Why the US Military worries about Chinese Air Power

hey everybody it's chris from military aviation history and today i want to talk to you about the air force of the people's republic of china now this is still one that is especially from a western standpoint from a popular opinion standpoint often met with some reserve with some preconceptions and some stereotypes so in order to actually understand where the air force of the people's republic of china stands right now i have invited justin bronk from the royal united services institute he has also recently published on this subject as such he is best placed to tell us more about it now this interview was filmed a couple of months ago so just keep that in mind because the pace of the informative improvement over in the people's republic is staggering but nonetheless this video is going to give you and actually the the interview was very illuminating for me as well it's going to give a fantastic breakdown of where the air force the plaf currently stands justin thanks very much for joining us again my pleasure and yeah today i wanted to talk about the chinese air forces of the people's republic of china and i think before we launch ourselves into this fully uh with the more recent developments it would be good if we just lay out a foundation like groundwork of what you know a brief overview here maybe of the chinese air forces of their historical role up to now essentially the the the kind of the journey for the the people's liberation army air force the platf um which is still the army air force is uh essentially one of of long-term dependents on soviet uh exports uh for their main types starting essentially with the korean war um and the dependence on the on at the time the mig 15 and then later on the mig-17 and then through 19 and eventually 21 and then a sort of move to try and develop at least an indigenous capability to kind of manufacture and develop which we see with things like their j7 which is now finally on the way out which is a kind of second and then third generation uh adaptation of the mig-21 and then you know in the in the 80s you start seeing a move towards actually indigenous designs being used in significant numbers with things like their j8 interceptor it's only really though when you get into essentially the mid 2000s where you see a serious move towards uh the development of something that is a kind of a a significant uniquely chinese combat aircraft industry and not just an industry that has a capacity to modify and develop local versions of but essentially is still reliant on the technology of and the imports from the soviet union and then russia uh and it is you know before going up any further it is worth staying still that you know russian uh types and missiles uh including the sukhoi 35s uh still make up a significant chunk of of the plaf's uh frontline strength um and there are areas where they still rely on russian technology although they are decreasing but yeah the the journey in the last kind of particularly 20 years it that has kind of increased in speed and in success uh over the last 10 years in particular has been this final move away from a dependence on licensed manufacturing of russian aircraft weapons sensors and technology into something that is actually uniquely chinese helped of course it has to be said by the large-scale uh industrial scale in fact uh theft of information from uh western manufacturers of combat aircraft as well now every country does industrial espionage um in the defense sector but the chinese are on just a completely different scale um but that does not follow that then the kind of the standard criticism that you hear of some modern chinese kittens that oh well it's just a copy in some cases it is but the chinese have been i think more careful than a lot of people give them credit for about analyzing where it is just sufficient to copy it just straight up reverse engineer western things like for example um joint direct attack munitions jdams china basically has its own cloned versions of most u.s j dam and paveway series weapons because they work perfectly well and they're adapted for baidu and you know why not but if you look at their aircraft it's much more nuanced than that they've in effect been able to uh in large measure take the best of western tech and approaches to things that they've both observed and stolen and russian tech that they've been exporting for years licensed manufacturing and indeed reverse engineering as well yes i think generally that historic reliance on the soviet union might be one of the reasons why the chinese air force isn't on in their kit isn't really taking all that serious nowadays so the question now that i would ask considering the modern uh changes and the modern capabilities that china is putting out and we will go into this specific aircraft in just a second but why should we maybe start to care about what we're seeing it depends who you are uh so the americans really have to care about what they're seeing because it is now and it's not even a point of discussion it has just acknowledged fact that china is the current most serious military threat to the united states and it is going to be the main security challenge to the united states uh for the foreseeable future um if you talk to uh pretty much anybody in the pentagon they will tell you that russia is a crisis management problem it's it's a it's just keeping the problem from bubbling over until it goes away china is a a sort of civilizational challenge um it's not that they you know it's not kind of us or them type of thing but there are no illusions that you know china is the new russia you know if you look at it from the kind of cold war setting you know china is the new soviet union it is the pacing threat against which american military capabilities have to be assessed and not only is chinese kit the pacing threat increasingly chinese organization and doctrine is the pacing sort of mode of employment that they need to be measured against and the geography of the indo-pacific is the pacing arena where everything has to be assessed the us is turning away towards not only a much bigger challenge but a completely different challenge so european states kind of have to be concerned in that sense with what china is is kind of