China's Air Force is Broken.

The Chinese Air Force is among most powerful on planet Earth. Flying some 3,000 highly potent fighters and bombers, the People's Liberation Army Air Force is the undisputed king of the skies across Asia, with the technology, the pilots, and the payloads to deliver some serious hurt against any adversary that would dare cross its path.

On the numbers, it's second only to the United States of America, while its highly advanced stealth jets and its growing list of next-generation fighters grant China the right to claim that it's America's equal on the global stage.

So it must be a point of some frustration inside the highest ranks of the CCP that China's Air Force is also utterly broken. Despite its capabilities on paper, despite the sheer volume of combat aircraft at its disposal, the reality of the Chinese Air Force isn't nearly as formidable as it seems.

It's hobbled by inefficiency, inexperience, it's unbalanced, and it's reliant on unimproven technology, and it may not even be properly equipped for an invasion of Taiwan.

Put aside the hype, the breathless optimism, and the propaganda, and there's a long list of reasons to suspect that in reality China's Air Force is little more than a paper tiger. So here's what China has in its arsenal, and here's where that arsenal falls apart. In life, two things can be true at once.

And while we're going to dive deep in today's episode on the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the People's Liberation Army Air Force, we've got to begin by emphasizing that even though China's Air Force is flawed, it certainly isn't weak by any fair metric.

Both in the sheer size of its air wing, and on the technological merits, China does boast the Air Force of a global superpower. So before we get into the myriad problems with the force, let's take stock of its overall military might.

Now the backbone of Chinese military aviation, and by far the most impressive mass-produced aircraft in China's arsenal, is the Chengdu J-20, the Mighty Dragon.

A stealth fighter that got its first taste of proper military service in 2017, the J-20 has been rolling off Chinese production lines at stunning rates, with somewhere above 300 copies of the jet in active service today.

A twin-engine, all-weather, air superiority fighter, the J-20 is a stealth fighter, the second most common in the world behind America's F-35.

It's reportedly quite well-armed, with an impressive payload capacity, a substantial combat range, and advanced avionics on par with the best in the world. Although it's China's premier stealth fighter, it's no longer China's only jet of this time.

Recently, Beijing has been preparing its Shenyang J-35 for service, with a handful of J-35s believed to be in circulation at this time.

Once it goes into full-scale production, the J-35 is expected to serve both as a land-based version and a catapult-assisted carrier jet. Externally, the J-35 is quite similar to America's F-35, and it's expected to export out to Russia and Pakistan's air forces at a minimum.

Backing up, the J-35 and the J-10 are a whole suite of their first-class attacks on the J-35.

The J-35 is a globalaller-related generation of region of the J-369. The J-359 has beennet-backed as a player, and the J-359 is a full-scale non-stealthy fourth-generation fighter jets, with most of those jets built around the core design of the Russian-made Sukol Su-27.

First introduced to Soviet service back in 1985, the Su-27 was initially intended as an air-to-air interceptor rivaling the American F-15 Eagle, although a number of variants have since gone into service.

Between the base Su-27, the multi-role Su-30 improvement, the air superiority-focused Su-35, and three specialized Chinese-built variants, the J-11 Yinglong, the carrier-capable J-15 Flying Shark, brilliant name, and the J-16 Xianglong. All told, China is estimated to possess roughly 1,000 copies of the jets.

That includes about 400 copies of the J-16 specifically, a variant fitted out with advanced avionics technology and equipped to carry the best Chinese-built munitions.

No matter the variant, aircraft of the Su-27 line are known for their impressive top speed, their ability to operate at long range, and their ability to pack a punch on at least 10 external pylons. Besides its roughly 1,000 Su-27 derivatives, China flies over 600 copies of the indigenously designed and developed multi-role fighter, the J-10 Vigorous Dragon.

Similar to the American F-16 or the European Eurofighter, the J-10 is a single-engine fighter meant to balance air-to-air combat with strike capability as a sort of aerial omnitool of destruction.

The latest addition of the aircraft, the J-10C variant, is known to feature particularly impressive onboard avionics and software technology, placing it on par with the best non-stealth aircraft in service with any world nation.

Along with the nation's wide variety of fighter aircraft, China's one of the few modern air forces on the planet to fly dedicated strategic bombers.

That portion of China's arsenal consists of well over 200 copies of the H-6, a bomber featuring a combat range of 3,500 kilometers, and a weapons bay capable of carrying all manner of guided bombs and large missiles.

Although the H-6 is based on the old Soviet Tu-16, an aircraft that first flew in 1952 and was retired in Russia in the early 2000s, today's H-6 aircraft is substantially more advanced than their dated airframes would suggest.

In particular, China flies at least 120 of its H-6K and H-6M variants, refitted with more advanced engines, a modern flight deck, and the requisite features to carry heavy, air-launched ballistic missiles, similar to the most modernized copies of America's B-52.

Alongside the H-6, China fills over 200 copies of the JH-7, which is a lighter, but still relatively potent fighter bomber.

Rounding out its combat arsenal, a range of unmanned drones, including both strike drones similar to the American-made Predator, a Reaper, and a second class of drones that's a bit more unique. Refitted, Cold War-era jet fighters meant to provide expendable fighter jet swarms and decoys during a potential invasion of Taiwan.

Backing up its ground forces, China flies several hundred attack helicopters in two models. the Z-19 and the Z-10, as well as a range of empty submarine helicopters, each available only in small numbers.

Just as important as China's combat aircraft are its support aircraft, gathered from a combination of its air force, its naval air wing, and the aviation branch of its ground forces.

