Is China’s 6th gen fighter project ahead of US NGAD? Roles and use analyzed.

On December 26, 2024, a flurry of images of China's next generation fighter jets emerged. We covered the better known design in a video that we strongly encourage you to watch. Not many more images were released afterwards and not much more info can be inferred from them. Thus, the focus of this video won't be on the design of Chinese planes themselves. Yes, there were two separate planes that flew. The focus will be on comparing what we know about the Chinese next generation air dominance program with what we know about the US next gen air dominance program, called ANGAD. What does this sudden appearance of Chinese planes mean for the US? How might these new planes be used? And how much might future US air supremacy be impacted? A fairly large combat aircraft was flown from Chengdu by Chengdu Aircraft Corporation. The same day, images and videos of a completely unrelated design from Shenyang Aircraft Corporation emerged as well. Looking a bit smaller, but still essentially a heavy flanker sized fighter. Rumors suggest that the Shenyang design was actually flown earlier and that imagery was released only later, but that's really immaterial. We can't know the quality of work that's gone into what was shown in China. We don't know anything about the quality of work that's going into US ANGAD, as that program is secret. So what we have left is milestones and timetables. The US has not yet shown any of its next generation manned aircraft. What US officials have said is that at least one ANGAD related plane has flown. Unofficially, it was suggested three separate prototypes exist. Air Force was to decide on one of the two allegedly proposed designs, Boeing's or Lockheed Martin's, yielding the final contract to the winner. But since July, the US Air Force program has been on hold under review. That's after Air Force realized that what they were going for was gonna cost quote multiple hundreds of millions of dollars per airframe. And after technology advances made them question the whole planned air power doctrine. This past December, news came that the review was completed. Not much else was shared, like the conclusion about exact design, size, cost bracket and so on. What was disclosed is that the current iteration of ANGAD proposal is gonna be manned. The decision on ANGAD is gonna be left to Trump's administration. The program may simply continue as quickly as possible. Or the pause in development may continue if further reviews and changes are done. By months or years. If there will be small or big changes to the design or even the whole concept. At the same time, there's a separate next generation program done by the US Navy. According to Northrop Grumman's CEO, they expect the winner of that contract to be announced sometime in 2025. Today, air dominance is not achieved just by using a single plane. It's all about a system of platforms. The Navy is gonna rely on smaller unmanned planes to operate alongside its manned planes. Though those are still largely undefined. The Air Force is gonna do the same. And the initial designs of its unmanned planes have already been decided upon. The US is to have a hundred of those by 2029. You can learn more about those in one of our previous videos. There may be even more components to future air dominance. But before we take a look at what flew in China, let's define what a demonstrator plane is and what a prototype plane is. The US Air Force disclosed in September 2020 that a demonstrator plane for its ANGAD program flew. But what does a demonstrator demonstrate? It's possible that what flew in 2020 in the US was a concept demonstrator. Or technology demonstrator, if you will. A special one-off plane made to validate certain novel approaches to fighter jet design. It doesn't have to resemble the final plane in any way. Now, if what we're looking at from China are such concept demonstrators, then China's next-gen effort might be a few years behind the US one. Approximately four years, but it's hard to tell. Again, none of that qualifies the technology levels and capabilities implied. F-35 came a decade after F-22, yet in many ways F-22 was more capable. But what China's Chengdu showed is simply too detailed and too much of a bespoke of a design to be a concept demonstrator. True concept demo planes are for example Russian S-37 or most US X-planes. They're planes from which engineers and designers learn what to go for in future designs. Sometimes, though, said demo planes are more mature and very specific representations of a design proposed to be turned into a proper fleshed-out fighter jet. Examples of those would be X-35 and X-32, which were pre-selection prototypes, of which one of them was chosen to be a base for an actual plane. Years earlier, the F-22 was also born out of a similar fly-off between physical pre-selection prototypes. China actually skipped that step with its J-20, not having a physical fly-off competition. And selected its design solely based on computer models. One might say that in this day and age, it's not actually necessary to build and fly a pre-selection prototype. But rumors still persist that the US next-gen F-4, the Angad, had three such prototypes. Allegedly Northrop Grumman later dropped out of the competition. If those US pre-selection prototypes flew, meaning if they weren't just digital simulations, then China might be anywhere from two or three years behind the US in the next-generation effort. Or, China could be ahead of the US. That's because it's possible that China recently didn't just fly pre-selection prototypes, but actual winning design prototypes. That's something that hasn't happened yet with the Angad program in the US. There are a couple of possibilities concerning the two planes we saw from China. One is that both plane designs observed are winning designs. That would imply there was no physical pre-selection prototype stage. But two winning designs would still be peculiar. Development, making and maintaining two