By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization
(Washington D.C.) The Chinese military has massively increased its sorties violating Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) starting in September 2020, more than tripling them from 2021 to 2023, a development which reflects Beijing’s interest in pressuring and intimidating Taiwan in a number of key and widely recognized respects. Certainly the large-scale uptick in violation flights, which jumped from 972 in 2021 to 3,119 in 2022, can be interpreted along the lines of several axes of thought, including war drills and invasion preparation, potential testing of newer technologies and related Concepts of Operation and of course conducting extensive surveillance of Taiwan and US surface and undersea assets.
An interesting and yet-to-be-published research essay called “PLA Flight Activity in Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone,” delineates some of the key conceptual and strategic parameters informing China’s stepped-up aggressive behavior.
“The ADIZ incursions occur for several purposes, with China’s overarching goal of putting military pressure on Taiwan and its international partners beneath the threshold of conflict. Regarding these growing incursions, three different factors: training, operational, and political, have already been briefly touched on in the essay written by Kenneth Allen, Gerald Brown and Thomas Shattuck. (This paper is slated to be published by the Routledge Taylor and Francis Group in the Journal of Strategic Studies in June 2023.) (Kenneth Allen is a former Assistant Air Attache in Beijing and current independent consultant)
The research naturally identifies that the well known synergy or overlap between more frequent and larger numbers of ADIZ sortie violations correspond to politically sensitive developments such as major US and allied training in the region and collaborative visits from US or other pro-Taiwan officials.
“As the PLA’s confidence in its own capabilities have grown, incursions into the ADIZ have allowed the PLA to accomplish a range of operational objectives as well. These operational objectives refer to the dispatching of aircraft with the primary aim of accomplishing a live military objective. So far, these have primarily consisted of missions such as intelligence gathering, tracking foreign naval forces, or wearing down Taiwan’s armed forces and testing response times,” the PLA Activity in Taiwan’s Air Defense Zone” states.
However, the research also points out several critical lesser recognized findings of great relevance to the Pentagon, such as the consistent absence of larger formations, a curious absence of the J-20 in any of the violating ADIZ sorties and the presence of attempted multi-domain networking efforts between Chinese sub-hunting planes, fighter jets and surface ships. The researchers compiled a detailed list of all sorties identifying the type of aircraft and number of missions going back several years, and one of their key findings was, simply put, the absence of the J-20 in any of the sorties violating the ADIZ.
Certainly Chinese papers write about the J-20s maturation, demonstrations and technologies such as its WS-10 domestically-built engine, yet apart from a few training missions, the J-20 has not been airborne much near areas where it might be seen up close. This was the thinking of one of the researchers, Ken Allen(former Assistant Air Attache in Beijing and current independent consultant), who suggested that perhaps the J-20 was kept from flying within Taiwan’s ADIZ to prevent it from being seen by Taiwan’s air defenses, surveillance planes or fighter jets at close range.
The J-20 has also rarely flown any sorties into the East China Sea or South China Sea. As a land-launched stealth platform, the J-20 may have limited reach without operating with not-so-stealthy large tankers, although the jet can clearly go the 100 miles from mainland China to Taiwan.
Allen also suggested that the absence of the J-20 may also pertain to its mission scope, as it is not necessarily built for an F-22-like air supremacy mission and is instead larger with “dual-wings” and an elongated fuselage. This raises questions about the extent to which it could maneuver and prevail in air-to-air combat engagements, suggesting that perhaps the Chinese might intend a more limited role for the aircraft. This may be largely unknown to a degree and it would likely depend upon the range, fidelity of its sensors, processing speed of its on-board computers and other tough to determine factors.
Tracking the frequency and composition of Chinese flights, the researchers also identified several “networking” efforts wherein a J-16 sent target identification data to both ASW aircraft and surface ships.
“Several sorties appear to be oriented towards training for the PLA, in support of Xi Jinping’s initiatives to achieve more realistic training, focusing on joint-operations and combat readiness. Some incursions resemble maritime strike training, in which ASW aircraft identify enemy naval vessels and relay that information to strike aircraft such as the J-16 or JH-7,” the essay writes. “In 2021, there were 41 instances in which Y-8 ASW aircraft flew alongside strike aircraft. While J-16s are likely to be adopted into the PLAN in the future as the J-16H variant, all current J-16 aircraft are assigned to the PLAAF, making this maritime strike training a joint effort across the PLA’s services.”
Of course the US has been training for years now with Pacific-theater multi-domain Task Forces in which ground, surface and air units operate synchronized or integrated, data-driven joint warfare preparation. China’s rather transparent and well-documented effort to “steal” US military weapons specs is quite well-known and published in many Congressional and Pentagon reports, yet what may be lesser known is that China clearly appears to be attempting to replicate the Pentagon’s fast-emerging Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) effort. This raises several critical and potentially yet-to-be-determined questions, such as the actual extent to which the PLA is able to achieve secure, multi-domain target sharing. In recent years, the US military services have been breaking through with multiple efforts and demonstrations showing that indeed air platforms such as drones, helicopters and fixed wing assets are able to send real-time targeting specifics to both ground and surface assets using hardened transport layer technology, advanced technical interfaces to ensure interoperability and AI-enabled data processing. JADC2 involves an evolving integration between the Army’s Project Convergence, Navy Project Overmatch and Air Force Advanced Battle Management System effort. Each of these respective efforts are demonstrating the technology and new concepts of operation sufficient to network a group of warzone “nodes” such as large weapons platforms, unmanned systems and various command and control points.
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