For its airborne early warning and control aircraft, capable of providing situational awareness in battle across great distances, China flies a small handful of long-range KJ-2000s, soon to be joined by the long-awaited upgrade, the KJ-3000.

Backing them up are about 70 propeller-powered early warning aircrafts, the KJ-200 and the KJ-500, plus a few different types of naval helicopter.

For electronic warfare, China flies about 20 propeller-powered aircraft, plus a dozen specially refitted copies of one of its Su-27 derivatives, the J-16, outfitted for radar jamming in roughly the same way as America's Growler aircraft.

China is working to expand its fleet of air-to-air refuelers, currently comprising about 25 jets across several different models, while the nation fulfills its strategic airlift requirements by leaning on about 70 jet-powered heavy-lift aircrafts split between the Soviet-era I-L-76 and the Chinese-built Y-20.

China also flies about 120 tactical airlifters, and if you're really counting everything that they've got, they also fly about 100 Soviet-era biplanes, which were first developed all the way back in the 1940s.

Coming up about 100 years ago! Altogether, China flies well past 3,000 fixed-wing and rotary combat aircraft, and its production lines are spitting out more advanced combat jets week over week. Not only that, but over the course of the past year, China has proved that its research and design capabilities are quite robust.

I mean, so robust, in fact, that the nation appears to have numerous experimental combat aircraft either in testing or on the verge of production. The most impressive among these is an aircraft provisionally referred to as the J-36, a three-engine, tailless aircraft that was first spotted over China in December of 2024.

Although it hasn't been formally acknowledged by Beijing, it's believed to be a prototype sixth-generation fighter.

A designation that, if true, would mean China has a shot at being the first nation to put a sixth-gen aircraft into mainline service.

China is also known to be flying at least two advanced prototypes of unclear nature, possibly piloted, possibly drone, as well as a stealth bomber known as the H-20, which may or may not have been an aircraft spotted flying at high altitudes by civilian photographers on the ground in China just this year.

China is also well on its way to fielding a whole range of collaborative combat aircraft more simply referred to as drone wingmen.

Take a step back. Take a long, open-minded look at the aerial warfighting tools that we just laid out, and we'd expect the conclusion is rather obvious. China's air force and its broader military capabilities are really rather impressive.

The Chinese air force is practically overrun. with a shiny new kit, and it's able to tick just about every box that a modern Air Force could possibly ask for. But in order to find the first glaring issue with China's Air Force, we don't even have to look under the hood. Although, to be clear, we will absolutely be doing that as well.

Instead, the first problem we have to emphasize is rooted entirely in the fact of China's new sparkly hardware, because everything in China's Air Force, from its aircraft to its pilots to its battle tactics and strategy, are unblemished. They're fresh out of the box.

And the last time that the People's Republic of China fought a war, the world was a very different place.

John Lennon, Princess Diana, Richard Nixon, and Jackie Anassas were all alive and well, and the band Queen had only just announced that they will, in fact, rock you. And the Islamic Republic of Iran was not years, not months, but just days old.

It was, of course, 1979, when China and Vietnam fought a nearly four-week exchange known as the Sino-Vietnamese War.

Western casualty counts from the war count somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people killed. But for our purposes, it matters less what the outcome of the fighting was, and more about what the People's Liberation Army was flying. In fact, China wasn't flying anything during that combat, at least not by way of combat air support for its ground troops.

And the people who were a part of China's Air Force back then have long since aged out of service. In fact, many of them have now died. Since that time, China has never fought an air war, not against a peer adversary, not against a near-peer adversary, and not even against an adversary that would have been cleanly outmatched in the sky.

Not a single one of China's fighter pilots is known to have ever tasted combat, and not a single one of the Chinese Air Force's high commanders is known to have ever commanded a modern Air Force in battle.

Of course, we say that China's personnel aren't known to have taken part in such things, because there's always a bit of a grey area where experience is concerned.

Certainly, we're not going to hold firm and insist that not a single Chinese pilot was quietly stripped of their uniform and sent to fly Russian Sukhoi fighters as part of the war in Ukraine or the prior conflict in the Donbas.

But even if a select few pilots have been able to get a taste of battle, the vast majority of China's pilots and its military leaders have had no such opportunity.

They've been trained via digital simulations, via real-life exercises, and via intensive, practical, and theoretical instruction, but none have ever officially taken part in an air war of any kind.

They haven't even carried out an air strike of the kind that's become so ubiquitous through the global war on terror and all manner of other counter-insurgent operations.

It's impossible to quantify just how much experience matters in modern warfighting environments, but the difference between experienced militaries that are accustomed to the rigors of combat and militaries that have never even gotten a taste is absolutely night and day.

That's especially true in aerial combat, where the combination of incoming enemy fire, constantly shifting priorities and battlefield conditions, and quite possibly even- an enemy aircraft to contend with all take the difficult challenge of flying and make it really rather impossible.

Even for experienced combat veterans, the cockpit is a real challenge, and in an environment where the pressure is so high, pilots getting their first taste of combat are prone to lapses in judgment, miscalculations, oversights, or just outright mistakes that in an academic sense, they already know how to avoid.

For air forces that can add new pilots to their squadrons gradually and expose them to combat conditions alongside seasoned veterans, that's a problem that can be overcome with experienced pilots helping to guide, coordinate, and if necessary, protect the lives of newer ones.

But when the entire squadron is flying into battle for the first time, all at the same time, against a more experienced peer or near-peer adversary, that's going to be a major problem.

