Discussion on:

China's stealth fighter gets lethal re-design

...Americans subsidize an opponents R&D. I wonder if they copied the F-22's Oxygen system as well. I hope so.

It might not be a bad idea to conduct an audit of American weaponry to determine how many components used in its electronics are manufactured in China. If there is a disruption in the supply chain are there any American sources that could pick up the slack in the event of war?

Most of our defense dollars are today being committed to fighting asymmetric warfare, i.e. war against loosely organized, non-state entities like Al-Qaeda.

We are largely ignoring the investments required to maintain superiority in conventional warfare. Meanwhile, China takes the opposite approach, and no one seems nervous. Hmm.

People need to remember that China's vital interests and political value remain at odds with our own. Sooner or later, it's possible that China will provoke Australia, Taiwan, or Japan in a way that's intolerable, and we'll find ourselves in a conventional shooting war. Only probably is, the way things are going, we'll be prepared for the wrong war.

Even though Chinese was the first one invented the stealth material, they do not know how to apply it to the airplane. As far as the info goes, they still use the very old engine, which cannot provide enough power for the jet. Now with the redesign of airframe, this implies that they have more trouble than our F35 program. I bet the upgraded F15 can easily shoot it down.

I couldn't agree more.

It seems to me that the Allies had air superiority at the end of WWII, but Britain suffered bombardment from the V-1 and V-2 unmanned bombs. Why build or worry about manned fighter planes, when drones are so much more expendable?

Drones are vulnerable to jamming. They will have a large part in future air combat, but will never fully replace manned aircraft.

This is related to why the Air Force is going back to inertial guidance systems to replace GPS on future generations of JDAMs, cruise missiles and other GPS guided munitions.

Our foes have figured out how to jam our GPS targeting and drone communications.

I love the "lethal redesign" -- would anybody use that to cover an upgrade to the F-22, like the oxygen supply?

And there's lovely alliteration from "mysterious" to "Mighty Dragon".

And there's a lovely allusion in "low production costs", suggesting China could turn out hundreds in a surprisingly short time, as if cost were the only thing capping aircraft production, but yep, the engine sure is Russian: Chinese engine technology.

I'm sorry, "there???s still debate over whether such accelerated developments present any sort of credible threat to the F-22, America???s supreme stealth fighter"...? There is no debate of the J-20's threat to the F-22 because the F22 program was cancelled in 2010 by Mr. Obama and Mr. Gates. Only 195 F-22's were produced during it's life cycle. I'd hardly call that "America's supreme stealth fighter" with those kind of numbers. The only "threat" to the F-22 is that the J-20 looks like a ripped off the design.

Without getting too much into the politics, Gates, Obama, and others decided to cancel F-22 production in favor of the F-35 and F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet programs due to their multirole capabilities and because the F35 is also a stealth fighter. Currently, there are about 500 F/A -18 Super Hornets (as of April 2011), and 63 F-35's since it's introduction in 2011.

So let's compare the J-20 to the F-35, instead, since that's a more realistic scenario.

If we continue to divulge our technology secrets and play nice with them while they stab us in the back. The F-22 has issues with G forces and oxygen but the F-35 has more issues and won't be a stable plane for some time. It would behouve our defense secretary to get these things ironed out soon and not let some other countries pass us up. Russia is also gearing their military up.