The Chinese Air Force

In my assignment as Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, I had the responsibility of monitoring air forces around the world. There is no question which country has made the greatest strides in developing its airpower capabil­ity. Over the last two decades, Chinas air force, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), has transformed itself from a large, poorly-trained force oper­ating aircraft based on 1950s Soviet designs to a leaner and meaner force flying advanced Russian and indigenously produced fourth-generation fighters. This remarkable transformation is still a work in progress, but China has made up a lot of ground in a short time.

China’s civilian and military leaders grasped the centrality of airpower in modern warfare as early as the mid 1970s, a lesson reinforced by the stunning success of the U. S.-led coalition during the first Gulf War. They set the goal of building the PLAAF into a world class, high-technology air force capable of pre­vailing against sophisticated adversaries in regional conflicts. China’s expanding airpower capability has had a profound impact on the Asia-Pacific region (and beyond), causing countries to reassess their own air force modernization needs.

China’s successful 2011 test flight of a stealth fighter prototype, the J-20, demonstrates just how ambitious its airpower goals have become. The United States and Russia are the only other countries deploying or developing true fifth-generation fighter aircraft; Beijing is now seeking to match the capabili­ties of the two most established aerospace powers. In addition to stealth fighter development, the Chinese aviation industry already produces two fourth-gen­eration fighters (the indigenous J-10 and China’s Su-27 copy, the J-11) which are roughly equivalent to the aircraft that make up the bulk of the existing U. S., Russian, and Western air force fleets. China has also successfully test flown a fourth-generation fighter (J-15) that can be launched from an aircraft carrier.

More sophisticated combat aircraft are just one component of the expan­sion of Chinese airpower. Chinese military planners are focused on development of antiaccess/area denial capabilities with an eye toward negating any potential threat to their dominance in the Western Pacific. Chinese efforts to develop an “informatized” military include a focus on integrating and networking aero­space systems, using airborne early warning and control aircraft together with space-based assets. China plans to field a large fleet of remotely piloted aircraft

(RPAs) with both combat and surveillance missions. The deployment of RPAs will enhance and extend the range of China’s area denial capabilities, challeng­ing the ability of other nations’ forces to operate in the Western Pacific.

China’s Second Artillery Corps now possesses a large arsenal of increas­ingly accurate cruise and ballistic missiles that could strike air bases in Japan and islands throughout the Pacific, and target U. S. aircraft carriers. Nonstealthy air­craft attempting to operate near China will be confronted with an increasingly capable land-based air defense network. PLAAF training has advanced in parallel with technological improvements, resulting in a better-educated and more pro­fessional cadre of officers and enlisted personnel. Even in an era of constrained resources, China’s comprehensive expansion of its airpower capability should be a matter of great concern to U. S. civilian and military leaders and to U. S. friends and allies in Asia, particularly Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

I was honored and privileged to take part in the October 2010 conference in Taipei on the Chinese Air Force, which was jointly organized by Taiwan’s Council for Advanced Policy Studies, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U. S. National Defense University, and the RAND Corporation. The organiz­ers did a superb job in assembling a first-rate group of international experts on airpower and the Chinese military. The conference papers were discussed and debated at length as experts sought to assess Chinese air force current and future capabilities and the trajectory of the air balance across the Taiwan Strait and in the Western Pacific. The current volume contains substantially revised versions of the papers presented at the conference, benefiting greatly from conference dis­cussions and careful editing by Richard Hallion, Roger Cliff, and Phillip Saun­ders. Together, the chapters offer a complete picture of where the Chinese air force is today, where it has come from, and most importantly, where it is headed.

This book should be of keen interest to policymakers, senior military leaders, the intelligence community, academics, and China watchers of every stripe. However, it is of particular relevance to senior U. S. civilian and military leaders as they make difficult decisions about funding U. S. air and naval capa­bilities in an environment of constrained defense resources. It is also impor­tant reading for U. S. Air Force and Navy officers, who need to understand the progress China has made in modernizing its air force, and to consider the ways Chinese leaders might employ air power in the future.

David A. Deptula, Lt General, USAF (Ret.)

Senior Military Scholar Center for Character and Leadership Development United States Air Force Academy