China's pilots simply don't have the crutch of more experienced wingmen to help them along, and while the historical record is mixed when it comes to relatively inexperienced warfighters rising to meet the moment, it's in the cockpit that inexperienced troops face the greatest barrier to success.

Unlike a platoon or a company of soldiers on the ground, fighter pilots have practically zero margin for error.

A soldier on the ground, if their unit comes under fire, can scramble for cover and start shooting back, but a combat aviator, by default, must make every split-second decision while performing the aerial equivalent of maneuvering a high-performance car down a bustling city avenue at 200 kilometers an hour.

At times, they've got to react to incoming threats from multiple vectors at once, with little, if any, ability to actually see the threat or their own comrades during intense maneuvers, all while trying to maintain situational awareness and carry out their own objectives.

The same could be said about, say, air-to-air refueling crews trying to carry out that complex task under adverse circumstances for the first time, or the crews of airborne early warning craft who, for the first time in their lives, have to keep battlefield awareness while watching real aircraft and real lives wink out on their screens.

Discussing the entire military's capabilities, even the official newspaper of the People's Liberation Army has called out this problem directly, referring to it as, quote, peace disease. But nowhere does the rot and atrophy of peace disease matter more than it does for China's air force.

And it's not as if the first taste of combat that Chinese pilots receive will be a carefully measured dose that's intended to inoculate them and make them stronger.

More than likely, the first large-scale war that China fights in the 21st century will be over the island of Taiwan, where the Chinese air force will be going head-to-head with far more experienced pilots from the United States flying their own highly sophisticated stealth jets.

Although it's been a while since American pilots were dogfighting with enemy aircraft, many of the nation's pilots have at least flown into active combat zones, which is far more than can be said for their Chinese adversaries.

America's history of recent aerial engagements also allows it to refine its best practices, accommodate the proven strengths and limitations of its aircraft, and use data to guide its future decision-making, all luxuries that China just doesn't have.

And just as China's pilots of no real familiarity with the rigors of battle, their aircraft are entirely unproven in combat. There are limited exceptions here for Chinese-made aircraft in service with other militaries around the world, and we'll talk through those exceptions shortly.

But even those aren't aircraft in service with the Chinese Air Force. They're just aircraft that China designed and then shipped off. The individual flying aircraft copies in China's arsenal have never been put to the test in combat conditions on China's behalf, and some of the most important have never been tested at all.

When we described the stealthy J-20, for example, as the backbone of China's combat air fleet, that was a positive in some ways. After all, it's a fifth-generation fighter produced in such high numbers that it could be readily accessible at scale in times of war. But it's also a platform that has never fired its missiles in anger.

On paper, it's able to conceal itself from even sophisticated enemy defenses, perform brilliantly in close-range aerial dogfights, and be able to turn around rapidly from mission to mission without falling apart under strain.

But if the J-20 is taken into battle, and even one of those capabilities proves absent, then the backbone of China's modern military will have proven to be no backbone at all. And that same problem extends to the entirety of the Chinese Air Force.

China is pretty sure that its H-20 bombers and its crew could fly to a target, unleash their payload, and come home safely. But China doesn't actually know that, because it's never been done.

The nation's strategic airlift crews should be able to carry out intense insertion and extraction missions on short runways and with limited time to work, but the air crews have never tried it, and their aircraft have never been asked to perform under that strain with the added risk of incoming fire.

Even the combat aircraft that have gotten a bit of combat action with other nations like the J-10C have yet to operate in large numbers.

For any of China's aircraft, aerodynamic challenges, production line errors, unknown weak spots and vulnerabilities, or underperforming technology could all be lurking, just waiting for the opportunity to bite China's pilots and commanders in the arse. And as major a factor as experience undoubtedly is, China's lack of familiarity with real aerial combat.

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The people who taught them and the people who taught the people who taught them china's military aviators are the very best in the world now with that assumption in mind let's ask another question how much does that aviation skill actually matter if every time they try to fly their aircraft lose power and come crashing to the ground i mean we're exaggerating

Of course lucky for china's pilots it appears that at the very least their planes are pretty good at staying in the sky but all the operational expertise in the world counts for nothing if the technology can't keep up and for china's warplanes this problem goes much deeper than the simple fact that they're untested in combat certainly there are some problems

That can only be exposed in the crucible of war but others are easy to spot even in peacetime and in china's case those problems are everywhere even afflicting the fighter jet that beijing intends to rely on above all else the most glaring problem for the j20 stealth fighter is a problem for quite a few of china's combat jets it's engines despite the j20

Being intended as a high performance fighter china's engine designers haven't been able to keep up with the intended engine for the j20 the ws-15 still not ready two decades after it was first ignited on the testbed the engine is reportedly prone to overheating its heat signatures are unstealthy and it consumes so much fuel that it cuts into the j20's

Intended combat range at present it's still not clear that the engine is being integrated into new j20 models as a matter of course further supply chain issues have become yet another barrier in getting the engine ready even when it is ready to go china will have to spend years taking flyable j20s out of service and upgrading them unless it wants to leave

Its existing j20 fleet hamstrung by an inferior power plant in the meantime china relies on a lesser engine called the ws-10 despite the fact that it's known for frequently overheating intermittently stalling and having no ability to fly at sustained supersonic speeds or supercruise without the use of afterburners beyond its perpetual engine trouble the j20

Has frequently had its stealthy attributes called into question while years of debate about its potentially compromising front windlets or canards have been mostly settled with the conclusion that the canards aren't that big of a deal the aircraft's manufacturing quality seems to leave gaps in the paneling on some aircraft that could make it far more visible

On radar it's also believed to only be a fraction of stealthy when viewed from the rear or the side, especially with hot-burning engines that make it a prime target for infrared detection measures.

