DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China’s Widening Defense Commitments Risk Straining Military

DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China’s Widening Defense Commitments Risk Straining Military

Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by K. V. Seth from reliable sources Bloomberg News
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - December 6, 2013: China’s broadening national-security commitments, including a warning of defensive measures against foreign aircraft in its new East China Sea air zone, risk straining a military still catching up with its rivals.

A reformulated and expanded Chinese Coast Guard is still working out a unified command structure, according to Susan Shirk, a former Clinton administration official who met with representatives of the branch in July. China’s fighter jet pilots get far less training than their regional counterparts, said Ian Easton, a research fellow at the Project 2049 Institute in Arlington, Virginia.

While defense spending has more than doubled since 2006, China is still modernizing its forces even as the U.S. dedicates more military resources to the Asia-Pacific and Japan expands its own navy. The relative gap indicates the capacity of China - - which also is advancing naval deployments in waters it claims in the South China Sea -- to sustain challenges to incursions over East China Sea airspace may be constrained.

“It’s the old line from Top Gun: Their mouth is writing checks that their body can’t cash,” said Richard Bitzinger, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies who analyzes Chinese military modernization, referring to the 1986 Tom Cruise movie. “Really their ability to actually monitor let alone enforce such a huge swath of territory is probably well outside their capabilities.”

Influence Abroad

Advances in stealth technology, missile defense and shipbuilding all point to the rise of a military whose focus has broadened from national defense and recapturing Taiwan to longer-range force projection. A 2013 U.S. Department of Defense report said China’s broader military interests include “advancing territorial claims and building influence abroad.”

At the same time, that military modernization, which has drawn expressions of concern from neighbors as well as the U.S., masks deeper problems such as entrenched corruption within the ranks and insufficient, rigid training for pilots who are constrained by risk-averse political officers, according to the Project 2049 Institute’s Easton.

Corruption in the military, which may include officers who drive luxury cars and pay for vacations with public funds, undermines the army’s effectiveness, retired Major General Luo Yuan wrote in the Chinese version of the state-owned Global Times in February.

Strained Military

Even stepping up patrols around islands in the East China Sea also claimed by Japan -- called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyu in Chinese -- have strained the military, saidShirk, who served under President Bill Clinton as deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific.

“I know from discussions with the new Chinese Coast Guard this summer that just the patrols out to the Diaoyu Islands was definitely stretching their capability,” said Shirk, now chair of the 21st Century China Program at the University of California San Diego. “They took all these ships and painted new Coast Guard signs on them, but the task of integrating them into a unified command will take a long time.”

China’s level of military modernization doesn’t compare with the world’s advanced armed forces, Xu Qiliang, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, wrote in a book explaining reforms outlined in a Communist Party meeting last month. There is a “large gap” between the military and the needs of national security, Xu said.

Biden Criticism

The creation of the defense zone, which covers the islands also claimed by Japan, provoked criticism from leaders including U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden, who visited Japan and China this week. He said China’s move, announced Nov. 23, has caused “significant apprehension in the region.” The U.S. operates air defense identification zones including along the east and west coasts, Alaska and Hawaii.

China will bear “increasing responsibility to contribute positively to peace and security,” Biden said in a speech in Beijing yesterday. “That means taking steps to reduce the risks of accidental conflict and miscalculation.”

As China gathers strength in the Asia-Pacific it will have to compete with a much larger U.S. military -- whose Air Force alone has more than 400 surveillance planes compared to China’s 100 in all its armed forces, for example -- as the Obama administration conducts what it calls a rebalance to the region.

Among the U.S. goals was to position about 60 percent of the Pentagon’s naval assets in the region by 2020, from about 50 percent previously, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said last year. Pentagon officials reached an agreement with Australia to shift about 2,500 Marines there from Okinawa, Japan, where their presence has drawn opposition from local residents.

Japan Defense

Japan is bolstering its forces as well. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe increased the defense budgetin 2013 for the first time in 11 years. The Defense Ministry wants another budget increase for next year, a move that would return military spending to its highest level since 2005. Abe’s government is putting the finishing touches on the country’s first postwar national security strategy.

Among the items included in the Japanese ministry’s latest budget request were 1.5 billion yen ($14.7 million) for amphibious training facilities and 1.6 billion yen to build a military facility on the tiny island of Yonaguni, close to the area disputed with China.

Training within China’s air force has been a challenge for years, according to Easton. In 2011, the military revamped training for fighter pilots to put new emphasis on aerial combat skills as well as academic training, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Ten Hours

“Chinese Air Force pilots still typically get less than ten hours of flight time a month, well below regional standards,” Easton said. “The training they do engage in tends to be highly scripted and they generally avoid flying at night or over water because it is dangerous and the political officers in control are inherently risk adverse.”

