A flying symbol of industrial might
What can the West learn from China’s new stealth bomber?
On 26 December 2024 China shocked the world with the public debut flights of two apparently 6th Generation combat aircraft: one is a crewed, three-engine stealth bomber (above); the other is uncrewed, smaller and has been dubbed a “drone mothership”.
Western experts are still trying to mentally reverse-engineer the two aircraft, in order to work out their potential specs, payloads and combat roles. But the fact that they are being flown at all is significant.
It took just ten years from the PRC flying a prototype of the J-20 — its current 5th generation fighter — to the start of mass production: there are now nearly 200 in service.
On a similar timetable, China could by 2035 have a fleet of aircraft that matches, or outmatches, anything Western air forces can muster — backed of course by its formidable produce-at-scale defence industry.
We are probably still a long way from China achieving its ideal standard for 6G combat air: no crew, no sound, no radar signature.
But the takeaway for UK decision makers is clear: our own 6G project, GCAP, had better work! And we need to find some money and a wider group of partners for it.
In this edition of Conflict & Democracy — written as always for politicos, not aviation geeks — I will explore the implications of the new Chinese stealth bomber for Western defence industrial strategy, and indeed global security.
What do we know about the Chinese stealth bomber?
First, we don’t know its name. Researchers at the China Aerospace Studies Institution (CASI) codenamed it in advance as the H-20, so I’ll use that for now.
We know it has no tail fin, for stealth reasons. We know it is big, so that it can either carry a heavy payload, or a lot of fuel, or a computer big enough to perform AI-related tasks.
We know that the three engines are likely to contain different technologies: probably two are for one kind of flight, the third for something different.
The PRC-affiliated website The China Academy suggests the third engine could be designed to operate at altitudes close to the boundary between the atmosphere and space (80–100km above sea level), dubbing it a “space battleship”
Others, including veteran aviation journalist Bill Sweetman, suggest a more prosaic explanation: the middle engine is used for takeoff and cruise, while the two outer engines are used to manoeuvre the plane without a tail fin.
The designers working on GCAP and its European and American equivalents (FCAS and NGAD) will no doubt be debating the implications.
Operationally, the potential uses of a big stealth plane match several tasks in China’s defence doctrine. In a war to conquer Taiwan, which Xi Jin Ping has mandated the PLAAF must be ready for by 2027, the key concept is what China calls “counter-intervention”.
Assuming the invasion force overwhelms Taiwan’s military and any local US forces, “counter-intervention” is designed to stop the USA hitting targets inside the PRC itself and retaking the island, using the China’s own stealth fighters, ground-based air defence and long-range missile strikes against US bases and ships.
A big, long-range, high-altitude stealth aircraft would certainty add to that capability, especially if it were accompanied by uncrewed aircraft. It could take out the AWACS and tanker aircraft the USA needs to operate against China; it could also hit aircraft carriers and US bases across the region.
In addition, if the new plane is capable of carrying a nuclear weapon, or a hypersonic missile, it would extend the range of the PLAAF’s airborne nuclear deterrent across most of south-east Asia.
The USA has currently three stealth aircraft that could attack into a multilayered Chinese air defence: the F-22 Raptor, the F-35 and the highly classified B-21, a long-range bomber which first flew in 2023 and has three prototypes currently under testing.
The USA’s 6G stealth fighter, known as the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) programme, has flown as a prototype but was paused last summer, while Congress haggles over the cost and technologists consider the rapidly changing technological challenges.
What does it mean for the USA — and for us?
The USA is already laser-focused on China as a strategic threat. As the DOD reported to Congress earlier this month, China has outpaced the US on the military development of AI, matched it on most aviation related technologies and is ahead on hypersonics.
China has fused its military and industrial base, together with seven militarised research universities, into an economic complex that could out-produce, and possibly out-innovate the West in any war.
We also know the Chinese timetable: 2027 for being ready to invade Taiwan, 2035 for completing force modernisation (ie being able to match the USA, operationally and technologically), and 2049 for “returning China to the centre of the world stage” — ie becoming the dominant superpower on the planet.
So there should be nothing surprising about the appearance of the H-20: by the time it is in service, say in 2035, the PRC intends to have a conventional and nuclear force capable of deterring the USA from any armed clash.
By the mid-century — well within the lifespan of such an aircraft — it intends to be able to shape the reality of the world by force, just as America did after 1945.
The role of a stealth bomber in that endeavour is therefore more than just operational: it is political. It is meant, at the very least, to signal China’s ability to dominate south-east Asia, to keep US forces out of the region and to strike its enemies deep.
But it also raises strategic uncertainty. If China ever did achieve its goal of producing an uncrewed, soundless and 100% stealthy aircraft, the implications would be huge — since that is not publicly a current goal of any Western combat air programme.
