The fundamental strategy to US weapon development is to be at least a generation ahead of its competitors. F22 had already matured and serviced for many years, despite slowdown caused by the slack from the ease-off of the Cold War. F35 should have already entered service 7-8 years ago, if Pentagon had the drive like they did during Cold War.
Big companies like Boeing and Lockheed always work on at least two generations at the same time. By the time YF-22 was chosen to be the official F22, groundwork on the successor had already begun.
It's no brainer that within the next 2-3 years, we will began to hear about the 6th generation plane. There will be coverage on it like there was for F22 program.
China is doing a great job, catching up from a 2 generation gap (J8&JH7 Vs. F22) to only a half generation gap. But it is still lagging behind. Catching up is easy, but surpassing is much harder.
Like I have mentioned before in other posts, US has a much bigger weapon industry. It is much more advanced and much more experienced. The biggest difference is that it's commercially driven, making them much more competitive and competent. The R&D sector is almost bigger than the manufacturing sector. When Chinese want to develop something, it's usually done purely by a government institute. For example, when a fly-by-wire system/software is needed for J-##, a team of academics will be formed. They will stick together and produce the software. But when the software is finalized and enter service, very few of the academics will stay and usually move onto some other projects. Another problem is the size of those teams, they're usually pretty small, consisting of one or two professors and the rest are just grad students. But in the US, it's done by those fortune 500 companies. They have armies of programmers and software engineers. Just like a commercial software, even after entering service, they're still constantly been upgraded. Lockheed Martin alone produces 4x more lines of software codes than Microsoft every year.
Yes, China did a great job. But to surpass the US counterpart, they have to privatize those big weapon companies. Privatization will increase competition and competency. It will elevate their level of professionalism.
The bottomline is, SkunkWorks and PhantomWorks are not sweating.
