sublight is back said:
There is growing concern in the Pentagon that the U.S. military is in a technology rut.
Bullcrap. I think we have many one off "silver bullet" classified advanced weapon programs. The problem with these are that taking them out of "special access" status removes several layers of security and instantly makes them a target for foreign espionage (if they aren't already). The Russians and Chinese have not spent trillions inventing as we have, and are perfectly content to wait it out and steal our R & D as soon as it is feasible to do so.
It may very well be a crying shame that we drag our feet on hypersonics, but should we go full throttle into it when the Russians and Chinese don't have anything better? When our adversaries have 1/100th the UAV's, 5th gen fighters, and a railgun, I might get a little concerned that we are in a rut....
The Russians and Chinese learn from us even when they don't actually steal information. Watching what we do tells then what directions are successful, and equally importantly, what
not to do.
That said, they are not complete copycats. In a number of fields they have shown themselves to be more advanced than we are, sometimes because we didn't go there, and sometimes because they were just better. Examples that come to mind are the ability to rework and form titanium, high energy physics, rocket/ramjet propulsion (although in that case part of their advantage was sheer ingenuity) and the ability to think "outside the box" as we viewed it. For example we made fun of the MiG-25 and the "crudity" of its construction. But what we overlooked is that produced a M2.8 capable craft that could operate from a semi-prepared field and be built in a truck factory by semi-skilled labor. The Alpha submarine was dangerous as hell to its crews, but it had a level of automation as well as performance that we couldn't match. Heck, we couldn't have built one if a "Red October" scenario placed one in our hands. IIRC correctly, after the Yom Kippur War, we got SA-6 missiles for analysis. At first, not only could we reportedly not duplicate the missiles, we couldn't even duplicate the kids of tools that built the missiles!
At the fall of the Soviet Union, they seemed to be ahead of us in non-acoustic maritime detection, and while there were certain problems with the Shkval torpedo we haven't been able to (at least publicly) field anything to match or reliably counter it.
They may not be 10 feet tall, but neither are they midgets. They may not have many UAVs that can operate in areas where there is more than minimal air defense, but neither do we (check out USAF's own statements on the usefulness of our current crop in the Pacific or other areas). That's why we need to continue research. We shouldn't be too complacent looking down our noses at others contenting ourselves with the feeling that, "The best they have isn't as good as what we haven't got" (wanted to use that for a long time)