via Military Aviation News.
Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group will produce a total of 1,200 J-10 fighters for the PLA Force to counter F-16 fighters over the Taiwan Strait and Western Pacific, according to our sister paper Want Daily.Hmmm. The Chinese are producing two (2) fifth generation fighters in the open...only God knows how many in secret...and yet they're still going to pump out 1200 J-10's.
The Moscow-based Voice of Russia says the J-10A uses the Lyulka-Saturn AL-31FN turbofan engine imported from Russia due to difficulties in the development of China's WS-10 Taihang engine. The newer J-10B variant will be fitted with the Taihang engine.
Geng Ruguang, senior vice president of China Aviation Industry Corporation, said the development of the J-10, Taihang engine and PL-12 air-to-air missile shows China has become the fourth nation in the world to design and produce its own advanced fighter.
What happens if you have 1000 stealth fighters but the enemy has 2000 stealth and 4000 4th gen monsters ready to gobble up your aerial fleet?
You tie if luck is on your side...you lose badly if it isn't.
A generation has passed since the JSF began development. Every assumption we made at that time has proven wrong.
Isn't it time to admit as much and start all over?
It's probably time for someone to start over. How'd your call on South Korea's F-15SE purchase go, Sol?
ReplyDeleteYou know the whole, "end of the F-35" thing? Guess what? F-35 plaudits were right and you weren't. Again.
it just shows the power of bribery, intimidation and industrial set asides on an international scale.
Deletethe good thing about this whole thing is that the S. Koreans are better at rooting out corruption in their government and less than a full scale scandal over something as big as this competition has caused governments to fall.
i hope every bastard that participated in this fraud goes to jail and is gang raped. here in the US too...sorta like that marketing son of a bitch that posted a false editorial in a newspaper.
you bastards are slimy.
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DeleteLooks like Dassault was right: they pulled the Rafale out because they said it was a sham competition, the F-35 had already been selected, and then they sat back and let Boeing and Eurofighter waste a lot of time and money that would have been better spent somewhere else.
ReplyDeleteAnother victory for Too Big To Fail, the new American way.
Hmm, wasn't everyone praising South Korea for this decision prior to, today? What a fair competition you all said? You praised them and argued that finally in an "open" and un-biased competition we can all see how "bad" the F-35 really is and how it's too expensive and not capable enough.
ReplyDeleteWell guess what? In Solomans idiosyncratic style, "you just got your ass handed to you."
Uh no. In case you weren't watching Boeing won the competition. The results of the competition are now being over-ruled in favor of the F-35.
ReplyDeleteJust like in the US, the F-35 was completely unable to meet the cost and timeline goals that were set out as requirements. Then, because the F-35 is too big to fail, the requirements are dumbed down so that the F-35 can meet them. There is a difference between "Too big to fail" and "Good" that you would do well to consider.
Hmm, a J-10B is, from what I can gather, a F-16 Block 30/32 with an IRST system and a refueling probe.
ReplyDeleteSo China is essentially building F-16s now.
Also, Pakistan will be getting few dozen in 2015, so maybe they'll bring them to red flag.
block 30/32 is a bit of an under-estimation i think. that should be the standard of J-10A. considering J-10B has AESA radar, it is probably comparable to F-16C blk 52-60 or even the V version.
Delete1,200? Isn't that a bit overkill for little Taiwan? Sounds like they have a bigger enemy in mind.
ReplyDeleteThe J-10B is going to be the "bad guy" of the skies in the 21st century. Not the J-20. Not the PAK FA. Not the J-31.
ReplyDeleteAny country running the J-20 or PAK FA (China, Russia, India, etc) is going to be responsible enough enough not to get into military action with the US or its allies, since that would likely bring about WWIII.
The J-10B is going to be cheap, available to just about anybody that wants it (Pakistan is already on the list), and China is obviously going to build a SHITLOAD of them. Its likely going to be licensed out as well. Its going to be the AK-47 of the skies. Not the greatest, but effective enough and commonly available.
Sounds to me like it will be the new MiG-21 Fishbed of our era. NATO needs to give it a designated name pronto.
DeleteI see it differently.
