Don't confuse Demographics with industrial scale and capability. Tiny Israel is in the top 10 nations in absolute dollar terms from their semi-conductor design and manufacturing industry. So their military has a huge civilian electronics ecosystem to tap into.
Right, so Israel is a top 10 country in semiconductor revenue? And the source for that is? By your logic leading semiconductor countries such as South Korea and Japan should be able to produce world class military technologies but they do not, at best they produce good systems but fall behind due to their weak military industrial complexes. In other words both countries have the technology to built radars but limited knowledge in how to do so when compared to other companies that specialize in the field radar development.
China has such an ecosystem as well, but Russia does not at this point. So while larger populations generally means greater industrial capability, Israel is an exception to the rule.
By ecosystem do you mean producing electronics for children’s toys? It’s also no secret that China’s leads the world in IT theft, much of what comes out of the Chinese semiconductor industries is ripped off or blatantly stolen from other companies.
Every country's corporations is in every other country's business. My point is that to actually use COTS(technologies, industrial processes, and skilled personnel) effectively, you need a large and agile civilian industrial supply chain that military development companies can tap into. What if you needed to modify that COTS processor from France? Maybe you need to amp up the cycle time, make it more tolerant of temperature extremes...etc? Commercial Sub-contractors that can modify their technologies to suit specific needs quickly and cost effectively is not in short supply in China.
You make too many assumption. Russia has both civil and state owned companies that specialize in electronics. Russia even has highest college graduation rates in the world if that makes you sleep better.
Russia has integrated foreign systems into the SU-30MKM and even into the International Space Station, don’t be naive to think Russia does not has the capacity to integrate or modify systems. It’s also interesting that you speak of ‘taping into’ civilian industrial suppliers. I already knew that you were oblivious to the fact that the top semiconductor industries in the world have sold technology to Russia that it than incorporated into military use. There are a number of US based companies that provide electronics even semiconductor giants such as Toshiba has provided technology for quieter submarines.
The big shocker is that
Russia has technologies from the EF-2000 as well as Rafale, and no your eyes do not deceive you, that is not a typo. Russian Migs have the Virgilius internal AESA based ECM suit that is equipped on EF-2000’s and Sukhoi license produces the Thales Damocles targeting pod which is found on the Rafale. China wouldn’t be able to touch those technologies with a 20 foot pole due to China’s poor reputation in violating intellectual property.
It does not stop there, even Israel is willing to sell technology such as UAV’s to Russia while Israel cancelled the program to modernize low end UAV’s for China. Most companies will have nothing to do with China, while on the other hand are willing to work with Russia, so at the end of the day it is Russia that is ‘taping into’ advanced technologies both civil and military, both foreign and domestic.
But in Russia, while they can get examples of COTS technology from other countries, re-factoring such technology to be militarily effective is much more difficult. Instead of leveraging a large commercial industrial infrastructure and personnel, Russia would need to create in-house single-purpose applications of any particular COTS implementation(along with growing the human resources to match). And this process is going to be necessarily slower and more costly. Scaling out the production of such a modified implementation is even more difficult since you can't be dependent on the manufacturing infrastructure of another country and still maintain independent production capability of such a weapons system.
Again you have a bad habit of making assumptions, you have zero proof that Russia would need create an ‘in house’ team to accomplish COTS. Russia has countless private as well as state owned companies that specialize in everything from civil products, to military applications, many of these companies have thousands of employees working for them, thus modifying or improving products would not be a difficult task. This is an advanced industrialized country not Zimbabwe.
