I wonder if it is not a good idea to allow the Chinese to obtain information on our weapons systems. If we allow them to do so, we accomplish two things:
-we give them confidence that we will not plan a surprise attack
-we give them the means to counter our offensive capabilities (thus reducing their fears of a conflict)
-we allow them to gauge our intentions
A war between the USA and China would be a disaster for both countries-so isn’t it better to leak a few secrets to the Chinese, so they won’t be tempted to launch a first strike? The Chinese are practical-they want to make money and obtain markets for their goods, and raw materials-they don’t care anything about ideology, as long as these needs are met. So why not allow them a carefully monitored spying program upon us?
The US and China are both capable of destroying each other with nuclear weapons, so I don’t know if deterrence is important.
The Chinese stealing military secrets allows them to catch up to us and possibly surpass us in military technology. Plus if they get involved in issues in Asia or Africa, the US will have less leverage if the Chinese military is as advanced as ours.
I don’t know if the Chinese think we would plan a surprise attack, both our economies are too dependent on each other. Plus we can’t even conquer Iraq with months of buildup and preparation, so we would have little chance of a surprise attack against China.
Those are pretty big assumptions to gamble the future of your nation on, it is questionable that they are true now and even if they are they most certainly won’t remain so into the indefinite future.
A lot of people thought the same about the world economy before World War One, it would be insane to go war and they were right, it was insane, but humans as individuals and socities aren’t entirely rational actors.
If you’re not going to let your military be effective, why have a military at all?
The Soviet Union stole our technology all the time and it did nothing to lower tensions.
Some of that military tech can have commercial applications. Once it’s in the market, obviously, we can’t keep it out of the Chinese government’s hands, but why give them a leg up by letting them have it before we’re ready to commercialize it?
[quote=“Wesley_Clark, post:2, topic:659885”]
The US and China are both capable of destroying each other with nuclear weapons, so I don’t know if deterrence is important.
The Chinese stealing military secrets allows them to catch up to us and possibly surpass us in military technology. Plus if they get involved in issues in Asia or Africa, the US will have less leverage if the Chinese military is as advanced as ours.
I am not sure about this. Take the F-35 fighter jet program. The plane is very expensive, and technical problems with it keep mounting up. The Chinese know this, and they also know that the F-35 (despite being vastly more expensive than the F-16), is not as good. So why not let them copy our mistakes? Or the Navy’s littoral combat ship-this is a new class of warship-designed to operate close to enemy coastlines. The Chinese (rightly) assume that this is a weapon capable of being sed against them-is it worth provoking them to build up a countermeasure to this?
In the Cold War days, the US deliberately leaked bad tech data to the Russians. One of the more famous incidents involved gas pipeline software (with questionable claimed results).
Leaking good data is bad. Leaking bad data is good. Espionage is all about layers of deception.