Why China is Likely Not the Threat They Appear

Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog gathers a variety of sources to report on Chinese efforts to reverse engineer high-end chip lithography machines.

Semiconductors are hard. Not only do you have to exactly machine the thousands of painstakingly precise parts in the equipment itself, you need to possess the deep institutional knowledge necessary necessary to tweak the thousands of differing process parameters for different types of chips. Steppers, the lithography machines that actually project the patterns necessary to make each layer of the chip, are at the very top of the mountain in terms of technological complexity, and ASML dominates the stepper market. If it was easy to build steppers, Applied Materials, LAM, or Tokyo Electron would have come out with their own steppers long ago, and they haven’t.

But China would love to get their hands on that technology, which is why they tried to disassemble and backward engineering an ASML DUV stepper and ended up ruining it in the process.

A Chinese firm reportedly has sought technical support from ASML, the world’s largest chipmaking equipment supplier, after it failed to reassemble a deep-ultraviolet (DUV) lithography machine following an internal teardown for alleged reverse engineering.

We Can Only Hope They Are Not Alone

 10/17/25 Reuters:

BEIJING, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Two top Chinese military leaders have been expelled from the ruling Communist Party and the military on corruption charges, the country's defence ministry said on Friday, the most senior officers to be purged in an anti-graft drive that began in 2023.

He Weidong, China's number two general, and navy admiral Miao Hua, the Chinese military's former top political officer, are the latest senior military officials to be targeted in a campaign against corruption in the People's Liberation Army.

In some ideal world, graft would not impair military readiness.  But it never seems to work that way.  I suspect that the much vaunted Chinese tiger will turn out in combat to be the Chinese giant panda. 

UPDATE: Behind a paywall, but the headline tells us more.  10/17/25 South China Morning Post:

China expels He Weidong, Miao Hua and 7 other generals from party and military

Curious Sign That Even Biden is Taking China Seriously

10/24/22 Reuters:

SYDNEY, Oct 25 (Reuters) - A former U.S. military pilot and flight instructor who worked in China was arrested in Australia and faces extradition to the United States, Australian court documents and company records show.

Australian Federal Police arrested Daniel Edmund Duggan, 54, on Friday in the rural town of Orange in New South Wales, and he appeared in court there on the same day, court records show and two police sources and his lawyer confirmed....

Duggan is a former U.S. citizen and the federal police were acting on a U.S. request for his arrest ahead of likely formal extradition proceedings, said one of the police sources, who was not authorised to speak publicly.

Is there some provision of your military pilot training contract that might explain how he is under U.S. jurisdiction if he is no longer a U.S. citizen?  How desperate does an American need to be to work for the PRC?

I am told that military contract gives them control over your subsequent actions for about 20 years.  Worse, there are companies that provide Dissimilar Air Combat Training, using relatively recent Western combat aircraft as Red Team opponents, like in Top Gun.  Some of these companies have as many warplanes as some smaller nations.  The idea that they are training America's enemies is really upsetting.