large advanced type of planes costs a lot of money. The US air force has so far balked at running just one design, when it became apparent the unitary price tag might be 300 million or so. Development cost of one such advanced design costs like 50 billion, easily. Then again, the US did manage to fund the F-35. Which is essentially a few different designs rolled up in one. China would not be paying in dollars, but in yuans. But still, even a few times cheaper equivalent sum, times two designs, would be big for China's defense budget. Still, it's not impossible. A second possibility may be that, while it may appear that two designs are aiming at different roles, that may not necessarily be the case. Chengdu Aircraft Corporation designers were interviewed and had stated in research papers about where they are going with air combat designs. And what we saw from Chengdu pretty much matches that. They don't see air combat being done at close range. They see done from considerable distances. So things like size of missile, number of missiles, aircraft range and reach of jamming and radar systems get even more important. Which is what this sort of a design we're seeing from Chengdu matches quite nicely. The added benefit is when you're sizing your plane for such air combat, you have automatically sized it up for delivering large air to ground munitions to long ranges. So it's a convergence of requirements to a single multi-role design. Shenyang's aircraft is much less known, as not many good images exist of it. But one decent-ish image that does exist suggests it's not a small plane either. Probably bigger than the J-20. We can't know for sure until better images appear, but Shenyang's design might be somewhat overlapping Chengdu's design when it comes to role and size. If that's the case, then we may indeed be looking at a fly-off of two separate pre-selection prototypes. But if we're looking at two separate programs with designs that have sufficiently different roles, then each of those planes is basically what the first J-20 airframe was when it flew back in January 2011. A winning design prototype. That design was refined over the years and reached the Chinese air force some six years later. Actual combat capability for the type was likely reached some eight years later. So what is certain is that Chinese planes are not mature, tested designs that are ready to be made in the hundreds starting tomorrow. Planes today need lots of time to be tested and to complete their development. Now, both the US and China are likely working on accelerating those development timelines for contemporary designs. Once the US does decide on an ANGAD design, for example, the time to operational capability may be cut by a few years. At least that's the holy grail of modern plane development, to speed everything up. China may be aiming for similar timetables. The problem the US faces is that its planes need more fuel and range to threaten China's coast, than Chinese planes need to defend said coast. That's still applicable even if the coast is replaced with Taiwan, as a requirement. On the other hand, if China simply defends, without threatening US bases, that won't really amount to a victory. So it's no wonder that Chinese designs are also large enough to provide enough range, so China can threaten not only bases across Japan and the Philippines, but also Guam. Not just with long range missiles, but also with cheaper glide bombs. Such a requirement would have driven Chengdu's design to grow so large. A small plane might work if supported by stealthy tanker aircraft. Which the US is exploring as well, but that too might prove to be quite expensive. Not relying on tankers accompanying the fighters might make the fighter jets very large, which then has a cascading effect on other variables, like engines, price tag and so on. The latter seems to be what China has chosen, as even its basic tanker fleet is still developing. They're far from some hypothetical stealthy tanker which could accompany fighters closer to the enemy area. If the two Chinese planes are competing for the same role set and same contract, that's pretty straightforward. But if they're complementary designs, how would that work? Some analysts believe what we saw from Chengdu is somewhat more strike oriented than air combat oriented. That might make it a sort of a companion plane to the J-20 or whatever Shenyang's design is gonna be. Perhaps serving as an arsenal plane when it comes to an air to air fight, lobbing long range missiles from afar. But also to serve as a strike plane as well. And use its considerable size and likely fuel allowance to deliver many large weapons to a distant target. For the longest time there was a project called JH-XX. Even the US DoD reports on China often mentioned it. Basically rumors have it that it started off as a successor to China's old JH-7 strike plane. But now said JH-XX may be dead if it morphed into a multi-role platform seen from Chengdu. Modern technology and air combat doctrines suggest that a true dedicated striker may not be needed anymore. The US even toyed with the idea of using its B-21 bombers as missile carrying arsenal planes to aid in air combat. So even if this Chinese jet ends up being used for strike missions, it could still be a multi-role plane. And could still, in effect, be a next generation fighter jet. One can only debate its role scope and technology scope. For which we don't have enough data right now. Binkov, for one, thinks that both designs seen in China may be geared for air combat. It's just that there may be uncertainty about how future air combat might work. The US itself also isn't sure. It's still analyzing and guessing what sort of both unmanned and manned platforms, in what mix, would be the best. It wouldn't be strange that China just said to hell with it, let's cover as many bases as possible. And financed two complementary designs, on top of probably a few more unmanned designs that are still to come. The stakes of a future air war between the US and China are so