China's Multirole Fighter Family

A country’s choices in high-end aerospace hardware are often more significant for signaling its security alignments than providing its warfighters with operational capabilities. Egypt signaled its mid-1950s embrace of the Soviet Union by procuring large numbers of jet combat aircraft, few of which survived the 1956 war, and marked its post-Camp David re-alignment by switching to US designs. More recently, Turkey has been willing to use its procurement of Russian surface-to-air missiles to disrupt relations with the US and NATO, demanding their attention to its perceived security needs.

Today, one of the few areas of consensus across the polarized US political spectrum is that China constitutes a major national security threat. It is often forgotten that, in the 1980s, the US and China cooperated on combat aircraft, most notably the Peace Pearl program. It was only with the end of the Cold War and the rise of post-Tiananmen Square repression that China’s military turned towards Russia to supply aircraft, even though China’s civil aviation still aspired to emulate western models in its equipment and operations.

This book looks at the multiple derivatives of a single combat aircraft design – the Sukhoi Su-27 ‘Flanker’ – and its role in the transformation of Chinese airpower. A Soviet-designed heavy fighter that emerged in the last decade of the Cold War, the ‘Flanker’ has been modified in multiple versions, built in Russia and China, that will likely remain in service through the 2030s. Russian versions have seen combat against Ukraine and, in March 2023, one downed a US Air Force UAV by ramming it.

This book is an in-depth look at the ‘Flanker’ design and how it has impacted – and in turn been impacted by – changes in Chinese aerospace. Since the ‘Flanker’ story started, both civil and military aerospace in China have dramatically and rapidly progressed while more established counterparts have often struggled to achieve more than incremental advances; it remains likely that the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will be unable to achieve full rate production by that program’s 30^th anniversary.

As a monograph, this book does not set out to provide the full context of Chinese airpower and its evolution. This bigger picture can be found online, including on Air Force and RAND websites.*

The focus on a single type of aircraft rather than the broader picture is less common among recent books on China’s military. This book’s publisher, Harpia, has followed its usual approach for well-produced softcover volumes on aviation subjects that fall outside the mainstream of English-language publishing. The physical presentation is good, with illustrations including 225 color photographs and 24 color profiles of different ‘Flanker’ versions, all on high quality paper, tightly bound. Graphics include tables of aircraft performance, orders of battle, a map and a useful ‘Flanker’ family tree setting out the intertwined Russian and Chinese versions.

The author has written several books on current Chinese airpower. While he has been able to draw on Chinese-language sources, information is often difficult to find and impossible to confirm; that which is available often proving contradictory or self-serving. The question of whether this book has made effective use of its sources can really only be answered thoroughly by someone with a good idea of what is available and how reliable it is likely to be. The book aims to be comprehensive, but the page-and-a-half index provided has limited value as a guide to the data-rich content (no entries for the many different types of radars, for example).

China has developed ‘Flankers’ for its own forces rather than for export, which has limited the availability of the marketing information that, for years, provided insights into what China wanted to say about ground forces hardware. But China’s use of

‘Flankers’ for international training and visits provides rare glimpses of how they are used in service. The author has worked hard to assess sources and to evaluate information where there is a choice between “alternative facts”. Sometimes, there is little evidence beyond speculation to explain things. Why are ‘Flankers’ often photographed with 1950s-technology unguided rocket pods rather than the wide range of guided weapons they can carry? Security? To lower training costs? Long-standing operational requirements? Even those with the language skills and access to available sources can only guess.

While any open-source examination of a contemporary Chinese military subject is, by its nature, limited in accuracy, what does appear in this book is valuable, especially dealing with orders of battle and weapons loadouts.

China’s ‘Flankers’ are currently part of the news about the increasingly tense security situation in the western Pacific. They penetrate Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) and are based on artificial islands in the South China Sea and aboard aircraft carriers. While it does not set out to present or assess the larger context of Chinese airpower, the ‘Flanker’ is a significant part of it and a reader will find both examples of effective and rapid adaptation of technology alongside much that is reminiscent of earlier decades.

The book’s narrative shows how the Chinese took the ‘Flanker’ and made it their own, legally or illegally, something better suited to Chinese operational requirements and, apparently, more effective. That Chinese development would work out was by no means certain. When China developed the basic Antonov high-wing twin-turboprop airliner design – like the ‘Flanker’, a Soviet-era creation – what they ended up with was the MA-60, a design suffering from fundamental flaws that prevent it from being certified to fly in most countries. China’s airlines will rely on European Airbus designs for years to come.

This book shows that the Chinese development of the original Soviet ‘Flanker’ did not go down the road that produced the MA-60; even though from the 1980s to the Covid shutdown in 2020, China’s civil aviation evolved, achieving reliability and safety consistent with international standards. It is uncertain how the evolution of China’s military aviation over the same period compared. There is much less evidence for this, and this book makes its case that it presents as much of it as can be found in open sources. But the Chinese ‘Flanker’ appears to be an interim type that pointed the way to the emerging generation of combat aircraft and engines that make China a peer competitor. Today, there is a great deal being said about how China will incorporate technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and unmanned air vehicles into its force structure and operational thinking. The example of how they developed and incorporated the ‘Flanker’ and what they have done with it, as set out here, may provide a valuable example.

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