Its internal weapons bays are quite small compared to American F-35s, severely limiting the payload that it can carry while remaining stealthy, and at present, it's not even able to carry any bombs within that bay.

It's known to have some pretty substantial maintenance requirements that minimize its flight time, and according to a range of Western experts, it's at least partially reliant on stolen technology from the US and Russia.

In practical terms, that last point wouldn't really matter, except for the fact that combining various stolen technologies plus indigenous design elements, while potentially not fully understanding the stolen tech that's being integrated, is a recipe for weird and unpredictable problems to arise when they're least expected.

Moving on from the J-20, numerous Chinese combat jets are thought to suffer from the same compromising engine issues.

China's J-10C, the most potent non-stealth aircraft in its air fleet, is fitted with the unreliable WS-10, an engine that's known to need frequent maintenance, and even to be swapped out occasionally, which really isn't what you'd want in a single-engine fighter.

China is developing new generation engines to power its H-6 bomber fleet, but will need to take those bombers offline when the new engine, the WS-18, becomes available. Even the mysterious jet that's been provisionally referred to as the J-36 seems to suffer from underpowered engines.

It's a tri-jet design, with not one, not two, but three engines set close together.

But while that setup might produce some cool contrails, it really isn't what you want in an advanced fighter. Instead, it's likely a byproduct of the aircraft's heavy, long-range design, simply carrying too much mass for just two of China's available fighter jet engines to be able to move it properly.

Then there's China's heavy reliance on aircraft of the Su-27 line as its primary workhorse, while more and better J-20s are still coming online.

Not only are those aircraft also brought low by their engine troubles, particularly the otherwise advanced Shenyang J-16, but they appear to a far lower range in practice than what's advertised in China's official materials.

China's J-11s are largely unable to receive air-to-air refueling, while the more advanced J-16 lacks thrust-vectoring engine nozzles and the ability to fly at supercruise.

Not only that, but the entire Su-27 basis for these jets is outdated, with the Su-27 and its many derivatives having shown up in enough wartime environments and engaged in enough highly visible combat operations that China's adversaries almost certainly understand the aircraft's inherent vulnerabilities.

China's supply chain for its Su-27 derivatives isn't healthy either, with Beijing still partially reliant on Russia to keep these jets in the sky.

As alternatives become available, China has been quite enthusiastic in getting its J-11s, J-16s, and Russian-made Sukhoi jets out of service, as well as the carrier-capable J-15s that the Chinese Navy relies on to stock its aircraft carriers. And no takedown of the Chinese Air Force would be complete without circling back to the H-6 bomber.

Although the H-6 is big, relatively fast, and has been updated by China over time, it comes with quite a few drawbacks. not least the fact that many of China's copies are outdated and haven't been brought up to modern standard.

Only about 120 of the jets, at most, are thought to be ready to fly into active combat, and even that's possibly an optimistic figure.

Based on a design that ended service with the Soviets in 1952, the H-6's payload capacity is paltry by modern standards, with the standard variant in the Chinese Air Force today, the H-6K, only capable of carrying a payload of about 15 tons.

If that sounds impressive, then we've got to give a bit of context here. That's almost exactly the same payload as America's F-15EX, an aircraft that can be flown by a single pilot, can hit a top speed of nearly triple that of the H-6, and can keep itself far safer through a combination of maneuverability and onboard defenses.

America's upgraded B-52H can carry well past double what the H-6 can, at the same high speeds and a far greater range.

Not only that, but the B-52 can work in tandem with the B-1 and B-2, while Russia's similarly elderly Tu-95 bombers can work alongside the Tu-22 and the Tu-160. China's H-6 is completely on its own, save for a fighter escort or the much smaller, less equipped JH-7.

It's utterly unstealthy and wouldn't be survivable in modern aerial engagements, where Chinese fighters haven't neutralized enemy air defenses and adversary aircraft using standoff weaponry that can launch very far away from aerial battlefields.

If recent world affairs are any indication, then there should be at least one Chinese combat aircraft that's immune from criticism, and that would be the J-10C, an aircraft that, according to Pakistan, shot down several French-made Rafale jets in combat with India just a few short months ago.

But even the J-10C has its problems, and not just because of the issues with its single unreliable WS-10 engine. The J-10C's avionics are good in some regards, but well below modern standards in others.

It's got relatively light payload and a relatively short range, even before adjusting for its engine's high rates of fuel consumption. And even the J-10C's accomplishments of Pakistan have been called into question, despite the evidence seeming to support the idea that the J-10C did take down French Rafales.

Instead, that combat victory seems to have had more to do with India misunderstanding the range of the missiles the Pakistan's J-10C's were firing, according to both Indian and Pakistani sources speaking to the global press.

That is to say, India's pilots believed that they were safe from the missiles being launched in their direction, because apparently the range of the Chinese-made PL-15 missiles that Pakistan used were a good deal longer than China had advertised.

To be clear, that is a positive mark for China's missiles, also an important asset to consider when evaluating the country's air force. But assuming that version of events is accurate, it would be premature to say that the J-10C outperformed advanced Western fighters or even engaged in a true contest with them at all.

Without that, the J-10C is just as unproven as the J-20 or any of China's other modern warplanes. So let's play devil's advocate one more time. We'll keep the assumption that we mentioned before, that even despite the fact that China's military aviators are completely unproven, they've nonetheless managed to become the absolute best in the world.

