Hybrid Approaches: Reverse Engineering, Coproduction, and Codevelopment

Hybrid approaches blend elements of buy, build, and steal in different combinations. This section considers reverse engineering, coproduction, and codevelopment as means of developing and acquiring aviation technology and building an advanced military aviation industry.

Reverse Engineering

Reverse engineering is the process of acquiring an aircraft, weapons system, or component and then taking it apart to understand how it works and poten­tially how to replicate or defeat it. The initial acquisition may be done through legitimate purchase (buy) or covert procurement (steal). Successful reverse engi­neering requires a certain level of technological sophistication in a country’s avia­tion industry (for example, some degree of “build” experience and capacity).

Reverse engineering can serve several functions. Disassembling a mechanical or electronic device reveals its inner workings, yielding under­standing of how it functions, the specific technologies and components involved, and identifying successful design paths that can be emulated. It may be possible to replicate the system or component by producing an exact clone of an aircraft component or weapons system. The knowledge gathered from reverse engineering may be incorporated into a newly designed subsystem that bears some resemblance to the original but is not an exact copy. As in the case of the “steal” option, a developing country might use reverse engineering to gain understanding of an aircraft’s weapons systems or radars so that it can develop effective countermeasures.

Developing countries often assume that reverse engineering can help accelerate development in certain sectors of the economy.8 Examples of weap­ons reverse engineering do not validate this assumption in each case but rather suggest that success depends on a number of country-specific factors. Devel­oping countries sometimes attempt to purchase a small number of sophisti­cated fighters or advanced components from another country for the sole pur­pose of trying to reverse-engineer them in order to produce copies or gain knowledge about the component parts. (China was notorious for its efforts in the 1980s and early 1990s to purchase small quantities of advanced fighters and aviation components.) If a country is able to purchase small quantities and suc­cessfully reverse engineer them, the savings in development time (compared to completely independent development) and money (compared to a purchase of large quantities of aircraft or components) may be significant. However, this runs counter to the seller’s best interests. Advanced arms suppliers such as the United States or Russia have no motivation to sell a small number of fighter aircraft to a country with the industrial capacity to copy them. A more usual variant can occur when a developing country procures a large quantity of an aircraft and then attempts to reverse engineer parts and components to reduce its dependence on the original seller for spare parts. (Both India and China have often pursued this approach.) This option is often explicitly banned by the sales contract, but the buyer may have a limited capacity to enforce these provisions once the sale is complete.

A developing country may also use covert procurement through a third party in order to acquire access to small quantities of an aircraft or component. An ally with legitimate access to advanced fighters or aviation technology may act as a “cut out” and either sell or turn over a working example of the aircraft for reverse engineering purposes. One widely cited example is the assumption that Pakistan, which purchased F-16 fighters from the United States, may have provided China with access to F-16 fighters and components. It is impossible to definitively determine the extent of access China may have had to Pakistani F-16s in the 1980s, but sources claim that Chinese technical personnel visit­ing Pakistan in the early 1980s were allowed to examine the U. S.-made fighter.9 China may also have obtained some access to F-16 technology through its defense cooperation with Israel.10

In some cases, a country may be able to acquire an adversary’s military hardware as a result of serendipitous circumstances, such as cases where a pilot loses his way in bad weather or defects with his aircraft.11 For example, during the second Taiwan Strait crisis in fall 1958, the United States equipped Taiwan’s F-86F Sabres with the AIM-9 Sidewinder infrared (IR)-guided air-to-air mis­sile (AAM). On September 28, 1958, an F-86F fired and hit a PLAAF MiG-17 with a Sidewinder that lodged in the MiG’s fuselage without exploding. The Soviet Union convinced China to turn over the unexploded missile and suc­cessfully reverse engineered it as the K-13. Soviet engineer Gennady Sokolovs­kiy described acquisition of the Sidewinder as, “a university offering a course in missile construction technology which has upgraded our engineering edu­cation and updated our approach to production of future missiles.”12

The biggest benefit of reverse engineering is that a developing country can sidestep some of the R&D investment required to develop advanced weap­ons technologies. Unlike the pure “buy” option where a developing country merely operates the system it purchases, reverse engineering can lead to sig­nificant technical discoveries that propel a nation’s defense industry forward. (The Soviet effort to reverse engineer the AIM-9 Sidewinder AAM is one such instance.) This is not always the case, however. Reverse engineering might allow for better understanding of a complex piece of military hardware, but there is no guarantee that a country can produce an exact clone or functional equiva­lent. Individual components may incorporate materials or be produced using advanced production processes that cannot be easily replicated by a developing country’s aviation industry. (This was initially the case with composite materials and stealth aircraft designed using advanced computer systems, and remains the case for some materials used in high-performance jet engines.) Fighter aircraft present a particular reverse-engineering challenge because of the vast number of complex subsystems (for example, radars, avionics, and engines) that must be integrated into a functional whole. A developing country may obtain access to an advanced fighter, but lack the production capacity to reproduce it. A devel­oping country may be able to reverse engineer and replicate key components, but lack the design skills to integrate them into an existing aircraft.