Nonetheless, the Chinese military hasn’t stood still. Military spending for 2013 was set to set to rise to 740.6 billion yuan ($121.6 billion) from 669.1 billion yuan, a 10.7 percent hike, after a similar jump the year before. That’s about five times less than the U.S. spends.

It’s also looking to close the gap with the U.S. China’s navy has promised more aircraft carriers bigger than its first, commissioned last year. China’s military has deployed missile systems capable of destroying aircraft carriers such as those in operation by the U.S. in Asia.

Monitor Zone

With so much advancement, China will be able to monitor the air defense zone in the East China Sea, though the timing of the announcement and the way the government explained it raises questions about leaders’ strategy, according to Huang Jing, a professor at the National University of Singapore who focuses on Chinese politics.

“I’m very confident that this declaration of an air-defense identification zone is backed up by capability but the timing is very, very bad and the way they explained it is very inept,” Huang said.

Corruption within the military also may not play the undermining role that even Chinese generals fear it will, according to Sameer Patil, associate fellow at Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

“Corruption can erode any institution, more particularly so in case of armed forces’ technical capacity,” Patil said. “However, this does not mean that the Chinese do not have a powerful air force or military capacity with which they can assert their territorial claims.”

Multiple Areas

One looming concern is that China’s forces, stretched across multiple areas, may get into accidents that could provoke a crisis. China’s Defense Ministry says it won’t rule out setting up other air defense zones in the future.

“The question is, do you want to spend all that time, and effort and money basically proving a point?” Bitzinger said. “And not exactly proving a very important point. They’re going to have to be selective about everything they do. They don’t have the capabilities to be everywhere and to really prove their point everywhere.”

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Sharon Chen in Singapore atschen462@bloomberg.net; Isabel Reynolds in Tokyo at ireynolds1@bloomberg.net; Shai Oster in Hong Kong at soster@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Rosalind Mathieson atrmathieson3@bloomberg.net 

*Link for This article compiled by K. V. Seth from reliable sources Bloomberg News
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DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China Says J-31 Fighter Will Compete With F-35 for Sales

DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China Says J-31 Fighter Will Compete With F-35 for Sales

Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by K. V. Seth from reliable sources by  Zachary Keck - The Diplomat blogs
(NSI News Source Info) KOTTAKKAL, Kerala, India - November 10, 2013: A PLA Navy official has confirmed to state-run media outlets that China will export the Shenyang J-31 twin-engine fifth generation fighter jet.

According to the Taiwan-based Want China Times, Admiral Zhang Zhaozhong told the People’s Daily this week that the J-31 was never built with China’s military in mind, and it was highly unlikely that the PLA would ever operate J-31s off of its aircraft carriers. Instead, the J-31 was designed for export to China’s strategic partners and allies, particularly those that couldn’t purchase the F-35.

The J-31, often referred to as the Falcon Hawk, Falcon Eagle, F-60 or J-21, is one of China’s two prototype fifth-generation aircraft, the other being the J-20. It is built by Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, and images of the aircraft first began appearing on the internet around this time last year.

Photos of the J-31 allegedly conducting its first test run surfaced last November, followed by a one-quarter scale model of the stealth fighter being showcased the same month at the China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition, China’s largest airshow. It was identified only as the Advanced Fighter Concept at the show, although reports in China’s state-run media said that prototype was a J-31. More recently, last month, the Global Times posted a picture of a J-31 doing a test run on its online edition.

Previous reports in China’s state-run media have been mixed as to whether the J-31 would serve as the PLA’s future carrier-based fighter, or whether it was intended for foreign customers. Sun Cong, the chief designer of both China’s current carrier-based aircraft, the J-15, as well as the J-31, told the People’s Daily earlier this year that future versions of the J-31 might become China next-generation carrier-borne fighter jet. However, representatives from the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, a state-owned aerospace company that displayed the prototype at the airshow last November, billed it at the time as intended for export.

An article in the People’s Daily at the end of last month did little to clarify matters. The article referred to the J-31 as a fourth-generation stealth fighter, while also saying that is comparable to the U.S.’ F-35 fighter jets. The report first said that it would be exported abroad as a competitor to the F-35, before discussing the possibility that it will be China’s next carrier-borne fighter.

“Experts predict that the J-31 will make rapid inroads in the international market in the future, and will undoubtedly steal the limelight from the F-35,” the People’s Daily report said, noting also that competition to sell the fighter jets to international customers was “becoming a new variable in the Sino-US strategic game.”

