It’s surprisingly hard to turn many structural materials into unrecognisable “junk”. A good illustration of this is the investigation of jet airliner wreckage.

It’s surprisingly hard to turn many structural materials into unrecognisable “junk”. A good illustration of this is the investigation of jet airliner wreckage. If you read into the reports a little, you’ll quickly find examples where visually unrecognisable fragments are easily identifiable by experts and they can reverse engineer the deformities into useful data about the crash. Explosive disassembly is a relatively well understood process, from little things like explosive bolts to big things like controlled demolitions of buildings, we have a pretty decent idea how explosions affect things. To effectively destroy something so that it’s of no use to an adversary is quite challenging, last I heard the recommended process for destroying sensitive computers/electronic equipment in the field is thermite charges, the sort used to render tanks inoperable. They basically turn a smallish stack of electronics into as close to a puddle of slag as they can. Doing similar to a useful fraction of an F-35 would be extremely challenging.