I’ve been out of the TS-SCI world for 15 years now and what you said about the Chinese military tech vs Russian military tech was true back then. My former co-workers and friends whom are still in that business, or have recently retired, have told me that the Chinese military tech is now considered equal to Russian military tech and is on trajectory to rapidly surpass the Russians in quality and performance. Of course neither are any where close to the US, Japan, Israel or the UK when it comes to military technology.
When Ronald Reagan left office the US had about a 25 to 39 year lead in military technology on our most capable adversaries at that time. After obama left office that lead was said to be down to 10 years, mainly because Bush, Clinton, Bush and obama allowed the Chinese to steal so many US military secrets that they’ve been able to start reverse engineering our weapons and platforms. But with the huge investment made by the Trump Administration and the R’s in Congress, I think we’re going to be 25 years ahead again, relatively quickly, approx 7 to 10 years. Think about it, next year the FLT III Arleigh Burke Class DDG’s are going to start hitting the water with their incredible SPY-6 Radar and an advanced version of the AEGIS Combat System and also they will be armed with the SM-6 anti-ballistic missile, missile, which can knock out enemy nuclear warheads in their coast or terminal phase, and soon there after, Directed Energy (Lasers) weapons are going to begin to be deployed in the fleet; Laser weapons have also been miniaturized so much in the last few years, soon (2022 or 23) our Air Force and Navy Fighter aircraft are going to be deployed with them also. By the mid to late 20’s we’re also going to start deploying the FFG(x) (Frigate replacement) and Large Surface Combatant (Cruiser replacement). We are also very close to deploying a working, unlike Russia’s, hyper-sonic cruise missile. We’re going to start deploying the new Columbia Ballistic Missile Submarine in the late 2020’s, and of course there’s the B-21 Strategic Stealth Bomber in the 2030’s, F-35’s are starting to be deployed in numbers right now. These weapons systems and the platforms that carry them, alone will put the US back up by 25 or 30 years in the tech race, and I’m sure DARPA is working on some other stuff that will move our military tech lead out even further.
OOPS, meant 25 to 30 year lead, not 25 to 39.