【Military Second Area】 Author: Feng Yu

According to a report by the U.S. "National Interest" on October 28, U.S. military strategic expert Rutherford wrote an article warning that the U.S. Air Force is losing its long-term air superiority.

The article points out that China's J-20 fighter jet is being deployed in large-scale quantities, and the carrier-based J-35 will soon be commissioned, with several sixth-generation aircraft already taking off.

At the same time, China is also advancing the construction of the GJ-11 unmanned flying wing aircraft, loyal wingman system, and integrated combat capabilities, forming a comprehensive breakthrough from platform to ecosystem.

In contrast, although the United States still has advantages in logistics, operational integration, and alliance coordination, the production of fifth-generation aircraft has hit a bottleneck, and sixth-generation aircraft are still in the design and verification stage, with progress far behind expectations.

The article believes that the United States is not yet overtaken, but is being equalized at an alarming speed. Moreover, if reforms are not accelerated in the next decade, the United States may completely lose its air dominance.

(U.S. media reporting screenshot)

The article clearly points out that China's pace of catching up is much faster than what the U.S. can handle.

This is because it completely breaks away from the rhythm of the opponent that the U.S. is familiar with.

China has adopted a rapid integration and synchronized deployment strategy in the field of stealth fighters, from the J-20 to the J-35 and then to the GJ-11, none of which are developed and produced simultaneously, and tested and deployed while trying.

When the U.S. military is still in the bidding, argumentation, budget approval, and contract process stages, China's prototype has already been finalized.

Moreover, China's defense industry system has a highly centralized scheduling capability, which can quickly allocate resources and compress the development cycle, whereas the U.S. faces structural constraints such as monopolization by arms companies, industrial hollowing, and reliance on imported parts, making it difficult to accelerate when needed.

Therefore, even though the U.S. military still has some leading technologies, it cannot offset the extent to which China leads in tactical deployment speed, platform density, and combat system integration.

This asymmetric speed difference is the biggest challenge that the U.S. cannot cope with - because China is advancing in a way that the U.S. cannot adapt to. The U.S. military has never seen such a situation, so it naturally does not know how to respond.

(J-20)

From a theoretical perspective, the U.S. obviously still has time to catch up, after all, the U.S. is still the strongest military power in the world, but the problem is that this theory is not practically feasible.

On one hand, the U.S. military system is highly bureaucratic, and any new fighter jet takes an average of more than 10 years from design to finalization, during which it needs to cross multiple stages including budget approval, political games, industrial contracts, and compliance verification.

On the other hand, the U.S. is extremely dependent on the base deployments and joint operations of its allies in the Asia-Pacific region, but many of these allies still use fourth-generation aircraft, which are difficult to keep up with the U.S. military's transformation pace, further increasing the complexity of tactical deployment.

The most critical issue is that the U.S. is still deeply entrenched in the concept of air supremacy, emphasizing the need for overwhelming air superiority on the first day.

But against China's distributed radar network, multi-platform simultaneous attacks, and long-range strike system, this model has already failed on the Asian battlefield.

(Chinese sixth-generation aircraft)

The competition for sixth-generation aircraft is the true watershed that determines the future air warfare landscape. From the current situation, the sixth-generation aircraft competition between China and the U.S. is no longer on the same level, and China is in a clear leading position.

The U.S. Air Force's F-47 project has just finalized the contract, while the U.S. Navy's F/A-XX carrier-based stealth aircraft program has not even determined the contract yet.

Meanwhile, China's J-36 and J-50 sixth-generation aircraft have been publicly seen by multiple sources, including photos of actual prototype aircraft, indicating that flight tests and performance testing are underway.

In addition, China has completed the concept validation of the loyal wingman and has already formed human-machine coordinated combat units in the Asia-Pacific region.

From a technical perspective, both China and the U.S. emphasize stealth, AI battlefield perception, wingman systems, and multi-platform coordination for sixth-generation aircraft, but China has already implemented these concepts, while the U.S. mostly remains in the PPT stage.

Therefore, from the perspective of system maturity, it is already a visible reality that China will achieve sixth-generation aircraft service and mass deployment in the short term. This means that in the next era, it will not be China and the U.S. advancing side by side, but rather China will be far ahead.

(Chinese and American flags)

It should be noted that there is a phenomenon in the competition between China and the U.S., which is that once China leads, the U.S. may never catch up again.

The reason is not due to a single aircraft's performance being overwhelmingly superior, but because once a systemic reversal occurs, it becomes irreversible.

From the U.S. perspective, the U.S. has not experienced the taste of being behind for decades, especially the taste of military backwardness. Its entire military-industrial complex is based on the operation of its absolute military hegemony. Therefore, once the U.S. military is no longer the number one in the world, its entire system will fail.

The U.S. has never been in a position of catching up, and this is something it cannot learn, so it will not be able to regain its leading position as China did when it caught up with the U.S.

From the Chinese perspective, since we have always understood the limitations of hegemony, we will not make the same mistakes that the U.S. made. The power of the system determines that even if we lead by a large margin, we still have the motivation to pursue higher goals.

Moreover, the Chinese people no longer want to experience the taste of being behind, nor will they allow the great rejuvenation achieved through hard work to be taken back.

Especially in the military field, the principle that being behind leads to being beaten is known to all countries that are behind. However, few countries can rise from a state of poverty and weakness to become the top global power. Once such a leap is achieved, it will certainly not allow itself to fall back to the original point.

Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7566490506499244584/

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