driving the us towards because it has implications for both the suitability of u.s kit that they might want to buy but also that the ability to plug into the us military machine as part of nato for collective defense and overseas missions also uh you know from a less kind of direct uh standpoint even if you're not worried about potentially having to fight the chinese military you're sure as hell gonna have to fight their kit at some point because it is now at a point of quality and price and comes with so few strings attached in terms of use at least it might come with financial strings attached including crippling debt and maybe having to transfer things like your fresh water sources to chinese company ownership if you come from various african countries but it is very attractive compared to the other traditional non-western source of uh military equipment which is the soviet union and now russia chinese kit is now arguably better cheaper more modern more reliable i mean we have the the j-10 the vigorous dragon the j-16 why is it called again the red eagle i'm not sure the name seems to vary depending on which film it starred in recently the chinese have a line of wonderfully silly cgi fest films with with their their latest uh fighter aircraft not that we would ever do anything like that in the world and then there's of course the one that that makes all heads turn at the moment the j20 the the mighty dragon um let's go into the the j-10 maybe first it's the newest variant of the vigorous dragon what's going on on there are we seeing this this this return of the the lightweight fighter yeah so the the j-10 uh the c variant is is the current uh production version of the j10 it's often been accused in sort of specialist press who look at these sort of things as being a larvae clone the israelis developed a fighter that shares an enormous amount of similarities in terms of shape and layout uh with the j-10a that there was undeniably technology transfer from israel to china in the early days of the larvae program and indeed the larvae's chief designer has there have been photographs that have surfaced of him next to the larvae prototype in israel um so there was undeniably some influence there um but the the the j-10 is in all functional terms a fully indigenous design it's a lot bigger than the larvae was it's a fully functional combat aircraft um and it's essentially china's f-16 it is a lightweight fighter with relaxed stability it's it's very agile it's got a respectable but not stellar thrust to weight ratio there's been kind of playing around with thrust vectoring technology there was a thrust vectoring demonstrator but ultimately what the j10 gives the the plaf is what the f-16 has always given the u.s air force a relatively cheap relatively cheerful multi-role lightweight fighter um that is you know has a in this case a naisa radar and in the case of the the the j-10c um it's got excellent communications links it's got the chinese equivalent to link 16. so it's got a data link that allows it to exchange data with other other um mostly aircraft because they're still quite siloed um in terms of operations but it's got a satellite it's got satellite communications capability um and it can carry a wide range of both indigenous and uh copied um gps guided laser-guided radar-guided um munition types you know the production run is substantial we're in hundreds and hundreds of aircraft now the rate of improvement from the j-10 j10a 10 years ago through the j10b with the development supersonic intake and the pisa array radar to the j10c with the ae plus satcoms plus link 16 equivalent has been extremely rapid um and yeah you know if i was looking for a fighter with a price tag of the sort of 20 to 30 million dollar copy uh per copy to do you know my airspace policing and and you know lightweight attack needs uh and i didn't want to go to the americans or the europeans i would undoubtedly go for the j10c it's going to be a trade-off between do you want the big external fuel tanks that give you decent endurance or do you want multi-role weaponry you can't have both so yes it is fundamentally more limited than heavyweight stuff but for its class it's extremely competitive and uh iterative improvement has been so good over the past 10 years there's very little reason to suspect it will stop here so it will probably still keep getting better in particular around the engine it's also quite interesting to note in the j-10c the the chinese have finally moved to indigenous ws-10 series engines it shows the chinese are getting confident enough in the reliability of their own engines to put them on single-engined airplanes up till recently you'd only really seen the ws-10b series on twin-engine flanker type aeroplanes where if you lose one you can still hopefully recover to base on the other so it does suggest the chinese are more confident now in their ws10 series so that's one to watch then for the future how about the uh the j16 yes so i think a relatively recent introduction introduction based on a the russian sukhoi su-30 how does this perform and especially how does it perform next to its russian cousin so the j16 is is really a bit of a watershed i think for um for the chinese aircraft industry because even though it is still recognizably a flanker it it is i think the first time the chinese have produced something that is genuinely better in almost every important regard than their russian flanker counterparts the the use of composites for a start in the airframe is is much more extensive and more advanced than any russian flanker so it is stronger and lighter um which allows also thinner skin in some places increases the internal space for wiring and fuel and things the thruster weight is is better than most of the russian sukhoi 30s despite being you know twin engine design it's still got an excellent kind of turner speed to it it's also crucially got an acer radar um so suddenly that huge flanker nose and all of that power that comes from the twin engine design allows you to push out a huge amount of energy and get huge performance from a radar but it's also potentially got the ability to do low probability of intercept low probability of detection and electronic warfare operations so it can potentially be developed to the point where it can scan without being easily detected um by enemy aircraft and also it can do a whole host of electronic warfare directed electronic warfare and electronic countermeasures um techniques which you can only do with an aesa radar the russians just haven't got to an operationally credible acer yet now of course how lpi lpd is china's acer capability at the moment probably not very but again that pace of iterative improvement is just absolutely relentless so not only do you have something that's lighter and stronger than a russian flanker that has access to far more capable multi-role munitions both in the air-to-ground domain because china has a very wide range of extremely modern uh precision guided munitions which kind of outcompete russia's in almost every category but also it has access to the much more effective air-to-air weaponry to go with that aesa radar they've got access to in particular the pl-15 which is a chinese uh air-to-air missile that was introduced about four years ago that include it's essentially like an enlarged amram um but it basically the the dimensions uh essentially give it around a 200 kilometer class maximum range uh our max so it it is probably out out ranging the american m120 delta so the longest ranged currently at least open source available american air-to-air missile um which is huge um now put that on on a platform like the j16 which can fly like any flanker very high very fast for quite a long time and therefore because you're launching it from high and fast that really long-range missile is also going to go a lot further than if you launch it from something from slower and lower down because it starts out with that much more energy and in thinner air so yeah essentially the j16 is probably the most capable flanker currently flying in most categories and that is a hugely significant development if you look at the relationship between china and russia in aircraft development because the flanker is the quintessential russian aircraft the only area now where if you look at flankers that russia still has a marginal advantages in the engines and even there they've they finally agreed to sell what they didn't want to do which was sell the sukhoi 35 in a small batch to the chinese 24 aircraft i believe um which is so small that it it's not really credible to say as the chinese that they want it for capability reasons it's obviously for reverse engineering the engines and looking at the oversee that the very very powerful but still phased array uh asa pisa sorry um passive electronically scanned array did the chinese like to check what the russians are doing just to see if there's still things they could be doing better but it's mainly the engines the russians were holding out for a bigger deal they wanted is basically the line was if we're going to sell you this we know you're going to reverse engineer the engines um so you better buy a lot of them to make it worth a while and the decision finally seems to been well they're going to catch up within three to four years anyway so we might as well make the cash now um and a similar thing seems to happen around the s400 as well because it was a relatively small purchase for the s400 for for china the russians were holding out for more for quite a long time and then just decided to sell it because again having spoken to some russians on this they basically decided yeah the advantage is only going to be there for five or six years in that case so we kind of let's make the export money while we can and talking about iterative improvement and sort of the new stuff that is coming out of china uh we turn to the the one that's probably going to get a lot of viewers excited uh the j20 the mighty dragon that also comes with that mythical world once again stealth attached to it i mean is this china successfully stepping into the 5th gen sphere short answer yes with an if long answer no with a butt um it's a yes um essentially what you've got to understand about fifth generation so-called i mean of course fifth generation is a marketing term come up with by um uh lockheed martin to destroy the competition very effectively um but it's a useful shorthand what what one has to understand about what we think of his fifth generation aircraft quintessentially the f-22 and now the f-35 as well is that it's not just stealth you don't just have to be difficult to detect physically although that's a huge part of it and to be vlogs so the the technical terms are low observable and very low observable low and vlo to be vlo can to be considered vlo you definitely need to have what's called all aspect stealth so you need to be difficult to detect in the fire control bands that radars tend to use so x and q normally things like the f 22 f-35 are overwhelmingly optimized to defeat radars in the x and ku band you have to be shaped to do that in in all aspects so viewed from any angle obviously you'll still have a best a best kind of angle against the threat but there needs to be shaping all around to be vlog but much more to the point you also need to be able to do your work of building a situational awareness picture of the battle space around you and launching weapons effectively without giving yourself away to passive sensors by the by your own emissions what we know with the j20 is that outside it probably classifies as lo but not vlo it is low observable from the front it is not nearly as low observable as an f22 or an but also it's not really designed to be if what you really care about is frontal radar cross-section you don't put canards on your aeroplane those forward control surfaces because yes while like the j20 and indeed the typhoon um and the rafale you can have software which kind of tries to within the demands of what you're doing flying wise keep the canard movements to doing things that minimize the radar returns it's still a radar return enhancing feature to have and you can't get away from that so if you really cared about frontal rts you wouldn't put canards on the j20 the reason they've done it is because they wanted something big enough that it could contain a large internal fuel load and long-range air-to-air missiles specifically the pl15 which is a big missile and they can carry four of them internally now while also being sufficiently agile and potentially