http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-090111-1.html

Third party article.

It is pretty interesting that one new aircraft will supposedly cause a reshuffle of the USAF's, and the Western world as a whole, particular military doctrine when it comes to dealing with China and any customer nations, assuming China will export it.

This article is bad. It mainly cites other articles on the website, it rambles incoherently on a few points, it misunderstands many attributes of the aircraft, etc. Whatever this article gets right is far overshadowed by all the little things it gets wrong, calling the overall analysis into question.

Aus Air Power is made up of fourty year old aviation buffs, not defence experts, so I do agree with you there.

However, the overall point of the article has merit. If China does end up with a top of the line 5th gen fighter, what kind of an effect will that have on the air power doctrine for the US and it's allies in the pacific?

The problem for the PRC is that they can't really afford too many fighters of the J-20 type. It's not like they can really export the J-20 to too many places, either. So how are they planning to cover the production run economically? F-22 and F-35 had to have massive production runs to even break even, something that the PRC can't handle.

if the prc buckles from overdeveloping inner mongola that isn't worth a hell of a lot

The "avition buff" and not "aerospace engineer" is kinda obvious when they talk about various shaping aspects....

Just because it looks like a duck doesn't mean it is. It's very easy to make a cool looking aircraft, to make one that performs as advertised is something else entirely.

But let's say that China completely leapfrogs the decades of research and engineering/manufacturing expertise we have, that they produce an aircraft as OMFG AWESOME as the internet screams it is, and that they get them in quantity. Now what?

By the time it will be out, South Korea and Japan will have their own stealth solutions of comparable or superior quality. The Americans will still have NUTS and will still be looking askance at the Taiwan Straight, and the Russians and Americans will have cornered the stealth aircraft export market. (we already have, tbh) The Aussies will probably get F-35s, the New Zealanders will probably have completely disbanded their military and police, and the Indonesians will be tired of this shit enough that they won't take crap.

The US will probably upgrade the software on their shipboard radars and carry on.

Not to mention China still can't produce a proper engine for it.

what

I concur.

As RAND has argued if anything has upset the balance it's China's ballistic and cruise missiles which the US does not have an adequate answer to. The J-20 is a lot more threatening because of it's potential to slip past USAF Combat Air Patrols and kill the tankers they need to fly to-and-fro bases safely out of the 2nd Artillery's reach. Or it's ability to slip by the fighters and kill the AWACs the Navy depends on to defend against low-altitude cruise missiles.

It doesn't need to be a super plane that gets the drop on F-22's.

APA does correctly point out that China's power is growing relative to the US in a very large part because the US military has become so appallingly awful at buying things. At the rate things are going the US could easily lose it's qualitative lead simply because the US will be armed with essentially the same weapons it has today well into the 2030's unless some kind of miracle occurs.

Well, the US army is still equipped with the AR-15 platform and despite multiple pushes over the latter half of its present service life, that doesn't seem set to change for a while.

China's power will grow relative to the US simply because China's industrial capacity is growing relative to the US. It's unreasonable to suppose that once it has had a GDP 1/2-1x US GDP for a few decades it will have a serious capability gap.

However the US does have an unfortunate tendency right now to plan its military on the basis that there either won't be a war or it will be against an opponent so weak that just about any weapon will do. Unless it's needed right now it seems difficult to obtain political support, which is problematic when aircraft have 20-30 year development cycles.

otoh AR-15 is nothing to do with it. Assault rifles haven't changed much because the technology hasn't developed much since the end of the second world war. Despite volume of designs on here and on NS the relative quality of two countries' small arms is pretty much irrelevant.

Why would that be unfortunate for you? Don't you want Lesser Britain to regain the status of world's... something other than a doormat? Weakening of the US would play right down that path.

Also, I can't possibly imagine why you would have bothered to do WTC if that was the case.

Will Britain exist in 2030? I'd prefer US to be powerful rather than EUreich. Besides, US is just Britain but with more land and lots of immigrants.

WTC can be viewed as just part of our/their plan, diverting US interest to strategically irrelevant COIN weapons away from making 2,000 F22s.

Don't forget that officer training programs and other bloat have expanded ridiculously.

And then there is air conditioning tents. For the same cost of air conditioning a tent, you could build cheap barracks that are better insulated then tents.


The key to world democracy, is India. Which means freedom is screwed.

Firearms are a wholely different branch. Firearms from 50 years ago still function as well as firearms from 2 years ago. They're just slightly different. (There is a reason everyone 'still' likes the FAL.)

Indeed, it seems like development of military equipment has reached a roof level. But the US military still is and will remain the world's most powerful military for many years (2030? 2040?), or at least that is what I expect.

wat

The greatest strategic impact is industry and population. India will have the largest population in the coming future, surpassing China in several decades. India is also the most populous democracy. If their economy wasn't so... horribly socialist, they'd be beacon of democracy.

