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Comment by bagels | Hacker News Reader

Again? Intelligence people are sleeping on the job if they're not scraping those forums all day every day.

I really doubt there’s anything meaningful coming out of these documents. It’s not going to change any literally a single country spends their military budget

I don’t think anyone is concerned about budgets. Having intimate details into the systems of these craft and understanding how they operate in great detail makes it much easier to 1. Copy it, 2. Defend against it, 3. Find critical vulnerabilities in its design, 4. Build offensive systems that take advantage of any shortcomings, 5. Fast tracks their own jet fighter programs (which to your point does affect budgets because someone else had paid for the R&D)

The same is true for any IP/competitive advantage.

It’s funny how in our industry security through obsecurity is a thing we avoid, but other industries are literally built on the foundation of hiding information in order to stay ahead

We avoid it because there are better ways, not because security through obscurity isn't security. Sometimes, obscurity is all you have.

Also because so much of software is uniquely poorly suited to obscurity. Attackers will often be able to probe the "obscure" system at their leisure trying to reverse it, or in non-SAAS cases get their hands on the actual (compiled) algorithm itself. And once you figure it out every single copy works exactly the same.

It's not like trying to measure the penetrating capabilities of a tank round, where you need physical access to a batch of large, expensive, explosive, tightly controlled objects to figure it out.

Everything is open source* if you know assembly, so to speak.

Edit: *source available

At least some classified stuff is well known to other country's intelligence services, friend, neutral, and foe. It can be so far out of the bag, it's had kittens.

Lot of stuff is classified not because it would actually prevent other nations from finding out stuff, but to hide from the American people and press embarrassing things like how much money is being spent on that particular project or weapons system, how much of a failure it has been, how much toxic waste is being created in its manufacture, and so on.

There's also all the stuff Internet Armchair Intelligence Officers think is "sensitive" or "classified."

China has access to all of our tech leaks, and yet, they cannot replicate it, neither can Russia, heck Russia has these really powerful jet planes... but they got less than a handful of them, and their GDP is comparable to the state of Florida's GDP.

> yet, they cannot replicate it, neither can Russia, heck Russia has these really powerful jet planes

Russia has powerful Soviet-era planes. Their new kit is demonstrably crap, being unable to establish even air supremacy against a foe wielding handfuls of decades-old air defence equipment.

There is also a P != NP difference between replicating a war machine and reverse engineering it sufficiently to defeat it, e.g. designing a radar that mitigates its stealth.

I can confirm, as someone who collects Soviet era electronics and buys replacement parts. Russian manufacturing is really bad now and very far from what it was during the Soviet era. Perhaps in part because of past cooperation between various countries of the communist block that is no longer there. For example Belarus and Poland made a lot of the integrated circuits(chips) back then. There are certain items, for example military radios like the R-140M almost every country had a local version of. For example the Russian version still used a vacuum tube as a delay timer well into the 80s while the Polish version had a box of digital logic.

Can I ask how you even got into such a thing?

Just get a HAM radio license :)

To a large extent China has been able to replicate.

China has faced less strict sanctions and has been able to engage in much more aggressive academic and industrial espionage than post-Soviet Russia. It remains to be seen whether, now that sanctions have ramped up, and access to Western/Japanese research and expertise is being curtailed, they can maintain what they've already replicated, never mind build on it to make newer and better things.

China simply outspends russia a hundred times over. When you account for china's full security budget it's almost the same as US defense spending when accounting for PPP.

China is also the world's factory and many components of modern weapons are dual use goods of which China is the supply chain. The problem that no one dares speak is that there is no wholly domestic supply chain for most electronics and other components anymore. If war were to break out with China US defense production would halt immediately.

I just really doubt this when it comes to China.

Betting against China being able to build anything at this point seems pretty dumb.

Almost delusional I would say.

Why? Have you not seen how low quality the things they build are? Among gun collectors, Chinese made guns are considered a fat joke, unreliable. Guns of all things, they invented gun powder!

Then there's buildings, literally fall apart out of nowhere. Their standards of building things are very shockingly bad. There is no motivation to do high quality work.

There was the hospital they built during COVID that collapsed after 3 months.

Those problems aren't limited to China. Just look at the crumbling infrastructe of the 'west'. Besides that they do produce high-quality stuff, even if only specified to that level by 'western' investors/corporations.

There is one meaningful thing coming out of these documents; WarThunder has become a reliable form of education in “how to evaluate information distribution restrictions regarding militarily-applicable topics” for the generations that grew up without the events of PGP / ITAR fresh in mind.

It’s probably some other intelligence agency leaking it.

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