Probably not, but also my personal experience says that you can't really replicate things just always from the patent. There's always some secret sauce to get things to work. The question is what exactly did Loon sell when they shut down and where did most of the people working on it end up? I know some folks at Loon and they went back to either Google Brain or some other moonshots in Google or Google Research but a lot of people didn't do that.
Lawyers who worked in chemical and medical patents confirmed this for me when I was in Google Legal. Don't even get me started about software patents.
The legal fiction is that a "reasonable amount of experimentation" may be required, beyond what's in the patent. The notion is that a lab tech determines the exact concentrations, temps, and pressure to get the thing to work.
Tell that to the pharmaceutical industry. Many pharmaceutical patents can't be reproduced without insider knowledge as discovered companies that entered the "generic" business.
That was my point, he seemed to be suggesting something almost like espionage if the patents had been sold to someone in contact with China or something, but the patents are already public and I don't think would be respected for this application.
Many Chinese equipment does look like a copy of Western equipment. I don't think China respect patents at all. And I think even allied countries wouldn't respect patents with military applications if in their interest.
