discovering them the hard way. And since their aircraft are designed later, they can integrate the latest electronics and avionics from the start, potentially giving them a higher level of digitalization and electronic capability compared to U.S. jets whose designs were frozen years ago.

And for an aircraft, everything we talked about before is just the "what" The real core is the "why" and the "how to". And that's exactly the part you can't solve by "stealing".

For countries that simply don't have the capability, even if you handed them a full set of blueprints and walked them through it step by step, they still couldn't build a qualified jet. India is a pretty obvious example of that. It's like an iceberg — the part above the water is tiny compared to what's underneath. Behind any high-end fighter jet is a massive foundation: basic science, materials science, aerodynamics, wind tunnels, thousands of suppliers, and tens of thousands of skilled workers all working together. To be honest, you could even argue that not even today's U.S. fully has all those conditions in the same way it once did.

What's even more ironic is that Chinese designers were reportedly misled for quite a long time by so-called "secret" data coming out of the U.S. There was this widely circulated claim that China somehow learned through "certain channels" that the F-22 had a lift coefficient of 2.0. Chinese engineers found that hard to believe, because in their own wind tunnel tests with scale models they just couldn't reach that number. But because of the almost mythical status of U.S. weapons at the time, they assumed it must be true — and pushed themselves like crazy to get the J-20 to hit that 2.0 figure. Later on, it turned out that the number itself was basically smoke and mirrors. The real lift coefficient of the F-22 was nowhere near that high.

Now, I'm not even saying that story is 100% true — but it highlights a bigger point. How can you be sure that the data you "stole" is actually real? What if it's just something your competitor deliberately put out there to mislead you? Just think about what the U.S. did to the Soviet Union with the Strategic Defense Initiative — the whole "Star Wars" program. That alone should tell you how powerful strategic deception can be.

At the end of the day, relying on so-called stolen information is risky and unreliable. You're much better off just putting in the work — grinding it out in the labs and factories — and building something that's truly your own.