having sufficient short field performance so to do that they basically needed the extra um control moment moment that that having the canards gives you long story short what the j-20 gives china is a fighter which is low observable enough that it will be very difficult to detect against the background chaos and noise of any large-scale clash between china and either one of its regional allies or with the united states where there will be hundreds of aircraft sorties thousands of missile tracks huge amounts of electronic warfare going on on both sides potentially physical attack but certainly network and other non-kinetic attacks on satellite communications and satellite imaging and satellite surveillance systems in that context the j20 is low observable enough probably to kind of be difficult to detect difficult to track and it's got enough range particularly because it can carry up to four external fuel tanks which it can then jettison to improve the stealth yes that will that will harm the radar cross section but again it's not that vlo that'll matter hugely with that range it can potentially fly a long way out from the chinese mainland and then approach the key targets which are the u.s air base at guam anything on the first island chain and a wax and tank orbits because a wax and tank orbits are what make western air power and specifically american air power work so the j20 is perfect for hunting these it's got very long range missiles comparatively speaking it's got a radar which even if it can't currently will be developed into something that has proper lpi lpd capabilities it is it's a big acer array we don't know how well it works but they'll keep improving it and it yeah it can approach from unexpected directions with a lot of range and it's hard to see it's dangerous now it's much more dangerous from the americans point of view in terms of where it will be in 10 years let's talk a little bit about sort of the other uh improvements that china has been doing you already talked about the engines ws-10 you mentioned appealed 15 missiles china seems to be making progress not just on the side of the aircraft but also the systems that these aircraft are carrying the radar suites you already mentioned that as well what are we sort of seeing there on their side so the chinese are following the same approach with radar systems as they appear to be following with a whole host of military tech in other words they are using the extraordinary amount of money they're putting in and the fact that because they are the expansionist power uh they are the challenger to the status quo uh in the region they can largely pick their timetable in terms of where and when confrontations occur so they don't necessarily have huge time pressure to commit everything to one program and push through capabilities as fast as possible so what they're doing instead is putting a lot of money into a whole range of approaches so if you look at a wax for example they have the kj 200 the kj 2000 and the kj 500 in terms of regular a wax interestingly the kj 2000 which is their equivalent of the a50 the the berry of a50 mainstay which is the russian a wax which it is sort of modeled on developed from the the illusion 76 airframe but it was actually modeled mainly with israeli avionics and then when that was stopped they took what they could extract in terms of technology and completed it themselves uh unlike the the russian a50 um the the kj 2000 is an aesa it looks like a traditional a wax in that it's got a big circular self lift creating array but instead of being a circle that rotates in a mechanically scanned array um the kj 2001 is actually three different aesa arrays uh instead of triangles that fit together into this circle and aesa radars again give you huge amounts of benefits in terms of both efficiency but also how many targets you can track the ability to do much more efficiently do air at air and underground work you can do a lot more interesting things with electronic warfare and countermeasures and things interestingly on a wax though the chinese are still operationally they're still trying to work out how they want to use them so chinese air-to-air training pilot training uh has until very recently been incredibly rigid uh so you would take off and fly an entire sortie literally according to pre-briefed individual sequenced textbook maneuvers from the textbook so you know you would do a merge between aircraft and both aircraft would do exactly what the textbook said and any any kind of move away from that was was a disciplinary event and if you as a pilot wanted to experiment and change things a you better hope that you had some rank and b you had to go through this really lengthy justification and approvals process to get it incorporated in as a new tactic that would then be taught again in this textbook manner the chinese have realized that this really isn't a good way to train people for modern air combat particularly the complexity of it and so uh helped by things like the golden helmet challenge uh they've instituted in effect a whole series of competitions which involve uh selected pilots doing genuinely free form kind of anything goes experimental air combat and you know even then uh when we say you know well that sounds a bit kind of remedial you know they're just getting to this now it's worth remembering that a whole host of of modern western air combat techniques are basically taught by the book yes it remains a dynamic thing and they don't structure the sorties in that way but what you do within a one circle fight or two circle fight or you know the tactics you employ as a western fighter pilot are still you know ones that you learn you don't just make them up on the spot because there's such a corpus of knowledge that people know that people have worked out over many decades exactly the most efficient way to fight their aircraft against given sets of opponents so you know you don't remake the rule book because people have already got it right um yes you might experiment with different applications and and the key skill is learnt knowing when to employ certain things and when to when to break with that but so that the chinese aren't quite as backward as it might appear but they're still in the early stages of breaking out of this extremely