The first thought that popped up in my mind while reading this was, "Why doesn't this plane have self destruct mode?"
This article feels disingenuous. They make it out like they Chinese or Russians are going to just stumble upon a nice, neat F-35, ready for inspection.
I won't necessarily say the landing was forced by PLA fighters; that would imply PLA intentionally did this (to obtain tech?) while in fact that J-8 crashed and its pilot was killed/missing. US recon planes fly near China's (and other countries') coastal line with PLA's fighter near by all the time.
My point is that incident looks more like an accident to me even though China may have gained some tech out of it while losing one pilot and plane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25#Western_intelligence_an...
A good illustration of this is the investigation of jet airliner wreckage. If you read into the reports a little, you’ll quickly find examples where visually unrecognisable fragments are easily identifiable by experts and they can reverse engineer the deformities into useful data about the crash. Explosive disassembly is a relatively well understood process, from little things like explosive bolts to big things like controlled demolitions of buildings, we have a pretty decent idea how explosions affect things.
To effectively destroy something so that it’s of no use to an adversary is quite challenging, last I heard the recommended process for destroying sensitive computers/electronic equipment in the field is thermite charges, the sort used to render tanks inoperable. They basically turn a smallish stack of electronics into as close to a puddle of slag as they can. Doing similar to a useful fraction of an F-35 would be extremely challenging.