Military-Technological Superiority: Explaining Failure and Success in Industrial Espionage, Reverse Engineering and Imitation of Advanced Weapon Systems

Mauro Gilli

2017 - 2020

Funded by: Center for Security Studies; Dartmouth College, John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding, Smith Richardson Foundation; Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management, Dispute Resolution Research Center and Roberta Buffett Center for Comparative and International Studies

This book project contributes to the literature on the diffusion of military innovations and on the rise and fall of Great Powers. It addresses the following questions: What factors affect the capacity of a country to maintain its military-technological superiority? Are there empirical and theoretical reasons to believe that, in the near future, the United States will lose its performance advantage in military hardware against its competitors? Over the past century the complexity of military technology has increased dramatically. It will be argued that such increase in complexity has led to a change in the system of production, which in turn has made the imitation and the replication of the performance of military technology more difficult, despite globalization and advances in communications. Thus, contrary to expectations that catching up with the leading state(s) is relatively easy, the advantage of the leading state(s) is unlikely to erode any time soon. Indeed, the advantage of the leader might widen the gap rather than that laggards can catch up.

Related publications

Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli (2019), external page Why China Has Not Caught Up Yet: Military-Technological Superiority and the Limits of Imitation, Reverse Engineering, and Cyber Espionage, International Security, Volume 43, Issue 3, Winter 2018/19