“A lot of US military hardware has specs for chips from the 1990s and earlier.”
Yet the Russians were still relying on Western-made chips for their cruise missile targeting systems and the like. If they can’t even reproduce tech we were using 30 years ago, I don’t think it’s likely they will catch up to us anytime soon, at least as far as high tech weapons are concerned.
Yes, because Russian missile guidance technology is all open source, publicly available, and easily analyzed by anyone on Free Republic, or MSNBC.
A lot of this difficulty of “keeping up” has to do with population. Russia has maybe 1/10th of China’s population, and maybe 1/3 of our own.