Andrea Gilli and Mauro Gilli should be lauded for making clear how the growing complexity of capital-intensive military platforms such as fighter jets hinders states, such as China, seeking to mimic the United States.1 Gilli and Gilli join a long line of thinkers, myself included, who argue that military technology does not always diffuse easily and that the characteristics of technologies matter in driving how those technologies spread and influence international politics.2 Although there is much to like about Gilli and Gilli's article, their analysis has some theoretical limitations with implications for policymaking.
First, because Gilli and Gilli evaluate only military technology adoption, they miss the broader ways that human capital, tacit knowledge, and organizational practices shape military power. Gilli and Gilli's unit of analysis is military-technological superiority (p. 145), suggesting a technologically determinist view of military power. Technology, however, is only a subset of how states generate...