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Much has been made about the modernization and the alleged great threat of China's armed forces, especially in particular, its air forces. The image of vast fleets of SU30s striking thousands of miles from the Chinese coastline against Asian neighbors seemed to predominate this image. Yet the myth ignores that the PLAAF itself faces a possible massive meltdown in the next ten years from the wholesale phase out of obsolete aircraft.

While there have been great strides, time is ticking. Modernizing an air force proved to be much more difficult than modernizing an army or a navy. Old tanks can still run, and a tank is always a tank. China can upgrade thousands of its obsolete T-59 main battle tanks (MBT) into the T-59D MBT. Old ships can still float. But an old plane? Planes have limited amount of airframe life. Old planes simply crash.

In the next ten years, thousands of old vintage aircraft would have reached the end of their service lives. The increasing pace of pilot training in the new PLAAF would accelerate this process further. It's often a risk to stretch old planes towards the end of their estimated service life---just to be sure, you often have to retire them before that. There is no second life for these planes unlike the T-59D MBT.

First to go are all the J6s, and that does not require any explanation. Second would be all early J-7s, especially pre-J-7E or J-7 with the straight delta wing. Third to go are all early Q5s, H5s and H6s.

1. The failure to integrate Russian and indigenous Chinese missile systems. This has the potential for serious logistical problems in the future.

2. The failure to develop and build new more sophisticated fighters fast enough and at the cost low enough to replace the attrition of vast numbers of aircraft destined to be phased out in the future.

1. The quest for national self reliance, with the aim of developing an industrial and technological infrastructure to create a modern air force indigenously.

2. The need for prompt and speedy modernization that required the import of foreign systems.

The PLAAF's Flanker program highlighted these problems. It has almost been a decade since the first SU-27s arrived. In the ten years, the PLAAF only gained about one hundred fifty (my estimates) Flankers of all types---SU-27SK, SU-27UBK and SU-30MKK---both Russian and Chinese made. These numbers basically include about 48 SU-27SK and 12 SU-27UBK that were delivered earlier, 38-40 SU-30MKK, 28 SU-27UBK ordered since 1999, and presumably about 30 J-11s built (est. 15-20 planes a year). There is still another 40 SU-30MKK in order, and at least 150 SU-27s yet to be built from the 200 licensed. The difficulty of producing this complex aircraft is not just a problem for the Chinese; the Indians could only produce their version of the SU30MK at a rate of ten per year.

And yet, as production struggles on, Shenyang is basically once again, building new build but obsolete aircraft. Compared to fighters across the Straits, the J-11 or SU-27SK, and even the SU-30MKK has better scan range (100km on a 3m^2 target vs 80km on a 5m^2 target featured by radars of the F-16 class, including the IDF). However, Western fighters have better simultaneous track and engage capability, generally handling up to four targets instead of the J-11's and SU-30MKK's two. There are rumors that some J-11s are equipped with Zhuk-27, which can deal with four targets, but that has not been confirmed.

That is at least 150 still born SU-27s whose avionics are already obsolete and will be more so in the future until the first decade expires. More over, they are purely on the air superiority role, and the only air to ground capability they have is some accurate dropping of iron bombs, which is quite a waste for an aircraft since the job is more suited for cheap Fantans. An attempt to test the multirole Zhuk 27 apparently did not prove successful (despite the Jane's report that China's license was essentially the multirole -SMK variant) since the PLAAF had to resort to buying the two seat SU-30MK instead.