I'd rather the airshow be cancelled than the J-20 put on another bloodless performance.
J-20 5th Generation Fighter VII
- Thread starter siegecrossbow
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Casual observers who are knowledgeable and intelligent understand more than you give them credit for. The rest can't be "convinced" anyway and there really isn't that much point in convincing them.
Well preventing the J-20 from showing its limits of subsonic kinematic performance is totally productive in this case. The only loss is we can't say to the typical Jai Hind level trolls "look here at this video there you go now shut up". That's kind of not what the PLA cares about.
PLA and China also hasn't been excessively secretive at all. I'd say China is behaving quite a lot less secretive about its capabilities in recent years, to the point of being potentially revealing too much if anything.
When you have nothing you have to be extra secretive to keep everyone guessing.
When you got some gear, you might want to show off a bit just so no one gets any funny ideas. Still cheaper than fighting a protracted war on terrorism.
I mean...I definitely want eye candy but I don’t think winning internet arguments about what the J-20 can do is really that vital to infosec...
There are secrets and there are secrets. "Can the J-20 do high AoA manoeuvres" is not a secret like "how much plutonium does China have". Let me repeat the relevant part of my argument since you seem to have missed it:
No I got your point I just disagree with it lol.
Doesn't seem like you did. The point I made wasn't about "winning internet arguments."
Your point is that you think public perception of this stuff affects national security risk calculus. I think that’s quite an overreach which I suspect is a backwards rationalization for the desire to winning Internet arguments.
Your suspicions about my motivations are irrelevant.
What is relevant is your belief that public perception has no effect on national security risk calculus. That's woefully mistaken. When article after article appears in the Western press claiming that the J-20 can't turn and can't fight, do you imagine they're written by an entirely different cast of characters from those formulating policies and making decisions? That would be a very unusual circumstance to have clowns writing for the public (and commenting on their social media accounts) and Very Serious People™ making decisions in shadowy backrooms. That's not how it works; it's all the same group of idiots. It's clowns all the way down.
The likes of Justin Bronk are writing the reports and policy documents that wind up on know-nothing decisionmakers' desks and get implemented. The Very Serious People™ you think are toiling away at the RAND Corporation or somewhere who you imagine to have a deep understanding of the J-20's role and capabilities simply do not exist. They're all a pack of Bronks.
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