Objectively, yes, there is little to state that a brand-new factory-fresh M16A4 rifle would need replacing. It shoots nicely, it's decently accurate and it performs decently with its new ammunition.

But the system as a whole is just old and outdated.
I have a significant dislike of the DI system. Sure, it's mechanically simple and sound and easy to clean, but just leads to so many negatives that the soldier can do without. It's why I so much prefer the AK-74 or other long-stroke weapons. The M416 would be such an improvement to the AR-15 family of arms in US service, but I don't remember the reasons it was turned down. Cost?

The XM8 or the XM25 are highly effective weapons needing adoption.

>implying bipolar world

India is hardly a beacon of democracy for reasons that we all basically know already

The US Army operates the XM25. As for the XM8, well, it's just a G36C in a not-so-pretty plastic frock.
Sure, they may well have no fixed the melting issues, but I prefer the G36C aesthetically, and there's little if anything to distinguish the two on a mechanical level.

There never was a bipolar world...

I don't think the XM-8 is compatible with the pile of add-on equipment we have.



For some reason the Army can't stomach the idea of buying a new weapon system before their new caseless rifles come online. There are plenty of better rifles and better rounds, we're just not buying them because.... cost? I think? (isn't that the most recent justification?)

Cost and basically not "enough" imporvement to be worthwhile. The Not enough improvement to be cost effective is actually a reasonable arguement, well it would be if it wasn;t for the various programs, evaluations and reissuing of massive contracts to Colt/FN for more M4s and M16s.

There also isn;t an easily sellable "requirement" for a new rifle. The XM-8 got aroudn that bit by not beign a new peice of gear but part of an already funded program to meet an established requirement.

i think you are right in that in that the XM-8 wasn;t fully comaptible with all the current RIS stuff, it wans;t a huge issue at the beginnign of the porjects as at that point rails were only a feature in SOCOM. IIRC the scope mount system for the XM-8 was pretty ncie but since the mass adoption of rails and rail accesories everything it could do is now availble for a fraction of the cost and the picatinny/NATO rail has become a defacto standard to the degree that even HK have fully adopted it.

It will hwoever be interesting to see what, if anything, comes out of the Imporved Carbine/M855A1 ass covering program.

I find it funny that in trials for the M1 rifle, the guns were self-designed and produced before being presented to the Army.

Now only major corporations can get contracts, and their research is subsidized completely.


On another note, the US army should use a new cartridge, and an upgraded version of the SAR 21.

Some dude was arguing on thefirearmblog that you can't design and bring a new weapon to market without millions spent on design revisions etc because ZOMG ANDY MCNAB SA80 ZOMG OPERATOR.

SAR-21 has it's own problems. I know that it'll never happen, but I think that the CR-21 would be a nice replacement. Especially if you could put picatinny rails on it.

http://world.guns.ru/assault/safr/vektor-cr-21-e.html

district niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine

You know, I don't think this comment got the attention it deserved.

This is exactly right. This is in fact the driving force behind why other countries are appearing to "catch up to" or "surpass" the US technologically.

Other countries aren't "catching up" to US technologically - they have been on par with US for a good while, particularly Western Europe and Japan, and even most of those behind the curve aren't decades behind, just years.

During the Cold War, US has maintained a greater propensity than others for sparing much less expense on armament, which translates into putting more expensive technology in, and post-Cold War this propensity has reduced. But there is not as much catching up going on as US realizing it doesn't really need to spend so much on heavy armament once it's recognized to be in a position of unchallenged military superiority, while some other countries are cranking up their military expenses after the post-Cold War cooldown (or warmup) period.

The problem is the US was over the past decade trying to stage an arms build up, and definitely spent all the money that normally entails. They just didn't get anything for it.

Now they are scaling back from replace everything to replace something. Even that probably won't work out though.

One part is that the US doesn't really know what kind of war it has been preparing for.

/All/ the war.

There are three missions the US military prepares for: humanitarian, WW3, and brushfires. If those three look like they cover the entire spectrum of what a military could possibly be expected to prepare for, you are correct.

Now, the military's overall missions are pretty much controlled by civilians, who like the first and have observed we're most likely to be engaged in the last. The first is good for America and good for the world, we help people who get hosed when the next earthquake or tsunami (or both) rolls through. That's nice. And we go and knock over tinpot dictators, which makes presidents happy.

The middle mission, they believe quite incorrectly, to have been dealt with via MAD.



We are currently built for the middle mission, and do the first with what we have. The current administration wants to do the last.

I always thought the current administration wants to make a robot dog, robot donkey and a robot chicken that are almost half as useful as a real one.

Indeed. Our current equipment is far too overpowered to fight warlords, but it is too underpowered to fight a conventional adversary.

Another thing is that we need more boots on the ground. We need the capacity to assume control over the administration of each and every town, just as in post-war Germany, and be aided by officials appointed by us. After which point we organize a national election.

A robot chicken.