An uncrewed aircraft could withstand higher speeds, G-force and altitudes. It could operate at the edge of space. And if it were substantially autonomous it would be operating within an ethical framework that no Western military has yet adopted.
We need a defence industrial revolution
What was on show in those images of the new stealth planes was, above all, China’s scientific and industrial prowess. In the space of 10 years it has been able, for example, to abandon reliance on Russian military jet engines and produce its own: we can be certain that those three engines contain Chinese proprietory technology.
China achieves this first and foremost through state ownership and direction of its defence industries. The company that produced the H-20, Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group, is state owned. The money to research and make the aircraft likely came from its budget, not that of the PLAAF.
Likewise, the “Seven Sons of National Defence” complex of universities, from which the defence industry recruits about 2/3 of its engineers, is a state directed research project.
In addition, China has a policy of “Military-Civil Fusion” (MCF): that means fusing its defence industry with its civilian industrial base by design; overriding intellectual property rights and competition in the private sector; and building military usefulness into large parts of its civilian infrastructure. Above all it means the industrial-scale production of science and engineering talent to the ends of national security, not simply for the sake of everyone getting a decent job.
Compare that to the UK — or for scale — the UK plus EU. Our defence industries are fragmented. They do not produce at scale. They compete needlessly, according to the wishes of governments who wish them to be national champions. Our defence industry is treated like a guilty secret, not a national asset. It is heavily financialised — with numerous critical firms in the supply chain owned by private equity, and often starved of investment.
Even for the big players, access to capital is hard — because of ESG investment criteria, and because returns on investment are unpredictable. The heavily indebted state is reluctant to spend money on defence — and so, for now, is the electorate.
As for getting universities to collaborate towards national security goals, the entire structure of higher education is geared to doing the opposite. Indeed, much of the STEM-oriented university sector is heavily reliant on the fees of Chinese students: put another way, it is likely that the technologies demonstrated on Boxing Day were developed by people trained at our own top universities.
The UK’s Defence Industrial Strategy Statement of Intent, which is currently out for consultation, shows the determination to change things: the Labour government wants to rebuild defence industrial capacity at home, abandoning “global competition”, and to rebuild the skills base.
But to match China’s military-industrial endeavour would need a return to state direction, financing and skills provision on a whole different scale.
Though our own project, GCAP, and the Chinese stealth bomber are not like for like, simply comparing their corporate structures and timescales is instructive. GCAP is a tri-nation alliance (UK, Italy, Japan) based around three companies (BAE, Leonardo, JAIEC), each of which is reliant on their national government for funding — none of which is fully guaranteed.
They must compete for talent and investment with rival corporations. And they are currently trying to get both the Indian and Saudi governments to fund the project.
Meanwhile GCAP is being developed in competition with a rival Franco-German FCAS project, which looks even more fragile.
If European nations took seriously the threats they face — short term from Russia, long-term from China — they would integrate their efforts on stealth combat air, systematise their research base and build industrial capacity that could produce at scale.
But one of the most striking things about Western attitudes to China is ignorance and contempt.
Time and again, when experts report to Western politicians, they warn: don’t assume we are dealing with like-for-like. Everything about the Chinese military-industrial system is different to ours — yet the very idea of having to adapt our own system to the threat of theirs is unthinkable in Western politics.
When we see at an aircraft like the one flown on Boxing Day, most people in the West assume “we could build one if we tried”. Until maybe 20 years ago, the assumption that Chinese technology would always be copy/pasted from the West (or stolen) might have been rational. But it is wrong today.
Stealth combat air programmes are not just about building airframes. Indeed, that’s probably the easy bit. They are about creating the ability to dominate air space — denying it to enemy aircraft, missiles and sensors. That means computing power, software, advanced materials, radar, communications and cryptography. No single company can innovate across all such technologies. So success demands orchestration — either by an all-powerful corporation or by the state.
The fact that no Western stealth fighter project — NGAD, FCAS or GCAP — has yet achieved critical mass politically, with a clear decision on design, money and production at scale, is indicative of a potential system failure, not just teething problems or budget worries.
So while 6G aircraft are just one of a suite of new technologies that will shape the military landscape of the mid-century, our collective inability to decide to make one is probably the biggest concern Western policymakers should have.
The People’s Republic of China intends to be the superpower of the mid 21stcentury. It does not want to be part of a rules-based, universalist order based on Western values. It has a 15 year head start in fusing its military and civilian industries and research efforts.
And it now has a stealth bomber that, within a decade, could be zipping around at 80km above the earth, carrying a hypersonic missile with a nuclear warhead.
If we are lucky it will be flown by a Chinese pilot. If we are unlucky, then somewhere inside its massive fuselage will be a computer smart enough to make its own decisions.
Given it will have been designed by people educated in a deeply anti-humanist ideological framework, that scares me enough to want my government to start work on something that could shoot it down.
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