Air Defenses Could Soon Neutralize U.S. Stealth Fighters

In simulated war games against China, the United States “gets it’s a** handed to it,” said a military analyst last year. True or not, there’s now another troubling development on this front: Advances in Chinese air defenses could soon render American air power ineffective, according to one expert.

As the National Interest reports:

While the West has been focusing on the power of advanced Russian anti-aircraft missiles such as the S-400, it should have been watching China.

China is pulling ahead of Russia, especially in terms of sophisticated radars and sensors, according to a British expert.

“I’d say we should have been paying more attention to Chinese systems alongside the Russian ones,” Justin Bronk, a researcher at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, told the National Interest. “Not because the latter aren’t still superior, but because of the threat trajectory of the former. China will eventually catch up to and then surpass Russian missile and sensor technologies; and with a much more capable air force and economy than Russia.”

Bronk recently authored a RUSI analysis of Russian and Chinese integrated air defense systems (IAD), those multilayered networks of surface-to-air missiles [SAM] and radars that give Western air forces nightmares. While Russia anti-aircraft weapons such as the S-400 (NATO code name: SA-21 Growler) are more capable than China’s HQ-9 missiles, China has more resources for developing even more advanced systems.

Bronk believes that U.S. airpower will soon be inhibited by improvements in China’s air defenses, which will extend across coastal SAM sites on the Chinese mainland, missile batteries on artificial islands in the South China Sea, and better anti-aircraft weapons on Chinese warships. “Coupled with the rapid modernization and professionalization of the PLAAF [People’s Liberation Army Air Force], the ability for the U.S. and its allies to project airpower within 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] of China’s mainland shore in a conflict will shrink dramatically on current trends through the 2020s.”

Many may find the notion that the United States — long considered the superpower’s superpower — could lose a conflict to China fanciful. Note, however, that we took the U.S.S.R. seriously decades ago and take Russia seriously today, and China’s economy is eight times that nation’s economy’s size. This is significant because military power tends to follow economic power.

Speaking of power, other experts have also warned that America’s is overrated while China’s is growing. As Breaking Defense (BD) reported last year:

The US keeps losing, hard, in simulated wars with Russia and China. Bases burn. Warships sink.

… “In our games, when we fight Russia and China,” RAND analyst David Ochmanek said this afternoon, “blue gets it’s a[**] handed to it.” In other words, in RAND’s wargames, which are often sponsored by the Pentagon, the US forces — colored blue on wargame maps — suffer heavy losses in one scenario after another and still can’t stop Russia or China — red — from achieving their objectives, like overrunning US allies.

No, it’s not a Red Dawn nightmare scenario where the Commies conquer Colorado. But losing the Baltics or Taiwan would shatter American alliances, shock the global economy, and topple the world order the US has led since World War II.

How could this happen, when we spend over $700 billion a year on everything from thousand-foot-long nuclear-powered aircraft carriers to supersonic stealth fighters? Well, it turns out US superweapons have a little too much Achilles in their heels.

Providing an example, BD continues, “In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with decades of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

Essentially the same warning was issued by former deputy CIA director Michael Morell in a November 2018 CBS Evening News interview (video below).

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