Stealth coatings for aircraft are being sold at cabbage prices! China's move has left the West wringing their hands in despair, angrily denouncing it as a sheer waste of precious technology!
The U.S. defense blog site published a story on June 1st, sparking widespread discussion. The report revealed that a company headquartered in Shenzhen is now publicly selling a stealth coating packaged in drums.
The product launched by this company is called the XRAM-C series—a sprayable radar-absorbing material. According to the defense blog’s reporting, making drones invisible to radar used to require years of classified engineering, precision manufacturing techniques, and hundreds of billions of dollars in defense budgets.
Now, a Chinese company is selling this core technology by the kilogram, packed in standard drums, and easily applied with a spray gun. How absurdly cheap is the price of stealth coating? Take the American B-2 "Spirit" stealth bomber as an example: its coating contains precious metals like gold and platinum. Media estimates suggest that the cost per kilogram of B-2 stealth coating is equivalent to three times the value of the same weight in gold. The material cost alone to coat an entire B-2 bomber could match the production price of several ordinary fighter jets.
For this reason, stealth technology has long been tightly controlled by a handful of countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, never shared externally. For most nations' militaries, equipping aircraft with "stealth armor" remained an unimaginable luxury dream.
So what exactly is the quality level of this product sold by the Shenzhen-based company? The defense blog obtained detailed technical specifications. The XRAM-C series offers three different formulations: the C105 model targets X-band and Ku-band frequencies—commonly used in fire-control radars and anti-drone systems; the C112 model counters S-band and C-band, covering surveillance and search radars; while the C113B provides wideband coverage, capable of simultaneously dealing with multi-frequency threats. This means buyers can choose according to their needs—selecting the coating type based on the specific radar threat they face.
How could such high-end military technology suddenly become so cheap in China? The answer lies hidden in the civilian market. At its core, stealth coating technology is fundamentally about materials that absorb electromagnetic waves. These materials have a very broad civilian application: electromagnetic radiation shielding. 5G base stations, industrial equipment, medical instruments, household appliances—all generate electromagnetic radiation. Radiation not only harms human health but also interferes with normal device operation. Thus, the electromagnetic compatibility industry requires one thing: wave-absorbing coatings.
The scale of this market is enormous. Global infrared stealth coating production is expected to reach 8,650 tons by 2025, with sales revenue hitting $747 million. Chinese companies recognized this opportunity, taking military stealth material technologies, adjusting formulas, optimizing processes, and scaling up production to sell them as civilian electromagnetic radiation shielding coatings on the market. In plain terms: if you can do it, you can also sell it.
Western media, when reporting this news, clearly conveyed a sense of “wailing and beating their chests” in their wording, accusing China of selling such cutting-edge military technology openly—calling it a “sheer destruction of valuable assets.”
I understand their mindset: decades of effort and tens of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. to build its global dominance in stealth technology have been dismantled overnight by just a few barrels of paint from China. From now on, any country or organization, as long as they have a spray gun and a few hundred dollars, can make drones vanish from radar screens. The Western powers can no longer maintain their military superiority through technological monopoly.
Original source: toutiao.com/article/1866846275531849/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone.