I meant to post this article on Chinese air power when I first saw it, but Parapundit among others beat me to it first.
Yet in a sense I have commented on many aspects of the institutional problems of Chinese air power years ago over on Jerry Pournelle's site here.
The real issues of Chinese airpower are not strictly speaking cultural, as the Policy Review author Jacqueline A. Newmyer states. They are issues of pure power politics. That is why Chinese air power will always remain more of a myth than a reality. I have an advantage here over Jacqueline A. Newmyer and Parapundit that I am going to share with you...
You see, I attended the Dallas/Ft. Worth ORIGINS wargaming convention in the early 1990s where several of the staff wargamers of the U.S. Naval War College explained the power template of 3rd world regimes and the role of air forces play within them.
All 3rd World States, including China, are a thin veneer of modernity stretched over a sea of abject poverty. This means they are literally one person deep in any given technological or organizational skill. The end result of this is that the average 3rd world regime looks something like this:
- The dictator/ruling faction is in the capitol and is protected by the REGIME SECURITY FORCES from the Army.
- The Army is located away from the capitol in the provinces chasing/producing rebels. The REGIME SECURITY FORCE have informers in the Army and visible political officers that watch units for disloyalty. The political officers also function to reduce the military effectiveness of Army units because militarily effective Army units are a threat to the regime.
- The Air Force is split in two. There are the ground support aircraft in the provinces to chase rebels and there is a unit of air superiority jet fighters in the capitol with zero air-to ground attack capability. The pilots of the capitol protection jets are the best paid and pampered people in the military. They and their families live in grandly built government housing guarded by the REGIME SECURITY FORCES.
- The air force headquarters is built in a huge high rise building in the center of the capitol city. Meanwhile the Army and REGIME SECURITY FORCE headquarters are built in bomb proof bunkers.
This is a great simplification. For example, there are always many seperate REGIME SECURITY FORCES, meant to watch each other, as well as the Army and air force. Saddam Hussein's regime was a prime example of this.
However, the point of the template is this. The majority of successful 3rd world coup attempts are launched from inside the air force. The reason is simple. The Army can be maintained at a much lower level of professional competence and still be intimidating bully boys. The air force must have a higher minimum level of organizational competence simply to fly its aircraft. Organizational competence of any kind concentrated in one place lends itself strongly to the organizational skill necessary to launch a sucessful coup.
This is something that Newmyer recognizes with China, but only in passing:
While recognition of its importance to modern warfare has led the Chinese to accord air power an increasingly prominent place, a record of PLAAF radicalism has inclined leaders to restrain air force development. During the late Mao years, the dissenter Lin Biao, who was eventually purged from the regime and died in a mysterious plane crash over Mongolia, coopted the PLAAF's leadership. Lin's 1971-72 attempted coup was based in part on support from the air force, a fact that led Deng to pay particular attention to the mood of this service branch.The writings of party and military elites convey their fears about the insurrectionary potential of a modern air force. An article published in a pro-mainland Taiwanese daily after the downing of the U.S. spy plane sums up the concern: "Past examples show that whoever has possession of a plane has the power to do what they want with it.... In the 1980s, Sun Tianqin defected by flying a Mig-21 to South Korea, and in the face of protests by the Chinese Communists, American experts carefully ;observed' this aircraft."
In Beijing's eyes, the tradition of PLAAF dissent lives on. The Falun Gong religious sect, identified by China's leaders as a threat to be eliminated, has won a significant air force following. In 2000, Yu Changxin, a septuagenarian retired PLAAF general, was arrested and sentenced to 17 years in prison after being accused of masterminding a Falun Gong demonstration in Beijing. Yu's incarceration, which made him the highest ranking official yet to be punished for affiliation with Falun Gong, provoked an outcry from his former colleagues. They were further aggrieved by the death in captivity of Wang Yu, a 49-year air force officer.
