"China's Air Force is Growing in Size and Technological Edge" Topic

"Tensions in the South China Sea and continued warnings about Chinese militarization of the disputed areas has led many Pentagon planners and analysts to sharpen focus on Chinese Air Force acquisitions and technological advances.
The U.S. Air Force's technological air power superiority over China is rapidly diminishing in light of rapid Chinese modernization of fighter jets, missiles, air-to-air weapons, cargo planes and stealth aircraft, according to analysts, Pentagon officials and a Congressional review released several years ago.

The 2014 U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended that Congress appoint an outside panel of experts to assess the U.S.-Chinese military balance and make recommendations regarding U.S. military plans and budgets, among other things.Despite being released in 2014, the findings of the report – if slightly dated – offer a detailed and insightful window into Chinese Air Force technology, progress and development…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Armand, I find your sites interesting but I'm confused about your meaning. Are you saying that:

1. "Look what our potential adversaries are developing. The West (primarily the USA) needs to put more money in advanced defense weapons or we're going to be left behind: Or

2. "The West is already fatally outmatched by the numbers and technology of our potential adversaries and we should just pull in our military forces and let the Russians and Chinese be the primary military powers in the world with no peers except each other,

Well… I don't mean nothing my friend… I only share the article…

But if you want my personal opinion… Nb 1. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

It's a trap! If you admit to #1 you're a fearmonger and if you cop to #2 you will be charged as being complacent and isolationist with your head in the sand.

1.b) 'Look at what our potential adversaries are capable of making and supporting in numbers. The West needs to assess whether it needs to start quickly developing cheaper and less sophisticated alternates using CURRENT technology as a 'low' component of a 'high-low' mix.

Looking at the drones as well as experiences based on F22 and F35 (and, I'm sure, Western knowledge of Russian and Chinese systems )it should be quite feasible to produce the quantities needed of a gun and/or bomb platform to equip a reasonably size force that can afford to engage an enemy.

I think we need to go a bit more on the high side, since the "low" side never pans out, and frequently ends up costing as much or more than the "high" end of the mix, with far less capability provided.

Just look at how those cheap F-18s ended up costing far more then the "expensive" F-14s they were supposed to complement.

My guess is the same thing will probably happen with the F-22 and F-35 mix too.

Should have just bought more F-22s and cancelled the other one.

you can build as many F1 racecars as you like but asking a former truck driver to run one is another story.

The F-18E/F is more high than low. It's not the earlier C model.

The PLAAF is still a border protection force though without much in the way of offensive power or power projection.

Vast majority of fighters are still older MiG-21 knock offs (J-7). There's a lot of other older aircraft still in service – Q-5 (modified MiG-19 attack jet) and JH-7 (Panavia Tornado equivalent in terms of role but not necessarily avionics and capability).

A lot of the modern ones are 1980s standard Su-27/J-11s, indigenous J-10s which struggle against modern networked fighters as shown in a recent exercise between PLAAF J-11/Su-27s and Thai JAS-39 Gripens.

This exercise revealed that PLAAF pilots were actually quite good but were let down by older avionics.

The tanker fleet is small and of limited utility. The AWACS fleet is reasonable in terms of size and probably capability (due to both Russian and Israeli links) but a lot of the platforms are shorter endurance and capability ones based on Chinese Y-8(An-12 Cub) airframe.

SEAD/DEAD is an unknown quantity and there does not appear to be dedicated Wild Weasel type units in the PLAAF that we
re aware of.

No doubt PLAAF would dominate its smaller neighbours and provide a stiff fight against the Indians or Japanese or even Russians.

But it's still got nothing on US.

Just look at how those cheap F-18s ended up costing far more then the "expensive" F-14s they were supposed to complement.

The F/A-18 was ALWAYS meant to replace the both the A-6 and the F-14.

My guess is the same thing will probably happen with the F-22 and F-35 mix too.

Different missions (or did you notice). F-22 is a pure air superiority fighter. The F-35 is a fighter/bomber.

Should have just bought more F-22s and cancelled the other one.

Obviously you haven't kept up. The F-22 (with ONE mission) costs more per flight hour than any other plane in the inventory (even the MULTI-MISSION F-35).

Do try to get things right…

F-22 also has the worst availability of all USAF fast jets, even though the F-15s/-16/A-10s are all much older.

It's a very complicated beast and stealth coatings require special looking after.

Still better than USMC with 27% availability for F/A-18s or the German Air Forces where some types have 0% availability.

USMC's availability has more to do with their abysmal management of the assets. If done right, they'd improve those numbers overnight.

Charlie 12, totally agree.

Availability is usually the result of logistics. In this day and age seldom is an equipment such a POS as to be a perpetual hangar queen (though some persist in service).

Even the Russian birds get decent availability if you have a decent logistics system. For example the Indian Su-30MKI fleet was suffering from an under 50% availability rate.

But improvements in supply chain and maintenance processes has availability creep up to over 60%.

Meanwhile the Europeans (including the French and Germans) and USMC continue to mismanage assets with availability plummeting to below 50% for many types.

A lot of the modern ones are 1980s standard Su-27/J-11s, indigenous J-10s which struggle against modern networked fighters as shown in a recent exercise between PLAAF J-11/Su-27s and Thai JAS-39 Gripens.

This exercise revealed that PLAAF pilots were actually quite good but were let down by older avionics.

I hadn't heard about this exercise. Here's a scanned article with a pic for anyone in the same boat: ( link )

But it's definitely a stretch in logic to conclude that indigenous and modern J-10s will suffer the same issues as their carbon-copies of old Russian tech. It's widely suspected that the now-standard and prolific J-10B features an AESA radar and IRST. Also, the Chinese have their own datalink systems. The Wiki for the Type 052D mentions them: JSIDLS (Chinese: "全军综合数据链系统" Link-16 equivalent) and HN-900 (older Link-11 equivalent).

If you search for "全军综合数据链系统 J-11" you get results such as this ( link ), which after running through Google Translate seems to say that the Su-27/J-11 have an obsolete datalink and the data bus standard used makes upgrades difficult. Also, China has some other, new datalink standards such DTS-03 that they are employing. See also: ( link )

On a broader note, running specific military terms in Chinese through Google can yield some really interesting Chinese-language information sources.

The F-22 (with ONE mission) costs more per flight hour than any other plane in the inventory (even the MULTI-MISSION F-35).

The concept of employment is that a large procurement of F-22s would enable us to totally overwhelm any enemy Air Force and then our cheaper legacy Teen-series aircraft could operate in the sort of permissive air environment to which we are accustomed. So even with the high per-flight-hour costs of the F-22 in the long run such air campaigns would cost us less than our boondoggle F-35 procurement. That's the theory, at least.

Tactical datalinks are a particular interest of mine, as I'm developing a product in this space (starting with battalion and below digital communications and ad-hoc networking). So while digging into these Chinese/US datalinks I found this Joint Airborne Networking document discussing the evolution of aircraft datalinks: PDF link

But there's only a handful J-10Bs (entered service 2015) or J-11Bs in service last time I checked. Most are still older J-11 and J-10As.

Now upgrades might be in hand to bring older airframes up to speed but the Chinese have historically not really done this too much.

I forgot to mention there's still a couple of hundred J-8s in service in several variants – these are equivalent to a MiG-23.