And we'll even add another assumption, that all of the problems with China's military aircraft that we just explained in detail are actually nothing to worry about. And the J-20, the J-10C, and H-6, and everything else that China's flying are just as awesome as Beijing would have us believe.

Even in a scenario where China does have the pilots and the aircraft it needs, there's still more reason to be concerned.

For a globally empowered air force, it's not enough to just have a good arsenal. You've got to be able to unify that arsenal into a functional air force. And here, yet again, there's reason to believe that China isn't quite so formidable as it seems.

The biggest problem here comes down to force design. Which aircraft China has chosen to procure with their respective strengths and weaknesses in order to accomplish the wartime tasks that China believes to be most important. After all, no two air forces are exactly alike.

Brazil and Italy, for example, command relatively the same economic power to fuel their respective militaries.

But Brazil, with no real geopolitical adversaries but a massive Amazon to patrol, has invested mostly in long-range, light-attack propeller planes to engage in remote patrols, with just three dozen modern fighter jets at the nation's disposal once all of its orders come in.

Italy, by contrast, is a relatively powerful member of the NATO alliance, building a fleet that'll eventually include almost 100 F-35s and almost 100 Eurofighter typhoons, with none of the propeller-powered patrol aircraft that Brazil so cupboards.

By all outward indicators, China wants to build an air force that prioritizes long-range, high-tech, air superiority missions. While its biggest investment, the J-20, can serve in a strike role, it's at its absolute best when bringing down enemy aircraft. And China has already built well over 300 of these things.

Its strike fighters and strategic bombers are all described, at least publicly, as having combat ranges of multiple thousands of kilometers, despite the high probability that their actual combat range is much less because of the engine troubles we just described.

China's most recently upgraded bombers are meant to launch long-range cruise missiles, while its upcoming line of J-35 stealth jets are meant to operate far afield on aircraft carriers before adding their own substantial combat range to the mix.

If China were to design a hypothetical war where its own combat arsenal was best suited to win, then that would most likely be a war against an adversary at least 1,000 kilometers out, where its advanced stealth aircraft could dismantle enemy defenses in short order, clearing the way for a second wave of strike aircraft to devastate whatever remains.

But if that's correct, then the composition of the rest of China's air force just doesn't make very much sense. China places... a disproportionately heavy emphasis on designing and procuring combat aircraft to the point that its fleet of non-combat and support aircraft looks practically anemic.

And while that might not be as big of a problem for a different style of air force with a different practical focus, it's a major issue for an air force like China.

Right now, Beijing has barely 25 air-to-air refueling tankers in operation, supporting a combined air force and naval air wing of over 3,000 combat aircraft, a ratio of 120 to 1.

By comparison, the US Air Force flies some 500 air-to-air refuelers without even accounting for other branches of the military against about 2,000 combat aircraft, roughly a 4 to 1 ratio, and it still believes itself to be in an air-to-air refueling crisis.

With so few refuelers available, China lacks the means to keep anything larger than a handful of fighter aircraft in the skies for extended periods on a combat mission, meaning that any large operation will have to depend on whatever fuel China's fighters can carry by themselves.

Even for non-stealthy aircraft, relying on external fuel tanks diminishes the ability to carry payloads or munitions, while if an aircraft like the J-20 wants to remain stealthy, then external fuel tanks aren't even an option.

And while this might be an acceptable situation for China, in an offensive against a nearby adversary like Taiwan, where it might expect a single all-out strike to neutralize its enemy in a matter of hours, even that sort of operation risks quietly getting out of hand if resistance is greater than expected, and China has to recall its fighters for a

Drawn-out refueling process.

Once operations become complex, a nation like China is really going to want air-to-air refuelers, and it barely has any.

The same can be said for China's airborne early warning and control aircraft charged with maintaining broad situational awareness across a battle field. China has a few different types of AEW and C planes, but only one, the KJ-2000, is equipped to provide 360-degree awareness over a massive battle space for extended periods.

And China's got fewer than half a dozen of them.

Unstealthy, hard to protect from long-range weapons, and reliant on large, highly specialized air crews, these are aircraft that are immensely hard to replace once they're lost. Just ask Russia, where Moscow's fleet of similarly equipped A-50s has been ravaged by Ukraine over the course of three and a half years of war.

China expects to add a new AEW and C plane to its arsenal soon, the KJ-3000, but only one of the aircraft is believed to have been completed thus far, and China's ability to produce more seems to be starkly limited.

When it comes to electronic warfare aircraft, China doesn't do much better, reliant on older, mostly propeller-driven aircraft in small numbers. And when it comes to strategic airlift, China practically falls apart.

Between Soviet-made IL-76 and indigenous Y-20, China has only about 70 strategic airlifters at its disposal at any given time, plus about 60 four-engine turboprop aircraft that could be charitably described as tactical airlifting.

Compare that to the United States Air Force again, without even accounting for the separate infantry of the Navy or Marines, and it isn't a close contest.

The U.S. flies about 250 massive strategic airlifters and a similar number of proven tactical airlifters, which it's proven that it can deploy at long range for sustained complex logistical operations, a skill set that China hasn't even begun to show that it can rival.

With so few strategic airlifters at its disposal, China lacks options when considering large-scale military operations abroad.

If it wanted to conduct operations against, let's say, Taiwan, then even if it could quickly secure Taiwanese airspace, it would have to either wait for a fleet of slow, vulnerable warships to arrive, ferrying troops and hardware, or drip-feed handfuls of Chinese paratroopers or small landing forces using the airlift as it has.

