Forget Stealth Fighters and Aircraft Carriers: America Should Fear China's J-10 Fighter

David Axe

Security,

It has skills. 

While observers focus their attention on China's new J-20 stealth fighter, the Chinese air force steadily is improving and building more copies of an only slightly less sophisticated fighter: the J-10.

Much like the U.S. Air Force with its mix of stealthy and non-stealthy fighters, the Chinese air force is developing a two-tier fighter fleet. Alongside a handful of radar-evading J-20s, Beijing is acquiring hundreds of more-conventional J-10s.

(This first appeared last month.)

The single-engine, single-seat J-10, a product of the Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group in southwestern China, first flew in 1998 and entered front-line service in 2003. Featuring a tailless delta wing and canards, the 51-feet-long J-10 externally is similar to the defunct Israeli Lavi fighter, although there's no proof that Beijing deliberately copied the Israeli design.

In performance and mission, the supersonic J-10 is similar to the U.S. Air Force's F-16. It's capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground missions.

In November 2018 the online magazine China Military published photos of a J-10 firing unguided rockets at a mock ground target. A separate photo from August 2018 depicted a J-10 carrying radar-homing missiles for suppressing enemy air-defense.

The 2018 edition of the Pentagon's annual report on Chinese military capabilities describes the latest J-10C variant as an "advanced fourth generation fighters armed with the latest weapons."

As of late 2017 the Chinese air force possessed around 260 J-10s, according to Flight Global's annual survey of world air arms. J-10s account for 15 percent of Chinese combat aircraft and nearly half of the roughly 600 Chinese warplanes that, in 2018, the U.S. Defense Department considered modern.