Comment by TaylorAlexander

I'm honestly not sure about that. I work closely with defense stakeholders both on the Hill and off the Hill, and a lot of the conversations about Chinese power projection sort of seem eerily similar to the kind of conversations I heard in the defense industry surrounding Russia's next-gen fighters, SAM, and heavy tank capacity in the 2013-18 time period. As we can clearly see in Ukraine right now, a lot of that was clearly paper tigers. And no offense to the PLA, but they legitimately have a weaker organization and R&D apparatus compared to even post-1991 Russia. Most next gen PRC designs in the jet space still rely heavily on IP and expertise from Russian vendors like Mikoyan, and they are increasingly left out of IP sharing agreements as competitors like Japan, India, Taiwan, and Australia start inking single use agreements with vendors in France, Israel, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. That doesn't mean the PRC's defense industry can't innovate, but it makes it harder to productionize or solve very complex problems that require very deep and interconnected supply chains. This is a big reason why the Treasury, DoJ, DHS, State, and DoD have been targeting 2nd and 3rd degree of connections vendors and businessespeople with sanctions when dealing with Russia and China since Obama 2 - it makes it much harder to scale out and productionize weaponry or policy in a manner that directly harms the US.