ReplyDelete*The Indians have balked at the PAK-FA prices. The Russians don't sound like they are building hundreds upon hundreds either.
*The J20/J31 haven't been tested, really, so we don't know if they are experimental designs or not. Perhaps they aren't going to be built in massive numbers. The J10B are going to built in large numbers and there are already a couple of hundred J11/Sukhois with more on the way.
*Looking at the prices of the F22/F35, we see that the prices for stealth are burdensome.
This is hardly my idea as I've seen it in other places, but I am beginning to think that with expense of stealth being too high to equip an entire air force with it, we are looking at a hybrid force of gen. 4.5 with limited numbers of gen. 5 aircraft that can be used at the sharp end of the stick. Rather than a force composed almost entirely of stealthy aircraft, we're going to see opponents field hybrid forces. Stealth aircraft will be used for the 5%-10% of missions that are too dangerous for other planes OR to achieve localized superiority.
The price for the f35 is minimally related to stealth. A large portion of the costs is for the systems and software being designed for the plane. The actual airframe and stealth aren't the massive cost drivers for that plane. The cost of stealth has been generally greatly inflated in the public compared to its real costs at this point. The F22 and F35 are expensive because of development costs (same is true for the B2, btw), not the actual stealth technology used. The stealth technologies used can have significant cost effect in maintenance (F22), but in actual manufacturing of the airframe it is minor.
DeleteStealth fighters simply can't be built in large enough numbers to replace non-stealth fighters. And cost of stealth has actually been deflated in public, both F-22 and F-35 cost around 150-200 million USD unit flyaway. Most expensive non-stealth fighter costs around 130 million USD unit flyaway, and *that* one (EF2000) is a complete f***up. All other non-stealth fighters cost between 45 million USD (Gripen) and 100 million USD (F-15K).
DeleteI don't think this is necessarily about sales, although China has stated they wanted to enter big time the world market for fighters. Personally, I think the J10B is a lot closer to what the Europeans have (maybe a notch below Rafale or Typhoon), I think they have already installed AESAs in the -B version. It should be superior to just about every F16 Block#. The Pakis flying the JF17 have compared it very favorably to their F16s so J10B should be superior.
ReplyDeleteChina has spent a lot of money on high speed computers and I am sure they can write war game simulations to run multiple of scenarios, maybe they know something we don't know or don't want to acknowledge. With so few F22s current and F35s future being in service, Pacific being such a vast mass of ocean, you are going to need some numbers and survive combat attrition and provide continual CAPs, even for China, they might not be enough J21s, you need to have some big number of fighters to fight in the Pacific.
Agree with your assessment. Numbers are important, especially when you consider the vast areas that require coverage surrounding China.
DeleteFurthermore, development of heavy fighter J20 may indicate that they are going for a hi-lo mix. not unlike
Ok, I'm going to ask the question nobody else seems interested in asking. Mostly because you are all too busy bashing the F35.
DeleteHow are the chinese gonna pay for 1,200 27.8 million dollar J-10s and developed and build its two stealth fighters in the next 10 years? China is rich yes but their debt has been mounting recently, and for all their wealth they do not have a budget even half what our is, they also have a lot of other expensive crash projects and things to worry about. Helicopters, navy, space, internal security expenditure is 200 billion a year.
SImply put, the Chinese cannot afford this at the same time as everything else in the next decade. And remember china's growth is slowing and the demographic time bomb is actively counting down.
Large swaths of what China is doing is meant to domestic nationalist consumption to keep the Chinese masses in check and willing to submit themselves to the CCP that is aesthetically providing things they can, for the first time in 1,000 years, thump their chest about.
CHinese are pathetic, we don't need to be more pathetic and mistake the difference between domestic propaganda and reality.
It is said that Logic is the systematic way of reaching the wrong conclusion with confidence. While your reasoning is not outlandish, your premises are misinformed at best. You assume that engine development will be perpetually unable to overcome bottleneck problems, that development costs will rise in the future disproportionately to what they are now, that a modest growth rate of 6-7% per annum is insufficient to support a growing defence budget and many others regarding the socio-political landscape of China. That's a lot of assumptions to base an argument on. Furthermore many of these assumptions are contested by academics and observers, and not widely accepted.
