plawolf
Lieutenant General
Jamming isn’t just about raw power. Higher maximum power output is only really an advantage if you are going with a dumb brute force full spectrum jam. That’s really a last resort in EW since doing so would blind yourself just as much as the enemy.
I know that the Chinese takes EW exceptionally seriously. Their world leading expertise in civilian telecoms and electronics would give them a rich and deep talent pool and highly stilled labour and cutting edge technologies for use in developing their EW since there is significant overlap between the fields.
China is also in an unique position of having had a wide range of state of the art Russian radars, missiles and EW to play around with ranging from Flankers (Su35 especially), warships, SAMs, missiles and jamming pods.
While obviously there are going to be a lot of difference between systems, there will also still be a lot of similarities between all the Russian kit owing to them being made by the same companies and maybe even designers after all. As such, the changes between systems are more likely evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Especially on core aspects like underlying physics theory used and specific application of techniques and solutions.
Especially for the MKI, which you need to remember was designed at a time of effective collapse in the Russian aerospace industry due to the lingering effects of the collapse of the USSR. As such, the pace of innovation would have been significantly slower, and the Russians probably used and reused off-the-shelf tech and solitons more than they should or normally would have in finalising the MKI and its BARs radar, which may have left it a lot more vulnerable than it should have been to someone with access to other Russian radars of the same time aka China.
In short, China has the means and will to develop world class EW, and it’s access to Russian systems from its own purchases likely gave its already formidable EW another significant boost.
On balance, this is probably Chinese EW over-performing due to the specific system them encountered. While I expect Chinese EW to be formidable, it’s probably not going to be as devastating if used against non-Russian systems.
