gambit
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Absolutely. There are two main reasons on why a 'reverse engineering' endeavor is started: To learn or to copy. The two reasons may create some overlapping programs but those programs took their directions from either of the main reasons.Nobody has to reinvent the wheel. China was far behind in military technology so they reverse engineered many weapons to catch up with the West and Russia. This has been learning process for China and I think in this decade we will see them start developing weapons from their own designs.
The reverse engineering endeavor cannot begin unless there is a finalized product, be it the wheel or an aircraft. The product is disassembled to as low a component level as possible, contingent upon the disassembler's technological competency. The greater said competency, the more subsystems can be individually studied and characterized.
Engineers who specialized in product characterizations are important at this point as they are collectively the intellectual bridge between components or subsystems and the final product. Characterization engineers must reconcile and correlate the theoretical principles that are supposedly associated to their assigned components or subsystems and publish what they believe to be behaviors of those components or subsystems, contingent upon their technological competency, of course.
The 'characterization engineer' is not a job description that anyone can pull out of the air for the sake of this debate...
https://hrprod.ext.ti.com/psc/pspro..._JOB_DTL&Action=A&JobOpeningId=36721&SiteId=2
Technical competency must be comparable across all disciplines and at this level lies the greatest potential for reproduction failures. To 'reproduce' here does not mean to produce an immediate indigenous version of the original, if the goal is to copy, but also to preserve what is gleamed from the analysis for future indigenous projects if the goal is to learn. So if there is a chasm of technical competency between the PhD-ed aerodynamicist and the mathematician who assisted the fresh out of school BS-ed avionics engineer, the odds of an actual crash or simulation failure is increased.Characterization Engineer
Responsibilities include:
- Lab characterization for digital, analog, and mixed signal devices.
- Design, develop, and implement complex lab and bench data collection setups to collect statistical performance measurements.
- Design and development of EVMs to assist with system level validation and characterization and customer interface
- Provide full ownership to analyze collected data to verify performance or application robustness.
- Develop automation routines to optimize data collection/system level validation/verification process.
- Design test fixtures, lab boards, and hardware interfaces.
- Develop test plans, specifications, and procedures for characterizing integrated circuits.
- Support internal/external customers related to lab data collection and verification of an application issue.
Bottom line here is that to 'reverse engineer' is to create an indigenous version, or copy, of an imported original whose legality is another issue. The opposite is 'forward engineering' that created the original in the first place. The last is 'value engineering' where an existing product is improved based upon new discoveries such as materials or softwares. The heavily modified MIG-21 Bison is an example of the overlapping of all three types of engineering. The F-18 Super Hornet also another example of this overlapping with heavy emphasis on 'forward engineering'.