Delete1200 mutliplied by $30 million is 36 billion dollars, why can't they afford it? Even if you go with 1200 multiplied by 60 million dollars, that's 72 billion dollars for 10 years. That's 7.2 billion a year for 120 J10s, why can't they afford that? As far as we know, they haven't started production of J20, China could just stay with the prototypes for the next 5 years and just test the crap out of them before launching production. Their DoD budget is easily double what they acknowledge, they are cutting back on the troops and manpower costs, they are going for a more hi tech military so I don't see why this is so unaffordable for them. China can affordable a 10 year 10 billion dollar a year procurement for jet fighters.
ReplyDeleteThere are also maintenance costs, which are higher for the chinese based on per flight hour. All this eats into their budgets for everything. Note all those other projects and budgets seem to be expanding too, china cannot expand its budget everywhere during a time of slowing growth and rising debt. Somethings gotta give.
DeleteThey are paying huge developments costs also, I simply don't think they have the money for EVERYTHING to be developed like they claim in the next 10 years.
You need to take the costs of that jet in perspective to the fact the Chinese are not only rebuilding an entire army from the ground up but paying development, maintenance, and upkeep for their entire political order. And we know based on the rising Chinese debt there is a pressure building up from what they've been doing... even without building these 1,200 jets and getting all those other wonder weapons into production the current chinese spending path is looking increasingly untenable. At this rate they will be at US debt to GDP proportions in less than 8 years at most. (many estimates that include shadow banking and hidden bad municipal loans place the rate of over 50% debt to gdp already, and the rate of return on investment in china is half. what is was 5 or 6 years ago. The jig is up in China.)
And Chinese growth is slowing, past its zenith, spending more is not gonna be easier, and the idea of outgrowing costs is no longer true for them.
So just given the current trajectory of Chinese finances this and other huge expensive projects they simply do not have the money to shell it all out in the next 10 years.
Unless something really shakes up the current economic trend, this kinda if power is simply not in China's immediate fiscal future where they are gonna have half the US budget.
Care to explain to us how you know their maintenance costs are higher in China than Western world? Funny, aren't all Western airlines and manufactures trying to build maintenance arms and production lines in China because costs are lower?
ReplyDeleteNot that it matters, we are talking production costs and as I just showed you, 120 J10s is about 7 to 8 billion dollars a year for their air-force. There aren't any developments costs really anymore, it's in production. We don't know what the Chinese are spending on J20 or J30, as far as we know, they can be laughing about it, just flying around the airfield, taking a few pictures and scaring the shit out of Western air-forces for just a few bucks of JP8 a month. We don't know when they are going to produce them, not even US DoD or CIA knows, they thought J20 was a few years away (2018 first flight?) from even flying and China is already flying it!
They sure seem to be able to but plenty of new destroyers and new subs, that have a new carrier under construction and compared to what we know of their DoD budget and GDP, 2% a year should be quite sustainable. If the USA can spend 1 trillion dollars of entirety of life of F35 with our deficits and debt, China can sure spend 10 billion a year on jet fighter procurement.
"Care to explain to us how you know their maintenance costs are higher in China than Western world? Funny, aren't all Western airlines and manufactures trying to build maintenance arms and production lines in China because costs are lower? "
DeleteReason producing in china is cheaper is because of fewer regulations, much lower labor costs, economies of scale. When it comes to aircraft maintenance what dictates cost is mostly how quickly the part need replacing and the engine needs maintaing. Simply put, Chinese engines have suffered from higher failure rates and need more maintenance to fly per flight hours.
Their cheap labor is of much less help here and their inferior quality is a factor.
"There aren't any developments costs really anymore, it's in production."
Not true of the chinese Taihung engine, seems that thing is in never ending development and its nothing but a modified russian design. (they only built russian engines with russian help for 40 years before they figured out how to make their own almost near identical one)
I'm not saying the J-10 alone is what the chinese can't afford, but in light of everything else I don't see it as possible. That 36 billion + maintenance will mean a budget cut somewhere. Note china's budget in 2012 was somewhere around 110 billion plus. Even if you assume its much larger than that the J-10 represent a large budget block for china.
And the future projects are only gonna be much more expensive plus developments...