Who says it’s big? It’s long but size in aircraft is determined by weight. The undercarriage shows that this aircraft is about as ‘big’ as a Su-27 or a MTOW of around 30 tonnes a long way from the F-111’s 45 tonne MTOW. The length is clearly for aerodynamic purposes.
About as likely as removing the wings between a prototype and production version.
Who said it was a 5th generation aircraft? Signature management is out the window and who knows about sensors but the benefit of the doubt says it will be a long way behind F-22/F-35. Its clearly the kind of plane you build when you can't build a 5G fighter. As fast and as agile as possible with a small, narrow frontal RCS. Same deal as the T-50.
they have and do. some of us don't live in a bubble.
have you ever worked in an environment where there was no point in contesting a view that the executive were hell bent on doing? Gates fired people for disagreeing with his views of the procurement world and future force constructs.
and when there's proof of a contrarian view it means what? FFS, do you seriously think that the SecDef view is sacrosanct.. Do you want to go back to recent history where SecDefs talked up a non existent threat with the Sovs - where in a number of instances the US had clear delivery and accuracy superiority but kept up the banter?
one of the "tells" will be seeing those canards operate when in the turn.....
Given Gate's original assessment of 2025, I would say he's just giving the media fodder to shorten the life cycle of this story and get journalists off his tail. It's against his, the military's, and the intelligence community's interests to have the media constantly refer back to his original estimate whenever the J-20 becomes visible during its testing phase.
Ahh I see. I misunderstood his comment. I thought he was talking about supposed ASMs being tested on the JH-7s. I would imagine that land based ASBMs don't have to worry about their "loud" signature because they will be flying too fast for an easy intercept, something that you couldn't do for an airbased ASM due to fuel constraints for size reasons.
the lesson for Gates I suspect (and any other politician in the executive) is to avoid "feeding the chooks" ie responding to the press without being prepared.
Hence ABL and the vision of killing at boost.....
Your views notwithstanding, getting pi##ed is not really an issue if it was really just the words of the secdef.
You need to separate what they say in reports with what they say in public. When a report cites a change it's usually an official reassessment. What they say in public is merely media strategy to control the pace and visibility of a store.
agree.
Insults aside, before the Internet, a certain guy called MacArthur ignored certain public warnings from a guy called Mao regarding a certain place called Korea.
Different political systems will have different media cultures and different strategies. When Chinese officials say something the political motive can be different from when a US official says something. Also, context is important. What a country's media directs to another country's political leadership is different from what a country's media directs to its own citizens.
Not when what they want to communicate to the public is different from what they want to communicate to each other. That's especially the case when there is a shared understanding of this within an organization.
Your observations could just as easily be interpreted to "the defence and intel communities don't want a small story to develop legs and be burdened with a haranguing public media that has the defence jitters, which is exactly what the media is for stories like these. Remember, the media's job isn't to tell the truth either (at least not completely). They're in it for attention and money.
All arguments require some degree of assumptions (yours included). Some assumptions are more well founded than others. Right now we're discussing about why we have the different assumptions we do.
That's always going to be true to an extent, but I believe there are always real reasons for parsing what an official says to the media.
Well, the official line is the official line and while I am the last person to swallow every word uncritically, it is obviously what we are being wanted to believe and that has to be being wanted for a purpose.
And that's when your best guess is as good as mine. Everything else is merely circumstantial.
Are you allowed to post those identified capabilities? They would give us a real way of evaluating aircraft.
