Past H-20 concept is just obsoleted by 6th gens. The idea was an all aspect stealth plane that can penetrate nearly all air defenses, which would make it ideal to hunt down enemy air defense batteries.
China doesn't really have an issue with bombing volume, what it wants is a way to ensure that enemies will lose their high value radars/IADS needed to defend against being bombed. The different penetration aircraft (especially J-36) achieve that goal.
You are misunderstanding what the H20 is. The H20 doesn’t make sense for tactical missions because it’s a strategic asset.
Literally the last thing you want to use H20s for is to go after heavily defended air defence weapons.
The entire point of the H20 is to bypass those hardened defences so that you can strike at the juicy soft high value targets those IADS is meant to be protecting.
SEAD and DEAD are missions for dedicated tactical assets, not strategic assets. The closest something like the H20 should get to enemy IADS is taking out the HQ and C&C nodes, not the individual radars and launchers themselves.
Obsession with sustain bombing US mainland makes no sense. The logical strategy is to island hop, and all the munitions that would be used on bombing west coast is much better spent speeding up the island hopping, which is what would give China actual ground for victory.
On the contrary, conventional deep strike missions make so much sense for the H20 that I think that will be the H20s primary mission. Indeed, Beijing may go as far as to make the H20 an exclusively conventional strike bomber, so as to avoid even the possibility of triggering a panicked nuclear response from an adversary.
You are again mixing up tactical strategic missions and strategies. Island hopping is tactical stuff, deep penetration bomb behind enemy lines is strategic. The two are not mutually exclusive, and indeed are massively complementary.
Just take Ukraine as a case study. How many tactical strikes does it take to destroy the equivalent of a whole warehouse of weapons and munitions blown up in the rear? Indeed, Ukraine’s only decisive large scale victory was only possible due to focused strikes on Russian logistics behind the lines and the shortages that helped to create in artillery fire support, which they had been counting on to even the odds created by the manpower differences.
In the same vane, island hoping will be a hell of a lot easier and cheaper in terms of lives and resources if the US is forced to split focus and resources fortifying its homeland rear as well as prepare for the landings.
This is arguably where the greatest value of having H20s comes into play, that their existence and strikes will force the US to divert colossal amounts of much needed resources into fortifying their homeland from further attacks at precisely the same time those air defence assets are desperately needed at the front.
On top of that, the US has creaking infrastructure and almost ignorable regenerative capacities to repair and replace core strategic level infrastructure assets damaged or destroyed back home. How long do you think LockMart or Boeing would need to repair their factories after whole bomb bay of cruise missiles have carpet bombed them? Same for US docks and port facilities. Bridges, power stations, munitions warehouses, the list is massive. Even if it costs the PLAAF a H20 to take out one of such targets, it’s worth it because while China can make more H20s, whether the U.S. can regenerate such lost strategic assets in a total war scenario and within a reasonable enough timeframe to have an impact on the war is extremely questionable.
Besides, US' strength is its peacetime standing military. Even if China achieve the same level of withering bombing to the west coast as they can do today to Japan or SK, it would not affect US' big reserves in weapons. It would only partially cripple US' ability to produce more, but the kicker is that US never had that impressive ability to do that to begin with, especially since during a war, US would lose access to all semiconductor besides really large legacy nodes.
War is about logistics. Not just in big ticket weapons, but also in munitions, supplies and repairs. While the U.S. might not be able to manufacture brand new assets at a huge scale, it can potentially reactivate mothballed Cold War platforms and modernise them, similar to what Russia has done to regenerate its armoured strength in Ukraine. Being able to disrupt that will be of fundamental importance.
From the clues we're getting by military watchers in China, H-20 program still exists. But the program has likely changed in nature. Imho H-20 2.0 will be much more focused on command and control facilities and MUMT. Air cruiser or even air CV (I don't mean actually carrying smaller aircraft, just that it could coordinate 100s of drones) compared to J-36's air destroyer concept.
Again, I personally think that are two entirely different programmes that people are conflating.
There is the strategic H20, which will focus on having massive range and maximum stealth for solo strikes against the CONUS.
However, I think there will also be a regional tactical bomber which will focus on high altitude hypersonic speed, and that this JHXX is the platform that will be performing much of the tactical level high difficulty strike missions you currently feel the H20 should do, but which it’s entire design philosophy is manifestly unsuitable for.
