If this were Wikipedia, every sentence about what US intelligence thought would be tagged [citation needed].
As far as I'm concerned, that is your unsubstantiated opinion, so no rebuttal is necessary.
As far as I'm concerned, that is your unsubstantiated opinion, so no rebuttal is necessary.
What I said about US intelligence is supported by the source I posted, with the relevant part being
The important assumptions are that they knew more than they told the media and that their prediction ("around 2015") coming true means they were realistic about the timelines of the project. (After all, it's not hard to imagine a situation where the aircraft first flew in 2005 and was in service in 2010.)
In contrast, what you wrote about their thinking could be true, but it could also be false, and so far there is no evidence posted to support it.
Good thing about SDF is you can't go back to edit your posts.
Here's what you actually said:
The implication here is the US intelligence community correctly "believed that such an aircraft would be a 5th generation fighter intended to compete with the US' own 5th generation fighters" because they "provided a realistic timeline [that] showed they were well informed at that point."
Well, no. I believe your belief is false. The US intelligence community most probably did not believe the Chinese 5th generation fighter program would've produced a design that would've been able to compete with the US' own 5th generation fighters, resulting in their decision to not upgrade new-build F-22 but simply stop producing them altogether. They were able to predict a timeline that was more or less in line with reality but everything else was wrong, resulting in wrong (for the US, great for China tho) decisions being made for US procurement.
You don't say.
No, one of my points was that in 1997, US intelligence was reasonably well informed about the project, as revealed by the article. I see no reason to assume they were less informed afterwards. I also stated that at that early stage their projections about the program were likely less precise than five or ten years later, when developments were more concrete.
So far, people who claim that they underestimated what was to become the J-20 have provided no evidence for their claims.
You are free to restate your points as many times as you want.
Obviously, nobody here knows what their actual assessment was. But for them to get it significantly wrong would make them incompetent, which is, in my opinion, unlikely.
Except many factors (budget, bureaucratic inertia, politics) other than intelligence assessments of future Chinese fighters played a role in that decision. Given that, I don't think your inference about said assessments holds - there just wasn't such a direct, unperturbed link.
I'll readily concede the sensor package, airframe size and growth potential, but care to substantiate the instability compared to the F-35 and IADS capability compared to its Russian counterpart?
As Klon says, where's the evidence to suggest this?
If anything, the expected long development phase to me reflects a recognition that China's ambitions were quite a bit higher than that (why would they think so if they believed this new fighter would be no more than an evolutionary improvement on the J-10, which was already quite well-understood at the time?). In fact, being only 2 years off the mark with a projection on a 20-year military endeavour by another nation which is very opaque to you in terms of information is a downright remarkable performance. Hell, few countries are able to predict the long term schedule of their very own fighter projects that well - credit where it's due!
Where the US intelligence community *royally* dropped the ball was their apparent total lack of awareness regarding the short-term progress of the project during the final years. As of 2009 (with first flight of the J-20 less than 18 months away), then-SecDef Robert Gates still believed it would not be in service by 2020! The margin of error in that prediction is in sharp contrast to the earlier intelligence efforts.
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Gonna add a comment @Jura would love (i think
): would US navy procure LCS and Zumwalt if they knew the number of 052D and 055 PLAN is gonna get by 2020?Delta-canard vs conventional. In the absence of concrete figures, I'm just going to assume the delta-canard is more unstable than the conventional planform. Couple this with Dr. Song's paper which stated his intention to increase the envisioned 5th-gen design's instability from the usual 3% of chord length for fighters to 10%, I feel even more safe hedging my bets with the delta-canard.
I could've said "one of the two most sophisticated IADS", I suppose.
I got it from the same place from which Klon got evidence of the US intelligence agencies' competency in their estimates both timescale-wise and capability-wise of Chinese 5th generation fighter/s.
Or it was more common sense that a typical fighter program takes ~twenty years to see fruition. If the intelligence people can only predict a project's date of conclusion with some accuracy and nothing else, why do they even have a job?
They dropped the ball much earlier than that, when they couldn't even predict the USSR was to disintegrate virtually overnight.
That "One" is the western military, not the PLA. The issue here is that, like many other observers (only) familiar with western military practice, you project the western image onto Chinese, expecting the same behavior and practice. Judging what PLA should have done "right" according to what is right in the west. You failed to realize that, Chinese strategic thinking is very different from the western (European history) from the very beginning (many thousands of years), and that difference will not change in our life time. In Chinese, there is a saying "江山易改本性难移", meaning one can change the dynasty with ease but never the mind of the people.
If you want to make anything out of the information in public (that picture), you will have to put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese, especially the PLA, think like a Chinese. After all, it is you who want to know what PLA is doing, not the other way around, so you have to adapt to the Chinese mind-set, not the other way around. It is NOT about who is right, what behavior is better, it is about who you are dealing with, isn't it?
P.S. that picture is not broadcasted, or officially released by PLA, it is dug up by someone inside. PLA may not even wanted to advertise anything like you has kept on claiming. How could you "blame" someone for what he is not doing? How could you demand something (the "right" practice) when that someone doesn't think you have the right to demand?
That is the key disagreement here, and will remain so. It is more appropriate to say instead "IMO, it is in its interest."