Not to mention, if China wants to actually station any of its own aircraft on captured airfields in a place like Taiwan, then it'll lack the ability to provide logistical support for that operation by air.

That means no rapid replenishment of munitions, no way to quickly send replacement parts if aircraft are damaged, and no way to quickly reinforce and fortify airfields in contested areas.

Finally, even China's combat air fleet is under-equipped for these sorts of operations. Most of China's fighter aircraft, as well as its H-6 bombers, carry relatively small payloads compared to similar aircraft in the arsenals of other nations. And its most important fighter, the J-20, is among the most underwhelming in that regard.

Like we mentioned earlier, the J-20 can't even carry bombs, severely limiting its options in clearing out enemy air defenses and adversary fighters. Nor can China rely on the idea that it could make up for small payloads on individual aircraft by flying its aircraft in massive volumes.

Even if China were completely focused on a single military operation, like an invasion of Taiwan, it would still have to distribute most of its combat aircraft across the nation.

A fair portion will be grounded at any given time, as is the case with any modern air force, while others will have to remain in position for both routine territorial defense and to conduct defensive operations in order to deal with potential counterattacks.

Using Taiwan as an example, any Chinese invasion will almost certainly result in incredible numbers of drones and missiles flying back toward the Chinese mainland, and China will need planes in the air to deal with that.

To count for all the aircraft that have to be kept in reserve for other duties, China has left with a much smaller invasion force, which it'll then have to split into multiple waves to avoid a scenario in which it establishes air superiority over Taiwan and then just leaves the area.

Those first few waves of an aerial invasion force would be made up mostly of stealth aircraft, carrying small payloads, and only able to spend so much time flying around and hunting for targets before they get back to the mainland. After all, China doesn't have the air to air refuelers to keep them flying.

In that scenario, a first wave of maybe a hundred stealthy J-20s have to try and neutralize well over 250 Taiwanese fighter jets, dozens of air-defense batteries, and hundreds of missile launches, all before the first waves of American F-35s, F-22s, or F-15EXs arrive from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.

Assume anything less than perfect efficiency, and that aerial invasion of Taiwan gets very messy very quickly. Worst of all, the imbalances that we've described in China's air force just result in worse and worse problems, as China is made to deal with adversaries located further and further away from its own mainland.

The Taiwan Strait is only about 180 kilometers wide, on average, where it's at least somewhat reasonable for Chinese military planners to assume that they can rely on mainland military bases to sustain an invasion.

Operations further out across the Pacific, against the Philippines, against Japan, against the outlying Pacific Islands, or elsewhere, would be substantially more difficult for China to sustain.

And in a world where the nations of the Indo-Pacific respond as expected to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, China will have a much tougher time securing control over its target if it can't sustain an aerial perimeter to keep American, Japanese, South Korean, Australian, and other warplanes from getting close.

With so few air-to-air refuelers, and so few strategic airlifters to support operations from the artificial island airfields that China has built, China will be hard-pressed to make any aerial perimeter a reality.

And if it can't keep a perimeter, then any Chinese invasion of Taiwan will have to proceed in hotly contested airspace. Moving away from flaws in the substance and the style of China's air force, we find our way to a much larger set of complicating factors that are moving behind the scenes to make their work that much more difficult.

In China, even more so than in most world nations, the military and the world of party politics are deeply interconnected, and where instruments of China's state bureaucracy wield power, corruption's never far away.

Graft, self-dealing, and outright theft of state resources are problems all up and down the Chinese military, and although the full extent of the problem is unknown to the outside world, occasional glimpses at the problem can paint a devastating picture.

Take the example of corruption inside China's rocket force, when, starting in 2023, Beijing cracked down on massive graft that led to all sorts of malfunctioning and compromised equipment, including the regular replacement of missile fuel with water, in order to hide fuel theft.

Beyond that scandal, the two men, who most recently led China's Ministry of National Defense, were both removed during anti-corruption purges, with the current defense minister, Dong Zhong, having reportedly been subjected to investigations of his own.

Xi's most recent purge has seen several major defense leaders in China be removed from their posts, including the two generals in charge of the rocket force, and a number of high-profile officials involved with the development of new technologies.

Notably, Xi's anti-corruption pushes within the military have swept up numerous figures who were widely understood to be Xi loyalists, suggesting either some sort of brewing internal revolts within Xi's own family. action, or, more likely, the existence of corruption issues so endemic that they've necessitated the removal of his own allies.

While the specifics of corruption within the Chinese Air Force are difficult to pin down, recent action by Beijing seems to indicate that there are plenty of problems below the surface.

Take the man who led the entire military branch before the current commander, Chang Ding Chi, who took the reins in 2021. Before Chang stepped up, the People's Liberation Army Air Force was under the command of Ding Laihang, who spent a bit over four years in charge.

But two years after his unexplained ouster, Ding was swept up in anti-corruption crackdowns coming from the top of Beijing's hierarchy.

He was stripped of the prestigious positions he had enjoyed after his time in the military came to an end. Early this year, China's most important military aircraft manufacturer watched two of its highest executives be removed from their posts.

While it's unheard of for Beijing to directly disclose what sort of corruption goes on inside its military, the country's Air Force in particular is a juicy target for high-ranking officials looking to make some money.

Whether it's by skimming off lucrative procurement contracts, selling off the specially machined components required to build and maintain aircraft, or even selling military-industrial secrets to other nations, there is no shortage of opportunity in the Chinese Air Force for an enterprising grifter.