The PLAAF's weakness, then, reflects the combined effects of cultural predispositions and conscious political choices. While China's political-military elites, like their former mentors the Soviets, have devised ways of developing the air force without putting too much power in the hands of untrustworthy pilots, their inability to rely on recruits has had far-reaching effects. For instance, the PLAAF's training regimen minimizes flight hours, which severely limits the skill of China's pilots. (PLAAF pilots spend only 80-100 hours flying annually; their American counterparts spend at least 280 hours in the air per year.) This economy is partly attributable to a desire to spare China's aging and fragile fleet from undue wear, but it also stems from a concern about giving yahoo recruits too many opportunities to defect. The regime's anxieties about maintaining power have depressed the air force's performance level.
The above are the reasons why the Chinese leadership, like most 3rd world regimes, is in love with ballistic missiles with a rumored weapon of mass destruction capability.
The wonderful thing about building ballistic missiles rather than a large air force or navy is that you can parade junk and it looks threatening. This make them very powerful political symbols for both internal political grandstanding and for bullying international diplomacy, a la China with Taiwan. You get all the peacetime benefits of a strong air force without the political coup threat problems that come with them. Besides, pilots that are politically reliable often are very poor in their flying skills, as the Darwin Award winning Chinese fighter pilot in the EP-3 affair proved.
This, BTW, is why American ballistic missile defenses are so fundamentally unacceptable to the Chinese. They neutralize the implied political threat Chinese missiles represent, and destroy Chinese illusions of power both internally and externally, because people will believe American missile defenses will work while Chinese missiles won't.
UPDATE: Team Stryker comments.
Rommel had learned by 1942 that if you don't control the air you don't control the battle. By mid 1944 that lack of control put him in a hospital.
You will note that the emphasis of the articles is on fixed based aircraft. That is a problem that is solveable in part politically. What politics can't solve is aircraft carriers. We have 2 more on the way.
Actually, missiles can solve those too. This is another reason the Chinese are worried about missile defense plans - they will allow America to project power to Taiwan, Korea et. al. without being deterred by a Chinese "missile umbrella" intended to keep their conventional forces at arm's length and establish a clear Chinese sphere of influence.
RE: "2 more carriers on the way"... Pentagon procurement policies ensure that we may have the carriers, but we won't have the aircraft. Like every other part of the military, Naval aviation is already below capacity. Unless they turn those 2 carriers over to Marine aviation (hmmm...), they'll probably move to mothball 2 of the old non-nuclear carriers shortly thereafter.
Joe,
Go read my article link to Jerry Pournelle's site.
The most important part of missile development is an independent test and evaluation system to wring out the technical bugs.
The Chinese test and evaluation system is hopelessly compromised and so are its missiles.
In 1944 Rommel was a consultant to the Atlantic defense in France. Von Runstad (Sp) was the actual commander. Rommel had experience allied air power in the African campaign and realized that the defeat of the invasion of Europe had to occur on the beaches. Von Runstad wanted to keep his tanks in reserve and move them to the invasion spot once it was clear where that would be. Rommel realized that allied air power would make mincemeat out of moving tanks and they would never get to where they were needed. Fortunately for the Allies on D-Day, Von Runstad's carried the day and when the allies invaded they were able to get ashore in strength. Of course, Hitler loved it when his generals were arguing over strategy. In addition to sleeping through the early hours of D-Day, he also chose to listen to the wrong general.
Trent:
I looked for the link to Jerry Pournelle site, couldn't find it. Went to Chaos Manor, looking for missle testing, etc. but no luck. HELP!!
Charles: Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt.
Phil,
This is the relevant section:
"Even assuming a "Paramount Leader" could arise to control the factions in the near future, the Chinese still couldn't pull off any of these strategies. The PLA Air Force is known as the "Center of Corruption in the PLA," according to James Dunnigan. The independent budget and testing oversight that force test after test of American weapons is lacking in the PLAAF. Tests are expensive and an embarrassing lost of face if they uncover failure. Testing is kept unrealistic, and done as few times as possible, as a result. A good historical analog is the performance of both American torpedoes and the U.S. Naval Ordnance branch early in WW2.
Then there is the final threat to this scenario: the Chinese version of the "DOT COM" brain drain. The foreign joint venture companies are raiding the Chinese military industrial complex for talented engineers and managers.