structured siloed approach to things so for example in the a wax what they've done is rather than an airborne commander control post an early warning post that you see in any western a wax in a coalition what the chinese have done is take the um brigade control regimental brigade brigade controller who used to literally sit in the control tower of the air base and give the sequential orders of the fighters fighter pilots during their sortie they've moved him to the a-wax so he can see much better what's actually happening but he still only has authority to talk to his units fighters because he's so so you have a couple of them who are talking to different units that are potentially in the airspace and they're still very much not you know there's a long way to go between for example coordination between ground-based surface-to-air missile batteries or naval surface-to-air missile capabilities or naval aircraft and platf aircraft so joint engagement zones for example don't exist really in china they can't manage surface-to-air missile engagements and air-to-air engagements at the same time which really matters if you look at something like the taiwan strait where the one of the big threats to the taiwanese air force is the huge numbers of long-range surface-to-missile batteries uh which are protecting all of the assets that the chinese have to strike you know ballistic missile launchers and anti-ship launchers and things which the taiwanese would need to strike at to stop the bombardment or to lessen the bombardment in the case of a clash but of course taiwan being the big security challenge of the moment for the chinese authorities the plaf have kind of claimed taiwan bureaucratically as theirs so you know in the case of a clash that the air force will be wanting to go over and do the do the stuff do the important work which means that the surface term missile batteries can't really engage while the air force is there right yeah and not not only while they're off engaging but until they're all back because otherwise as has happened repeatedly across the taiwan straits over the years and they'll shoot their own people down so it does matter um not to say that joint engagement zones are always seamless and easy in in western or indeed russian usage but there's more practice at it and where so where's the chinese air force sort of sitting generally with the experience that they have gained over the last couple of years and also sort of the overall quality not mainly of the pilots you already mentioned the golden helmet and those are sort of small changes to the more rigid system but also the everything that comes with an air force you know the the maintenance crews the command control structures where are things going there the command and control is still very very rigid i mean it is almost inevitably so because it exists within an unbelievably rigid hierarchical structured society that is the ccp it will always be much more rigid than a western system that said there is an increasing understanding that they need to train in much more realistic environments there is an attempt to train more with with overseas partners so they've been to russia for a couple of years running to go and train in russia and joint exercises one of but although to give an idea of you know that the base from which they're starting it used to be a big thing for chinese detachments to go and operate from a different airfield than from their own airfield in china um you know you're going to deploy and fly sorties for a week from a different airfield and that was a big deal now not only are they going to russia to do joint exercises but last year they brought their own munitions rather than relying on russian ones so and they brought some more of their own maintainers and fueling and stuff so they're getting better and better at this expeditionary thing but it's worth remembering that they are coming from a low base um and in many ways the kit out in many ways the kit outstrips their ability to make what we would consider at least modern use of it but again they'll get there and because they're the challenging power for the status quo they can kind of pick their moments and pick where you know confrontations happen if they happen if you look at you know where where the where the pilots are i mean i was told from um diplomatic exchange but who who had a background as a fighter pilot who several years ago went for a a demonstration flight a back seat flight with with chinese air force um in a flanker i believe he was saying it's clear that they put someone who they considered was was one of their good guys to kind of make a good impression um and you know he said it was what we did was all perfectly competent but we went out over the sea and then we refueled in the area we did mid-air refueling and then we came back that was the sortie like the refueling was the sortie and so i think we we've got kind of blase because of the war on terror for so long and and the complexity and often kind of chaotic nature of a lot of those missions the ad hoc capability to improvise that pilots have had to develop and that the whole system has had to develop the c2 has had to develop all the enablers have had to be incredibly responsive and efficient i think we forget how how long that took for the west to get right um when we look at china you know and it is still subordinate to the pla you know the the the plaf is still it's it's got more power it's got more clout uh in the ccp than it used to but the pla the army is still very dominant and that does affect things in terms of the way that the leadership see the plaf and if we talk about the leadership i mean what what is the focus of the the plaf you know ignoring for one that that this equipment could hit the export market and you western countries might face it how is china currently set to deploy this at home so at home uh china organizes uh traditionally by military districts just like the soviet union did and essentially it's it's again just like the vks it's it's mainly territorial defense um but increasingly the the the focus is on first of all enabling a lot of the assets that are used to push what some people refer to as the a2ad bubble um more accurately long-range strike systems and long-range air defense systems which