China’s air force needs to broaden its air surveillance and attack capabilities in the western Pacific including the area near Japan to ensure its command of the skies, according to an official study.
The report, prepared by the Air Force Command Academy in November, also stressed the need to develop and enhance nine types of “strategic equipment” with an eye specifically towards the United States and its “pivot” to Asia.
The academy, a Beijing-based think tank for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, has not publicly released the report, which laid out visions for the air strategy to as far as 2030.
Listing the US, Japan, Taiwan, India and Vietnam as “threats” in military airspace until 2030, the report proposed broadening Beijing’s scope of surveillance from the so-called “first island chain” to the “second island chain”.
The “first island chain” – linking Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines – has been regarded as an area that Beijing sees as an important barrier of defense, in particular against US military presence.
The “second island chain” includes a larger area that stretches farther away to include Japan’s Izu Island chain, Guam and New Guinea.
The report said China should enhance the ability to attack US bases within the “second island chain” with a new type of strategic bomber and “deter US military intervention” in the event of a defence operation involving Chinese islands. It was not clear if the islands would include the artificial ones China has been building in the South China Sea.
Other “strategic equipment” that needed to be developed were a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense ground-based interceptor system, a high-speed air-launched cruise missile, a large transport plane, an airship that moves in the upper atmosphere, a next-generation fighter, unmanned attack aircraft, air force satellites and precision-guided bombs.
On the air defence identification zone that China set up over the East China Sea in 2013, the report proposed cooperation between the air force and navy to enhance air defence capability, stressing the need to boost joint training.
Li Jie, a Beijing-based naval expert and retired senior colonel, said the navy and air force previously had a limited scale of joint training. “In the future, joint exercises between services and arms [of the navy and air force] could be incrementally increased,” he said.
The air force had already been rapidly expanding its fighter program, and the majority of its combat aircraft were expected to be of a modern standard by the end of 2016, said Rukmani Gupta, senior armed forces analyst at IHS Janes.
But the air force still lagged in aerial refuelling, hindering its power projection capabilities, Gupta said.
“If China’s air force is able to undertake regular and continuous surveillance and attack operations up until the second island chain, this would represent the capability to undertake aerial out-of-area operations, necessitating a recalibration of military strategy by other actors in the region,” she said.
