What I meant is that tech without the infrastructure is much less useful.
It's the difference between having a few blacksmiths hammering on iron, and having a developed logistics network that provides fuel, ore and labour at comparatively cheap costs.
Both make you an iron sword.
But one of them, makes you thousands. Just having knowledge only carries you so far.
They are both multipliers that stack, so getting as much as possible of both increases the end result tremendously.
In our case, we have a very well established and stable society that knows how to do logistics, plenty of excess wealth (not just the stat, but in terms of everything we can buy things with) to reinvest, lots of land to use for various purposes and cultural values that allow us to progress fairly fast. Tech they can steal. The others are a lot harder to get.
It's basically like North Korea getting the plans for a modern aircraft. That doesn't translate into engineers that can make those plans a reality, nor into having the resources or tools to make producing them practical and even if you do, everyone else still outnumbers them hilariously.