But in China's military, corruption goes well beyond simple graft by generals or state defense companies. In some ways, corruption within the system is a deliberate and careful creation by China's own leaders, not just to enrich themselves, but to ensure that the military doesn't become a threat to the regime itself.

China's ruling elite have taken great care to shut down potential challenges, coming from every conceivable angle. Ordinary people can't vote for a different leader or rally to force a political change. Potential opposition leaders can't organize into independent political parties.

Wealthy elites have been reminded repeatedly that their fortunes exist at the pleasure of Beijing, and members of China's own hierarchy of leadership are kept so busy fighting each other that they've got little hope of finding an opportunity to challenge the political powerhouses above their station.

The Chinese military, by contrast, has been rigorously coup-proofed over the course of generations.

Promotions are made largely on the basis of loyalty instead of merit, internal leadership structures are made intentionally bureaucratic and inefficient, and a very small number of trusted commanders are granted the vast majority of command and control authority.

That's especially true for the Chinese Air Force, where as little as just a single maverick bomber crew, under the right circumstances, could decapitate China's political leadership in a way that a rogue band of soldiers or junior officers would have no hope of achieving.

And unfortunately for the Chinese military, coup-proofing comes at the expense of military effectiveness on the battlefield. Beijing has declined the opportunity to promote its own best and brightest in favor of promoting alternatives who won't rock the boat.

It's ensured that the decisions of its military commanders have to be run through political commissars. who often lack military experience or even basic familiarity with the way the military works. In peacetime, Chinese military commanders have had to wait for committee approval to perform tasks so fundamental as bringing submarines to the water's surface.

The nation's military exercises are typically designed to deliver a sense of grandiosity for party elites, rather than to actually hone the advanced skills of the troops participating, and advertised efforts to reform the system have turned out to be little more than performance art.

China cannot simply flip a switch in times of war and expect the bureaucracy, that inefficiency, and the consequences of an intentional corruption of its military will simply go away.

And for the nation's air force, where real-world combat operations will require real-time coordination of assets, efficient decision-making, and tactical prowess from the leadership, that internal corruption may prove even more damaging than it will be for everybody else.

Combine all the many, many problems of the Chinese air force, from a complete lack of experience, to a strange and discordant force design, to underpowered and underwhelming technology, to self-enriching and state-sponsored corruption, and it ain't a pretty picture, is it?

To be clear now, we here at Warfronts don't have some secret window into the Chinese military. We can only draw on external observations, the analysis of experts, and the occasional bits of news that filter outward from the Middle Kingdom.

But if, indeed, China's air force is hobbled by each of the problems that we have laid out, all at once, then China's ability to fight a 21st century war against a modern adversary should rightfully be in doubt.

The PLAAF doesn't make sense as a unified force, except in the narrowest of circumstances. Its leaders don't have evidence to support the idea that their inexperienced air crews or their combat aircraft can handle the rigors of battle.

For China to look at this air force and believe it capable of destroying a lesser adversary, similar to the US-led air assault on Iraq in 1991, then, sure, perhaps we could buy that.

But for China to take this air force and trust it to handle a war against Taiwan, and thus a war against the US and its Indo-Pacific allies, it just doesn't appear to be a smart bet. There is, however, another option, to speak softly and carry a really, really big stick.

You see, when China's air force gets itself into trouble, it's because China's adversaries are reading the fine print.

China proudly touts its hundreds of J-20 stealth fighters, and that's really impressive, as long as you don't go searching for articles about the J-20's engines or the complications of its stealth profile. China has well over a hundred strategic bombers at its disposal, and that's really impressive, as long as you don't look too closely at the stat sheet.

China, the nation that's built itself into the rising superpower of this century, has one of the biggest and most technologically sophisticated air forces in the world, and that statement, by itself, is undeniable.

It just happens that one of the world's biggest and most technically sophisticated air forces comes with a few notable drawbacks. The But whether or not that's a problem for China, that depends on how Beijing would answer the following question. What is the Chinese Air Force actually for?

Is it intended to win wars, or prevent wars, from ever happening at all? If the Chinese Air Force is for invading Taiwan, conquering the Indo-Pacific and beating the United States into submission, well, that is got an uphill battle, doesn't it?

But for China to actually invade Taiwan, or really for China to actually invade anywhere, would be a major departure from how the modern Chinese state chooses to operate.

Beijing hasn't fought a war since the late 70s, but that's not for lack of opportunity. If it had wanted to, it could have sent its forces abroad on stabilization missions across Asia and Africa to protect Chinese interests tied up in the Belt and Road Initiative. It could have taken a more belligerent stance in its Himalayan border disputes with India.

It could have deployed peacekeeping forces to the Middle East, sent troops in large numbers to pick up experience in Ukraine, or tried to snatch a bit of land from any one of the neighbor nations with which China shares a border.

Just this year alone, China has had three separate opportunities to intervene militarily in regional conflicts, India vs. Pakistan, Thailand vs. Cambodia, and the civil war in Myanmar. But every single time, Beijing has declined the opportunity.

Of course, nothing in geopolitics is absolute. But if China really intended to invade Taiwan, then why would it give up so many opportunities for its forces to gain combat experience and for its equipment to be tested out in lower-stakes confrontations?

The way to explain China's air force not as a platonic ideal, but as it really exists today, is to explain it as an instrument of deterrence.