The report added that, “The J-31, with its main target as the export market, represents a serious threat to U.S. arms manufacturers.” Later in the same article, however, People’s Daily noted that the plane’s landing gear was built to sustain the impact of landing on a carrier better than the current J-15s, and therefore might be used as China’s future carrier-based jet.

One possibility is that China is building both a domestic and export version of the aircraft. Some foreign news outlets have indeed said that China may sell a version of the aircraft abroad under the name F-60, while maintaining a fleet of domestic J-31s for the PLA.

With so little known about the J-31, it’s hard to gauge how credible China’s claims are that the J-31 is a low-cost alternative to the F-35. In a report in Defense News last August, shortly after the first few images of the plane surfaced, Project 2049 Institute’s Robert Cliff dismissed the notion that the J-31 would pose a serious threat to the F-35 in terms of overseas sales.

““India won’t buy it. Russia won’t buy it,” Cliff noted, adding: “That pretty much leaves countries like Pakistan, Brazil, some Middle East countries, none of whom [the U.S. is] likely to sell the F-35 to anytime this decade or next.”

He also said that he did not believe Saudi Arabia was interested in the plane.

Pakistan is perhaps the most likely foreign purchaser of the fighter. Pakistan and China previously jointly developed the JF-17 Thunder advanced fighter, although only Islamabad has ended up purchasing the jet thus far. This week Pakistani officials called on China to increase cooperation in the area of defense production. Beijing has long helped Islamabad acquire the necessary knowledge and expertise to develop a more advanced domestic defense industry.

*Related Shenyang J-31 (F60) Stealth Multirole Fighter Images;

*Link for This article compiled by K. V. Seth from reliable sources by  Zachary Keck - The Diplomat blogs
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*This article is being posted from Toronto, Canada By DTN News ~ Defense-Technology News Contact:dtnnews@ymail.com 
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DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China Shocks The World

DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China Shocks The World

Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources Strategy Page

(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - January 5, 2013: Chinese weapons development in the last two decades has been even more spectacular when you consider that 500 years ago China began falling farther and farther behind the West in most military matters. When the civil war ended in 1948 there were no Chinese factories producing modern (Western) weapons. 

There were some workshops repairing Western weapons and assembling them from parts, but that was it. In the 1950s China began producing licensed copies of simple Russian weapons (rifles, machine-guns, some artillery and ammunition for all this stuff), but nothing sophisticated. 

By the late 1950s China was producing copies of Russian tanks and other armored vehicles as well as the two seat trainer version of the MiG-15 jet fighter and the Mig-17 jet fighter. 

Many of the components for armored vehicles and aircraft had to be imported from Russia. It took decades for China to develop the skills and industrial organizations that could build the electronics and high-tech mechanical items (like jet engines). This really didn’t start happening until after the economic reforms of the 1980s (allowing entrepreneurs to start businesses and get rich) had time to develop high-tech industries. That’s why there’s been so much progress in the last two decades. China is still playing catch-up, but is closing the gap more rapidly every year.

For example, while the U.S. introduced stealth aircraft three decades ago, China now has two of these in development and flying. While the U.S. has been operating aircraft carriers for nearly a century, China commissioned its first one this year and is operating jet aircraft from it. Nearly all the mechanical and electronic equipment on this carrier is Chinese made, and often of Chinese design. 

China is a major supplier of satellite launch services and has already developed and tested a KillSat (a satellite that can find and destroy, via collision, another satellite). China has sent men into space in the last decade and is developing a reusable vehicle similar to the American Space Shuttle. 

China has been producing more and more UAVs with capabilities (and often designs) similar to the most advanced ones in the West. China is still having problems developing state-of-the-art warships, but keeps at it and continues to make progress. Same trend with missiles (guided, ballistic and so on).

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*Link for This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources Strategy Page
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DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China Has A Daring And Prudent Plan

DTN News - CHINA DEFENSE NEWS: China Has A Daring And Prudent Plan

Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources Strategy Page
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - October 25, 2012: Earlier this year pictures came out of China showing yet another stealth fighter prototype. This one is called the J-31 “Falcon Eagle” (from an inscription on the tail), and while it looks like the American F-22, it’s also smaller than China’s other stealth fighter (the J-20, which has already flown). The J-31 was built by the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation (which makes the J-11, the illegal Chinese copy of the Russian Su-27). The J-31 has some characteristics of the F-35 as well but appears more an attempt to match the F-22. It’s possible that the F-31 was a competing (with the J-20) design that lost out. That’s because the J-31 has not flown yet. Whatever the case, the J-31 is further evidence that China is determined to develop its own high tech military gear. 

While China is eager to develop advanced military technology locally, it recognizes that this takes time and more effort than nations new to this expect. Thus China is trying to avoid the mistakes Russia made in this area, and having competing designs and developing necessary supporting industries is part of that. All this takes a lot of time and involves lots of little (and some major) failures. The Chinese are doing it right and are willing to wait until they get military tech that is truly world class.

