Equipping the PLAAF: The Long March to Modernity

David Shlapak

Since the early 1990s, and rapidly accelerating after the latter half of that decade, China has undertaken an ambitious program of military mod­ernization, one that continues vigorously today.1 A primary focal point of this effort has been to update and upgrade the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), which for the first 40-plus years of its existence had been a backward force, equipped with numerous but antiquated aircraft flown by poorly trained pilots. While it has yet to completely outgrow this modest past, the PLAAF has undergone a remarkable transformation over the last 20 years, a process that seems certain to continue through the foreseeable future.

This paper addresses one aspect of the PLAAF’s ongoing evolution: its air­craft and weapons. This assessment leads to a conclusion that the point of the PLAAF’s spear—its fleet of modern combat aircraft along with their munitions— has mostly caught up to the standards of other advanced air forces. In terms of its physical hardware, the PLAAF will soon have the ability to credibly challenge the United States over the nearby waters of the Taiwan Strait, if it is not capa­ble already. However, the PLAAF’s ability to project airpower against a first-rate adversary in an arena farther from China’s shores—over the South China Sea or beyond—remains more doubtful, although this could change in the next decade.

Equipment is of course only one piece of the airpower puzzle; without adequate doctrine, leadership, training, and ground support, the most modern aircraft and equipment are at best a static display and at worst a target array. So, this paper’s judgment of China’s air force must be partial; larger and more integrated assessments are needed to understand the PLAAF more thoroughly. What can be said is, should the PLAAF falter in a Taiwan contingency, its lead­ers will be hard put to lay the blame on their tools.