Now, the classical weapon of deterrence in today's world is the nuclear warhead. Yeah, it could wipe out a city if you actually use it, but if you threaten to use it, you can make even the most powerful adversaries think twice and change their behavior. In a defensive sense, it's easy to see how China's air force could be a deterrent.

After all, if any world nation were to attack China, then they'd find themselves on the receiving end of China's entire aerial might. And that's obviously going to go rather badly, even if an adversary manages to win. But deterrent weapons don't necessarily have to be a tool of defense in order to be used for maximum effect.

Instead of comparing China's air force to a nuclear weapon, let's say you're robbing a bank. You go up to the teller, you pass them a note, and you tell them to put some money in that f***ing bag. Then you make some very obvious show of reaching into your bag as you're staring at them.

You don't actually take anything out of the bag, and as it happens, you just don't need to. The bank teller realizes they're under threat, they comply, and within a couple of short minutes, you and your accomplices are gone out the door. So what was in your bag?

Was it a fully loaded gun, a big gleaming buck knife, a rubber chicken, thin air? Whatever the truth might have been, nobody ever has to know, because you were able to convince the bank teller that calling your bluff on what was actually in the bag just wasn't worth the risk.

In this same way that China has been able to build its air force into a potent tool of deterrence, and if China's recent unveiling of new mysterious aircraft, its over-focus on stealthy combat jets, and its emphasis on combat over logistics are any indication, then building a tool of deterrence has been China's objective this whole time.

Much like our bank robber reaching into their bag with an air of threatening mystery, China uses its air force to ask its adversaries one single question. Whatever you want to fight China for, whatever you want to gain or protect or bargain for, is it really worth the risk of tangling with the Chinese air force?

Sure, China's adversary might believe that it can win in the end, but our bank teller might be 90% sure that the bank robber's backpack is empty. 90% certainty isn't so certain when the risk that you might be incorrect is the risk that you might take a bullet.

If we understand China's air force as a tool of international military intervention, the entire thing is busted, it's lethargic, it's unbalanced, and its personnel have never tasted even limited combat. But if we understand China's air force as a tool of military deterrence, then even though those drawbacks still exist, they don't matter.

Threaten to send 500 J-20s to defend China's interests, and even if only 100 could actually be allotted to a war effort, even if they've got questionable stealth, small weapons loads, and underpowered engines, 100 stealth-ish advanced jets like that could still inflict major losses on an advanced air force, and they could still run through an air force like

Taiwan's, or Vietnam's, or the Philippines's, in a one-on-one contest.

If China can hold the vague threat of 6th generation fighter aircraft over its adversaries' heads, or threaten them with a strategic bomber fleet that could, in the right circumstances, break through and lay waste to an enemy target, then the question for America, Japan, South Korea, or another of China's powerful adversaries isn't whether they'd ultimately

Win a knock-down, drag-out contest.

The real question is, whatever they want from China, is it really worth the pain of a knock-down, drag-out contest at all? Probably, some things still will be worth the pain.

Right now, it's still somewhat likely that the US would fight a war to protect Taiwan despite the costs, not just in the air, but on the sea and on the ground.

Japan, or South Korea, or Australia would still protect their own sovereignty, and for the sake of regional stability, they'd probably come to the defense of smaller allies like the Philippines or New Zealand, even if that's a fight that would really suck to endure. But other things just aren't worth fighting anymore.

China's iron grip over rare earth mines in Myanmar, its progressive absorption of Hong Kong, its growing alliance with Pakistan against India, its island building, and its intimidation operations in the South China Sea, and its many Belt and Road initiatives all across the world do matter to China's adversaries, but they aren't significant enough to tangle

With China militarily.

And if those strategic flashpoints aren't worth the risk, then what else could China get away with using its military? I'm thank you for your great节目.

Primarily, the threat of its air force to convince its adversaries to back down. If China were to unilaterally seize the entirety of the Spratly Islands disputed by the Philippines, that would be a major international incident. But it probably wouldn't be worth a war.

If China were to annex other small, unpopulated islands, or even an island here and there that did have a population of its own, is it really a problem so grave that China's adversaries would go to war? I mean, maybe. But as things stand right now, it just isn't very likely.

So as we step back and take a final look at China's convoluted, malformed, busted, broken air force, we're left asking one final question. What will China, the world's single, greatest, rising superpower, choose to do with it?

If China were looking to change its strategy, to go back on the long-held principle that China does not make war to achieve its goals, then a revision of its military would probably involve major structural reforms.

Party officials would be trimmed out of the decision-making apparatus, training, and exercises for Chinese military aviators would get a lot more realistic, and the nation would invest heavily in logistical and intelligent support aircraft.

Perhaps it would engage in limited interventions in Myanmar, or across the Thailand-Cambodia border, to give its pilots and tacticians a taste of the real world. But if China were building a world-class deterrence, then it would continue to do the same things it's doing now.

It would focus on building advanced combat aircraft in greater number, at greater range of models. It would unveil and leak hyper-advanced prototypes regularly. It would invest heavily in new spending and new research and development, because the more it invests and the more it builds, the less its adversaries want to take the chance to mess with it.

How big and how advanced would China's air force have to be in order to convince the Western world to accept a formal annexation of Taiwan without trying to contest it militarily?

How strong would China's air force have to be to convince Japan, or South Korea, or Australia, that while its own sovereignty is non-negotiable, the sovereignty of, say, the Philippines, or Laos, or Thailand, could become an acceptable loss? If China's current course is any indication, then Beijing intends to find out.

If it does, then China's air force may remain a broken asset for years or even decades. In the end, that brokenness might not matter at all.