The other stealth fighter, the J-20, was made by CAC (Chengdu Aircraft Company), which also produced the JF-17 and J-10. The J-20 made its first flight over a year ago and several more since then. A second J-20 prototype has also been seen and first flew last May. While the J-20 looks like the American F-22 when viewed head on, it's overall shape, weight, and engine power is closer to the American F-15C. In other words, it's about 20 meters (62 feet) long, with a wing span of 13.3 meters (42 feet). J-20 has about the same wing area as the F-15C, which is about 25 percent less than the F-22 (which is a few percent larger than the F-15 in terms of length and wingspan). Worse, for the J-20, is the fact that its engine power is about the same as the F-15C, while the F-22 has 65 percent more power. With the afterburner turned on, the J-20 has more power than the F-15C and nearly as much as the F-22. But because the afterburner consumes so much fuel, you can't use more than a few minutes at a time. The F-22 is still one of only three aircraft (in service) that can supercruise (go faster than the speed of sound without using the afterburner). In addition to the F-22, the Eurofighter and the Gripen can also supercruise.

The J-20 has some stealthiness when it's coming at you head on. But from any other aspect, the J-20 will light up the radar screen. For this reason the J-20 is seen as a developmental aircraft, not the prototype of a new model headed for mass production. As such, it is only the fifth stealth fighter to fly, the others being the U.S. F-22 and F-35, plus the Russian T-50 and I.42. The older U.S. F-117 was actually a light bomber and the B-2 was obviously a heavy bomber. Based on recent Chinese warplane development projects (J-11 in particular), the J-20 has a long development road ahead of it and will likely change size and shape before it reaches the production design. The J-31 may be an insurance policy, in case the J-20 effort goes off the rails in a big way.

While the shape of the J-20 confers a degree of stealthiness (invisibility to radar), even more electronic invisibility comes from special materials covering the aircraft. It's not known how far along the Chinese are in creating, or stealing, these materials, or the needed engines. The current J-20 engines are sufficient for early flight tests but not capable of providing the supercruise, something that would be essential for the J-20. That's because China would most likely use the aircraft singly, or in small groups, to seek out and attack American carriers. As for F-22 class engines, that is being worked on. Two years ago China announced it was developing the WS-15 engine (since the 1990s), a more powerful beast well suited for the J-20. No date was given as to when the WS-15 would be available for use or whether it would have the same vectoring (ability to move the hot jet exhaust in different directions in order to make the fighter more maneuverable) the F-22 uses.

For the J-20 to be a superior fighter, it would need electronics (including radars and defense systems) on a par with the F-35 and F-22. So far, the Chinese have not caught up with stuff used by current American fighters. But the gap is being closed, faster than it was during the Cold War when the Russians were creating, or stealing, their way to military tech equivalence with the West. The Russians never made it but the Chinese believe they can succeed.

Work on the J-20 began in the late 1990s, and the Chinese knew that it could be 25 years or more before they had a competitive stealth fighter-bomber. The J-20 is being tested in central China. The twin engine J-20 appears to be about the same weight as the 30 ton F-15C. The F-35A is a 31 ton, single engine fighter, while the twin-engine F-22 is slightly larger at 38 tons. The Russian I.42 was a 42 ton aircraft and their T-50 weighed in at 37 tons.

China is also developing other support technologies, like the AESA radar, highly efficient cockpit, stealth, and software to tie everything together. Developing, or even copying, this tech is not easy. But the Chinese already know that, having decades of experience adapting stolen technology to their needs. Thus it appears that China is planning on having the J-20, in some form, ready for service by the end of the decade. The key factor is their ability to develop or steal the needed technology by then. The J-20 appears to be a fighter-bomber, as this kind of aircraft would be most useful dealing with the U.S. Navy and key targets in Taiwan or Japan. In any event, the J-20 is an attempt to develop some kind of 5th generation aircraft, complete with stealth.

The only other competitor in this area is Russia, where fifth generation fighter developments were halted when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Actually, all development work on new fighters, by everyone, slowed down in the 1990s. But work on the F-22, F-35, Eurofighter, and Rafale continued, and those aircraft became, in roughly that order, the most advanced fighter aircraft available today. MiG resumed work on the I.42 in the 1990s, but had to stop after a few years because of a lack of money. Sukhoi has never stopped working on its T-50, funded by much higher sales of its Su-27/30 fighters. This fifth generation may come to be called the "last generation," after they are replaced by the second generation of pilotless combat aircraft (counting armed Predators and the like as the first).

*Link for This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources Strategy Page
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