high, that they might decide the outcome of the whole war, if there is one. So investing heavily in a next generation air power might be prudent. We are yet to see what will happen with the US ANGAD program. But it's possible the US programs will get more money after all this, rather than proceed conservatively. The difference may be that the US will use a navy's design and air force's design, meaning two separate planes, supported by at least two or three separate drone designs, at first. The idea behind drone design is fast and iterative development of new variants, so there may be even more drone types serving at any one time. China may be using the larger and probably more expensive Chengdu's design as the force multiplier and the silver bullet platform. It may be ideally sized to provide lots of power for medium range radar jamming, protecting entire groups of friendly planes. And provide ample missile capacity for long range salvos. Shenyang's design might serve a bit more to the front, providing numbers and operating from aircraft carriers. Again probably with an ample number of various drone types accompanying it. Both sides might even decide their future bombers might aid in air power as well. But that's even more speculative. In the end, it should not come off as strange that China has been working on new fighter planes. After all, a new cold war has basically descended upon us. And there was a stream of info that China has been working on something more advanced than J-20 for quite a long time. First rumors started in the mid 2010s, but something more concrete came in early 2019, when Wang Haifeng, chief designer of Chengdu Aircraft Research and Design Institute, which had also worked on the J-20, said in an interview that they started the pre-research and that he hoped the then present efforts would turn into mature weapons by 2035 or even earlier. In 2021, satellite image of something resembling a futuristic plane emerged, taken at Chengdu Aircraft Corporation facilities, pointing to further work being done. In 2022, US Air Command General Mark Kelly said China is working actively on a next-gen plane, and is on track with its development. Whether that meant on track for the 2035 milestone is open to debate. So, with all those milestones thrown around, it's not strange that the first flight of something new has been witnessed now, basically 10 years away from the suggested 2035 threshold. If what we're seeing is an already chosen winning design or designs, then China might stand up its first combat unit equipped with its new plane even a couple of years earlier than 2035. If what we're looking at are pre-selection prototypes, then that might be just about right to hit the 2035 milestone, development-wise. That's if using the J-20 development timeline as the baseline. But what does all that mean for the US? While the US Air Force seem to have been at least half a decade ahead of China when it comes to next-gen fighters, that is not necessarily the case anymore. Even if US designs have flown, and all that's left is one final decision, the US may be anywhere from zero to two or three years ahead of China. If no pre-selection designs flew, then it's a few years behind China. Of course, even if both sides flew their prototypes at the same time, that would not say much about the speed of the rest of development, nor the speed of induction of the type, nor the speed of production ramp up. It's entirely possible that one side is a few years late to fly a prototype, yet that it's the first side to field a few hundred airframes. And while it's possible the US design will be advanced enough that it will be worth more on the battlefield than the Chinese plane, that may not be a guarantee of US being able to afford producing nearly as many next-gen jets as it would want to. Already, one of the main reasons why the US paused its ANGAD procurement was price. And it was why an idea was floated, that the next fighter jet is to actually be a capability small jet, not really more expensive than the F-35. One might also wonder why suddenly there's such a small gap between generations. Well, partly because generations are marketing bull. And partly because there's an arms race. During the Cold War, Soviets and NATO tried to eke out better designs whenever they felt technology progressed enough, even if the improvement was sometimes incremental. The US air force appears to be strapped for cash, forced to pay over 140 billion dollars just for the Sentinel ICBM program, and at the same time pay for the B-21 bomber program, which might be a 100 or 150 billion dollar program, depending on the number of bombers bought. Then there are hundreds of old tanker planes to be replaced, also probably leading to 50 billion plus more. And the F-35A procurement is not even one third done. Also requiring an additional 100 plus billion, or the similar future time period, as all of these other programs mentioned. But, as we said, the cold war is upon us, and with China's designs flying, it's possible the pentagon might get visibly more funding, sooner rather than later. Can China afford two super expensive next gen jets? Well, no one knows. But Vinkov did multiple videos on China's military budget, and concluded that once everything is truly normalized under a common denominator, China might have as much money to spend as the US. Even more, because due to lots of legacy systems the US is supporting, like its vast navy, vast transport and tanker plane fleet, it's plausible China might be free to invest more on new projects, rather than to sustain existing ones. It may be that China won't be able to afford making 500 plus large advanced planes in the future, but if the US air force is too slow to act, or too strapped for cash to procure a technologically superior plane, then even fewer than 500 might be enough to keep US planes away from China. Which, in any Taiwan scenario, might not be enough of a victory for the US. And remember, Vinkov may talk about war, but only real peace can bring us all together.