are being pushed out for example onto artificial reefs um that the chinese have created uh in the east and south china seas but also uh on things like their h6k long-range bombers which are very very heavily modified illusion um but with modern turbofan engines and completely revamped avionics and sensors and things the h6ks carry basically very long-range anti-ship missiles ballistic missiles and all sorts of long-range treats which can threaten things like u.s forward air bases carrier groups essentially pushing any preparations for a large-scale clash that didn't rely on host nation support uh yeah can you see the japanese letting the americans do kinetic strikes from bases in the japanese mainland or the koreans from them at the base in the middle of seoul maybe unlikely um but it it's that ability to push specific threat systems that that push the americans and their allies back with their particularly their enablers so their carriers their tankers their a-wax the rest of the platf kind of only has to provide a an umbrella to kind of help those project far enough out to do that job and because they're all relying on standoff weaponry that's kind of enough so the scope of ambition doesn't have to be hugely high um and you know the majority of it is providing support to the army um you know remember that they have an active border dispute with india which has an enormous army and and you know relatively well equipped one and certainly a very motivated one and a large air force uh with an extremely professional aircrew um and nuclear weapons uh so you know they have a serious land border with with with india they also have a serious land border with the russians and at the moment china and russia are much much you know closer aligned than they used to be there's a sort of common interest in in um sticking one up to the west for once for a better term um you know and they see they see western kind of attempts to constrain their freedom of action in their narrow broads as mutually annoying we sometimes forget that the chinese have a lot quite a lot of military forces uh on the sino-russian border and the russians have lots of military forces on the sino-russian border and uh yeah a couple of years ago the chinese did a a divisional scale land exercise where they moved uh heavily supported armored forces about a thousand kilometers across desert mountainous terrain now if you're the russians looking at that where in the world can china deploy a divisional strength force a thousand kilometers across mountainous and desert terrain and there's only one place and it's between the chinese china china russian border and the top of the camp chakra peninsula so you know there's still signaling there and so a lot of the plaf is actually also still being set up to support the army in much more traditional confrontations as well as helping to project this this kind of long-range uh threat but of course the more capable they get and particularly as things like long-range u-calves their their strike bomber program the h-20 then you i think it's jax or jh xx which is sort of a if you think f111 aardvark um but in low observable chinese form so basically another guam killer as these capabilities come online you know the hammer wants to find a nail so it will help move towards china's broader geostrategic games which as as stated to be a uh i think it's the primary military power within the the home island chain in effect by 2035 and uh world-class global military or however they phrased it by 2050. in other words they want to be competing with the americans on the global global stage militarily or at least have the capacity to do so by 2050 but that's a long way out so for now the focus is very much within the first island chain making sure the americans feel they can't can't interfere if they feel they have to take a military solution with taiwan and also you know to maintain a potential to coerce uh smaller neighbours um particularly around kind of fishing disputes and things in vietnam cambodia um the philippines uh and yeah manage the indian uh confrontation which again interesting to see in indian strategic planning the language having almost completely switched away from the traditional discussions about pakistan to china um so yeah that's very much that that i mean you've published on this but what sort of recommendations would you have right now if people are interested in the subject where they can they turn to to learn more i think in the english language the the far and away the best source open source on on the the chinese air capabilities across the spectrum um is a series of books by a guy called andreas ruprecht um who's published to harpier who's i think they're titled modern chinese warplanes yeah um he's got there was an updated one a couple of years ago that's that's probably the best current open source publication on the topic i found it very useful okay fantastic well i think this has renewed interest in chinese aviation capabilities amongst many viewers so we'll see what happens in the coming decades and how the situation develops justin thanks very much for joining so i hope that you enjoyed that and i want to thank justin bronk again for the absolutely amazing introduction he has given us to this subject i hope that you learned something i certainly did and if you have any feedback on this video or if there's anything you want to add to the discussion please let us know down in the description no not into the description in fact in the comment section but the description is important as well first of all i'll be linking justin wrong's profile there as well as his publication on the subject and his recommendations of course as well and if you're so inclined also consider checking out our patreon or channel memberships to see how you can support this sort of content actively over these platforms and of course you will also find links to my social media like twitter and instant gratification if that is something you want to follow me on i guess in any case i wish all of you a great day and see you in the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 692,011

Keywords: China, Air Force, Chinese Army, J-10, PLAAF, J-20, J-16

Id: uQedM3qBXgc

Length: 37min 18sec (2238 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021