Chinese 6th Generation Fighters Hint that the US Has Fallen Behind a Competitor for the First Time

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It was December 26th, 2024—Chairman Mao’s Birthday—when a pair of unmarked, unidentified warplanes screamed across the skies above Chengdu, a city that hosts the factory of the Chengdu Aerospace Corporation that is known to be currently working on a new fighter jet.

Tentatively being called the J-36 and J-XX, (no official names exist) these are believed to be 6th generation warplanes, or at least “next generation”. What generation is China on that these would be from the “next?” The current J-20 is generally referred to as having the speed, stealth, integration, payload, and maneuverability of a 5th generation fighter jet—equivalent to the US Air Force’s F-35.

In that case, one might call these 6th generation, although US strategists admit that China tends to favor greater incrementalism in its military development, compared to the Air Force, which prefers to produce larger advances across longer time spans, and so maybe it’s more appropriate to call it 5.5th generation.

Either way, with the F-35 already being the most expensive conventional weapon system ever produced for the Pentagon while still suffering several technical and performance issues, the chance is greater than not that the US has officially fallen behind in combat aircraft technology.

Although perhaps not, since no information on the J-36 or J-XX is officially available. What is available comes from observations mostly, by a group referred to as the “PLA watching community”. Some of these folks are more assertive than others. Journalist and PLA watcher Rick Joe takes a middle ground, calling the J-36 and J-XX “genuine competition” vis-a-vis the Pentagon, while also admitting that the PLA watching community’s predictions of the appearance and nature of these two aircraft have been remarkably on point.

Joe describes these aircraft as something more than a “fighter” or a “bomber” and more like a “high performance, weaponized command platform,” or an “aerial destroyer,” referencing naval warship classification.

Joe lists the “credible” descriptions of the aircraft as one with “significantly greater combat radius, superior and omnidirectional signature reduction, significantly greater power generation with sensor and [energy weapon] capabilities,” and possessing of a larger internal weapons bay long enough to potentially host the long-range air-to-air PLA missile known as the PL-17.

Another writer, Rathindra Kuruwita, cites sources which claim the operational range of the J-36 and J-XX will be 1,800 miles, allowing it to reach the US outposts of Guam and Diego Garcia in the Pacific. Kuruwita reports that Chinese analysis of the F-35 finds that it is too small to accommodate the power demand associated with integrated warfighting, and as such the J-36 contains three engines in its tailless, diamond shape platform that’s much larger than the American plane which should make room for additional fuel to generate these power demands.

It is designed, he writes at The Diplomat, to act as the central node in a system of unmanned capabilities like squadrons of combat drones hundreds of kilometers in advance of the aircraft, as well as high-powered radar, jamming and cyber weapons, and direct energy weapons.

None of this has been demonstrated to observers, but is assumed based on statements and planning documents of what a future combat aircraft would look like, one which would be larger and heavier than modern craft—to which the double-wheel landing gear visible on the J-36 testifies.

The War Zone speculates that these would possess a significant weapons payload for both air-to-air and air-to-ground, but less than a bomber.

🇨🇳🛸JH-XX & J-36 : China continues to impress us every year, total air supremacy is just a matter of time. pic.twitter.com/JKdzD2dPA8

— N.p (@n_p505) December 28, 2024

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Kuruwita looked at the time it took from testing to deployment of previous aircraft and judged that the J-36 and J-XX may be ready for action by 2031 if they followed the same timeline as the previous J-20. The US needed about 12 years to test and deploy the F-22 and F-35, but its current so-called 6th generation aircraft, called the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, is in limbo after huge cost overruns were found, and a reimagination of the system was determined to be necessary despite being launched six years ago.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall initiated a “strategic pause” to reevaluate what it was the program was meant to be building, all but guaranteeing that the projected completion date of 2030 will be overshot by several years.

“From a requirements perspective, what I would say is we’re going back and starting at the beginning with ‘What is the thing we’re trying to do?’” said the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff James C. Slife on the topic at the end of 2024. “‘How do we achieve air superiority in a contested environment?’”

The review found that any craft would have to be cheaper, as a price point of $300 million, three-times as much as an F-35, was simply unreasonable. It also found the craft would have to be much more accommodating to unmanned aerial vehicle collaboration.

That leaves the F-35 as the most available warfighting option for the US, but its long troubled history hasn’t concluded. Despite the US military recently clearing it for full-rate production, a 2024 review by the Pentagon still identified major issues with the aircraft. In 2023, the report found that any given F-35 was available for action only 51% of the time, compared to the benchmark of 65%.

Furthermore, this availability issue got worse compared to availability in 2022. In any given month in 2023, the combat-coded F-35 fleet could only achieve all its delegated missions and objectives 48% of the time, dropping to 30% across the whole fleet of combat and non-combat coded jets.

Rates of F-35s down for maintenance worsened in 2023, compared to 2022, which was also worse than what was seen in 2021. The main drivers of critical failures were “troubleshooting (including software stability), attaching hardware (including nutplates), wires/tubes/ducts/ fiber optics, throttle grip, aircraft memory device, [low observability] repair, standby flight display, refueling door, [and] position light,” the report noted.

“As a fleet, the F-35 still isn’t meeting the reliability and maintainability standards set in the Operational Requirements Document. The F-35A meets two and the F-35B meets one of the three reliability requirements. No variant is meeting [all] the maintainability requirements,” it read.

Without question, it’s safe to assume at least some of these issues are present in the PLA Air Force because of the technical sophistication and demands of modern warplanes, but for the first time since World War II, it seems all but certain that if it came to a clash in the skies over the Pacific, the US has entered a period in which it will be outgunned. WaL