The brain drain of the "Dot Com" economy is blamed for several recent U.S. space launch failures. Reports are that the same is happening to the Chinese military in a much more threadbare industrial economy, as its technological culture is "one deep." That is a major drag on any Chinese military buildup and ensures what they build cannot be maintained.
"Building missiles" does not mean, "building missiles that work." This is a fact the Chinese are well aware of in light of their reaction to the possibility of American strategic missile defenses.
The wonderful thing about building ballistic missiles rather than a large air force or navy is that you can parade junk and it looks threatening. That is why American ballistic missile defenses are so fundamentally unacceptable to the Chinese. They neutralize the implied political threat those missiles represent, and destroy Chinese illusions of power because they will believe our defenses work while their missiles won't. When you combine the brain drain problem with the rampant corruption loose in the Chinese PLAAF, and lack of direction above, the odds approach certainty that any long-range missile built by the Chinese, and launched by the regular military under combat conditions, will fail.
Remember that even in our checks and balance driven procurement system, the USA did not build reliable SLBM/ICBMs during the Cold War.
The Polaris missile had corroded safety interlocks that rendered its nukes inert until the mid-1960s. A Titan 2 missile blew up because someone dropped a tool on a fully fueled missile in the 1980s. Only 3 of 7 "combat ready" Minuteman were successfully launched from active silos in early 1980s realistic tests ordered by then Defense Secretary Casper Weinburger - realistic compared to the standard phony tests from Vanderberg AFB silos of carefully reworked Minuteman ICBM's. Our MX Peacekeeper ICBM's were rendered unusable for half a decade because of a defense contractor defrauding the government with faulty guidance gyros.
The kicker here was that the Soviets missile serviceability rates were half what American ballistic missiles were.
If we had such problems, and the Soviets' were far worse, how reliable will Chinese ICBM's be? How much of drain on China's economy will an attempt to build lots of land-based ICBM's be?"
Phil,
For the whole article over on Jerry's, try this:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/special/sdi1.html
Thanks, Trent.
My dad is a former airforce fighter pilot and his mantra is that pilot quality is directly proportional to the amount of flight time they receive. Flight training is expensive and everything I've seen indicates that Chinese pilots don't spend nearly the time in the air that US (or Taiwanese) pilots do.
Well now, PLA has no Air Force worth a damm. Their navy is a joke. The Army is famous for their ability to trade man for bullets (their ONLY capability). Unless they decided to nuke Taiwan with terrorist, there is no way in hell they can even get close to Taiwan.
Rommel was appoited by Hitler in early 44, to inspect the Atlantic Wall. He found the defenses in a poor state, except at the Pas de Calise, were the 15th Army was based. At the time of the invasion Rommel was the Commander of Army Group B which had responsibility for the Normandy coast. It was in this capacity that Rommel was serving when the Hawker Tyhpoon shot up his car.
Just to further the Rommel digression... As Terry notes, Rommel was commander of the Army Group in Northern France at the time of D-Day, with von Rundstedt overall Wehrmacht commander in the West. This meant that, short of direct intervention by Hitler, von Rundstedt controlled the frontal level strategic reserves, and did indeed keep them centralized over Rommel's objections. Rommel, contrary to von Rundstedt's strategic directives, crept his own Army Group's assets progressively closer to the coast. By D-Day, 21st Panzer was southeast of Caen, within a dozen miles or so of the British landings. 12th SS Panzer was a bit further east, but still quick to respond. In the end, Allied airpower was so smothering that even these divisions couldn't muster effective counterattacks, though they did keep the British from breaking out of the beachhead. Rommel's plan at least recognized the air superiority problem, but I have doubts that there was any real solution available to the Germans.
Trent's comments on strategic missile operability are quite fascinating. I had always suspected that, given that they function entirely as bluff weapons anyway, it made little sense to spend much money and effort on making strategic missiles actually work. I don't know if any authors of post-holocaust fiction ever addressed the possibility that major population centers might have survived an all-out nuclear exchange intact, just due to the "dud rate". The fate of civilization would be a much... noisier... story in such a case...