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Posted by David Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Monday, September 20, 2010 at 13:13:08 :
In Reply to: China- our best friend???? posted by Galen [128.229.4.2] on Monday, September 20, 2010 at 10:24:33 :
You must be talking about copying our movies, because that's about all there is left to steal. You better hope they keep stealing our intellectual property, because that would at least mean we're still inventing things here, even if we're not building them here. What's happening more and more, though, is that they don't need our intellectual property. They can design their own clothes and computers and cars and ICBMs without having to copy our designs.
As for the military technology, they'll gladly let us build the stealthiest bombers and the fastest fighter jets, seeing as how even our own generals can't think of anything useful to do with them these days, keeping them combat-ready is insanely expensive, not to mention the billion or two dollars we're out every time one of them crashes. They don't need or want to steal the technology behind a B1, an F22, or an Osprey. Anybody in the world today who has a cause worth fighting for should be able to win using nothing but off-the-shelf weaponry out of the Poly Technologies catalog. The RPG is the PowerWagon of man-portable weapons.
We better hope they keep trying to steal our military technology, just as we better hope Mexicans keep trying to sneak across the border. It's when we don't have any ideas worth stealing (except movies), and nobody wants to sneak into this country, that we'll be in real trouble.
Meanwhile, who's going to design and build all the fancy electronics for all of our drones and secure global satellite communication systems? If we don't maintain a commercial electronic manufacturing base in this country, it's going to be mighty expensive to keep a fab line open just to build chips for the DoD. Furthermore, they'll fall behind in technological capability pretty quickly. I strongly suspect, though no one will admit it, that Chinese components are already going into US military electronics systems, either because there are no longer any domestic suppliers, or the Chinese parts are technologically superior.
In the near future, if it comes to a war with China, the US will have to ask the Chinese to lend us some money so we can buy Chinese parts to put into our weapons so we can fight the Chinese.