2) Chinese Defence Products Today: State-of-the Art
Chinese defence products were once thought of as being moderately capable copies of previous-generation hardware that contained attributes of Russian, European and Israeli designs.* Some of those bloodlines can still be seen in their designs, but the products now being seen at an expo like CIDEX show that Chinese firms have capabilities that approach first world industrial, state-of-the-art levels of sophistication.
In the 1990s, when the Russian defence was in danger of drying up and closing its doors due to an almost complete collapse in any funding from their own government, it was China that saved the day. China bought billions in military hardware from Russia, but it also sent its engineers, designers and technicians to study inside of Russian industry to learn how the weapons it was purchasing had been developed in the first place.
This transfer of technological know-how, plus some enormous investments by the Chinese military into its state-owned industries (what more than one Russian has referred to as uncontrolled and rampant modernisation) has produced a defence electronics industry that far outstrips the size and capacity of that which existed in Russia when Chinese industry first began their cooperation with Moscow in the early 1990s.
Today the former students (the Chinese) have become the masters.* Chinese industry now has the ability to produce components that the Russian electronics industry (after almost two decades of no investment by their government) is no longer capable of either designing or manufacturing.* The initial failure rates on the production of transmit/receive (T/R) modules for the Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars being designed for the Mikoyan MiG-35 and the Sukhoi T-50/PAK-FA 5th-generation fighter, for example, were so high that it would have bankrupted any western firm involved in a similar programme.
Not surprisingly, this years CIDEX show saw groups of Russian specialists going through the halls and looking for components that they could source out of China to be utilised in Russian-designed weapon systems.* Russian specialists will point out that they are now at a huge disadvantage to the Chinese in two very significant respects.
One is that the commitment by the central government in resources to the defence electronics sector is both sustained and serious.* They can take a field where there is nothing but flat land and wild grass, said one Russian company representative, and the next thing you know there is a full-blown factory or design centre there turning out a world-class product.
The other advantage to China is the unfortunate reality of actuarial tables.* Younger scientists and engineers who are needed in Russia to form the next-generation of weapons designers are leaving the nation in droves.* A few years ago the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) estimated that 70,000 scientists and specialists from Russian defence institutes and military-industrial complex enterprises had left the country.
A documentary on the subject produced by Moscows NTV stated the nuclear physicists, experts in electronic equipment, virologists and biotechnologists did not leave Russia empty-handed.* They took secrets with them and presented their former foes with the weapons they had themselves developed.
The documentary went on to claim according to CIA data, in the first half of the 1990s thousands of Soviet specialists in the field of nuclear and missile technology left for the Middle East.* They worked there in violation of the treaty on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the MTCR.* From the Arzamas-16 centre several people went to work in Iraq.* Russian scientists worked in Iran and Libya.* Forty nuclear scientists immigrated to Israel.* Thousands of Russian specialists in the field of nuclear and missile technologies developed programmes to improve armaments in China.* Our scientists are willing to work anywhere they are paid.
The consequence is that whereas the age of the average defence industrial scientist or engineer in China is about 30 and around 40 in the US it is 50 years or more in Russia.* Chinas industry is growing and advancing, while Russias will effectively be dying off before too long.
one cannot expect anything less than this from Indians who are master of twisting the topics when ran out of argument.
