This is John Batchel, a conversation with General Blaine Holt, United States Air Force, retired, asking the question, why, given that the PLA stole the plans for the F-35, are they struggling to reproduce it, reverse engineer it, with the so-called J-35, fifth-generation aircraft.

Blaine gives a very detailed answer and quite logical.

His general hold on the failure of the Chinese thieves

to assure that their stolen plans turn into something genuine and not troubled. More of this later.

Yeah, that's a great question. So even if you gave them every single thing that they needed

to go ahead and reproduce it, and this goes to every single thing it is that the Chinese make

in their arsenal,

whether it's a ship, a rocket, here we go with an airplane. They have an inherently corrupt

system. Everybody is always scalping something off the program as they go up further in the chain

as they get it further to production. We have Navy ships in the Chinese Navy that are not

made of marine grade steel underneath the water. Their hulls are rusting. We've got rockets that

don't seem to be able to hold on to their fuel and their silos. We've got ships, or not ships,

but command and control centers that are just not performing.

They're not reliable.

And the reason that is is because you've got a layered system, you've got patronage in the ranks,

you don't promote on merit, you promote on party identification.

Well, that's all cancer when you're trying to put together one of the world's most complicated

airplanes.