In the 1930s, the Soviet Union sent hundreds of hand-picked engineers to study aviation in the USA. The reason was very simple: the US production was the more advanced in the world. The game paid over and over. The USSR of the second war was very different from he backward country Hitler imagined.
Wrong tactics made heavy losses of soviet aircraft on the ground. But the core base of production was already established. Thanks to the USA. The transfer of technology to the USSR from the USA lasted decades, and changed forever the geopolitics of the world. Part of it was legal, and other part was spying. Both parts worked well, and today it is considered the biggest coup in intellectual property theft of the century.
The truth is that the knowledge stolen from the USA had a great part in the Nazi defeat by the USSR.
The FBI only finished its long sleep about soviet spies well into the 1950s. Spy rings were discovered and many imprisonments executed. The Soviet effort to steal secrets of he aviation industry were not limited. Nuclear secrets were also penetrated and reproduced. Historians today think that the 'Cambridge Five' were jus a decoy for the real effort.
But the main problem of the arms industry of the USA was its privatisation. Private companies in the sector put the profits of their partners far above the national interests of the USA. In Russia, a phone call from a minister to a factory starts the production of a given arms platform. But not in the USA. Prolonged negotiations are necessary to ensure the right gains for the owners of the company.
This bureaucratic process, summed to the quick absolescency of the arms platforms, turns American arms obsolete even before they are deployed.
This is the way the Russian and Chinese arms industry managed to surpass the US. The complex of state-owned and private-owned concerns are closely connected to the national interests, and not to their private owners. This s a winning game.
The owners of Northrop and others are very rich, but the US is not winning this nightmare cavalcade towards nuclear war. The Industrial Military Complex denounced by Eisenhower is today in full blown operation. But the reduction of that industry to a small conglomerate of oligarchs endangers the US arms production in a very dangerously way. American arms platforms cost much more than their counterparts in China and Russia, and this is very damaging.
At the core of Russian and Chinese defense industry there is a powerful set of state-owned enterprises capable of directing the efforts of the private sector. And this is working very well, against the dogmas of private enterprise superiority prevailing in the West.
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