China’s mystery warplanes: head fake or another Sputnik moment?
Symbolic showing of apparent sixth-generation fighters no doubt aimed to send a message to the US – but what exactly?
Headin’ into twilight
Spreadin’ out her wings tonight
She got you jumpin’ off the deck
And shovin’ into overdrive
Highway to the danger zone
I’ll take you right into the danger zone
– Kenny Loggins
In a likely apocryphal scene in the 2000 historical thriller “Thirteen Days” on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara character berated a US admiral conducting the naval blockade from a Pentagon war room, saying:
Note from Taiwan: The Players on the Eve of Destruction
Read MoreYou don’t understand a thing, do you admiral? This is not a blockade! This is language – a new vocabulary the likes of which the world has never seen. This is President John Kennedy communicating with Secretary Nikita Khrushchev!
On December 26, on Mao Zedong’s 131st birthday, China, with no fanfare, publicly flew two apparently 6th-generation warplanes (fighters, bombers, both? Who knows?). It also flew a large AWAC plane and, with much fanfare, launched its new Type 076 amphibious assault ship. As an anti-climactic stocking stuffer, the PLA also flew a strange-looking large reconnaissance drone for all to see.
Expectedly, social media went wild. PLA fanboys deliriously trolled US military fanboys. US military fanboys put up a brave face with the usual pabulum of stolen technology and, “we already secretly flew the NGAD.” Indian military Twitter ran the gamut from delusion to despair. It was much fun for all involved.
But social media fanboys were not the intended audience. These were neither weapons tests nor military parades. Like the US naval blockade of Cuba in 1962, this is a language with a long-forgotten vocabulary that is quickly being relearned. This is Secretary Xi Jinping communicating with President-elect Donald Trump with deadly seriousness.
What does this mean? What is being communicated? How does the US respond, if at all?
In offices throughout the Pentagon and Langley, pizza boxes are stacking up late into the night as analysts pour over every last pixel of video posted on social media, strategists theorize on what message is being delivered and engineers seconded from Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman go through their PowerPoint slides deciphering just what these planes may be capable of and when.
We live in exciting times, and though all of this could easily get us all killed, the geopolitical psychodramas will at least not be boring.
As in most things of this nature, none of us plebes know anything and are not the interlocutors anyway. But nothing prevents us from joining in on the fun with idle speculation, armchair expertise, deranged conspiracy theories, and perhaps even sober analysis.
What does Han Feizi think is happening? There are many possibilities, none of them mutually exclusive. The affairs of and between states can get just as if not more convoluted, multi-dimensional, and intrigue-laden as junior high school cafeteria seating arrangements.
To simplify things, let us ask a question of both China and the US. Are they smart or stupid? Two nations and two possible answers for each give us a 2×2 grid of four possible scenarios. China could be smart or stupid, sending a message to a US which is either smart or stupid.
Let us go through the possible permutations in detail:
China is smart and the US is smart
If China is smart and the US is smart, then China would know not to try to pull a fast one on its intelligent opponent. China would not fly mock-up planes to bamboozle the United States whose analysts and intelligence services would surely be able to determine how genuine China’s 6th gen planes are from the public flights.
A smart China would also not be showcasing its 6th generation planes (on Mao’s birthday, no less) if it did not also have good reason to believe that America’s engineering capacity was in a degraded state with NGAD (the US 6th gen fighter program) in serious development hell.
If a smart China believed the US could quickly reinvigorate its engineering and industrial capacity with “Sputnik moment” policies, China would not heedlessly provoke its opponent with advanced weapons demonstrations.
The intelligent American response desired by an intelligent China is to recognize that its industrial and engineering capacity is hopelessly outmatched in the medium term and to rebuild that capacity will require a period of retrenchment, détente and isolation.
China is smart and the US is stupid
If China is smart and the US is stupid, then China’s weapons demonstrations are designed to flatfoot America and force a fumble. A smart China would know that a stupid US would have little intelligence on the progress of its weapons program and would be flummoxed by the demonstrations.
In this scenario, China could very well be pulling a fast one on the US by flying embryonic technology demonstrators decades from deployment. A smart China in this scenario would know that the American military-industrial complex has been hopelessly degraded by decades of corruption and substandard education of America’s youth.
The stupid American response desired by an intelligent China would be to double down on defense spending, wasting national resources in a vain attempt to tread water.
A nation’s defense industrial complex is a parasite that sits atop its commercial industrial complex. Total defense spending in the US is ~25% of total industrial output. In China, it is ~4%. Allocating even more resources to the military-industrial complex now only robs from commercial industry which, at some point, results in a death spiral. Ronald Reagan forced a fumble of this sort on the Soviet Union.
China is stupid and the US is smart
If China is stupid and the US is smart, then China’s weapons demonstrations are at best a chest-thumping exercise, showcasing technology that the US has long possessed, all under the watchful eye of the CIA and NSA.
American analysts and strategists would chuckle and brief President-elect Trump that he has nothing to worry about. These demonstrations only strengthen America’s negotiating position as the opponent has chosen to reveal a few lousy cards that they hold in a poor hand.
The smart American response to flummox a stupid China would be to dial up US security pressure in the Asian theater – casually deploying 6th-gen fighters and other weapons systems – and watch China’s inability to respond.
China is stupid and the US is stupid
If China is stupid and the US is also stupid, then we are in for much fun and games. China’s cobbled-together demonstration of embryonic technology would surely be met by a US response – some premature test flight of a cocked-up prototype.
The two sides will square off against each other like drunken meatheads before a bar fight, flashing biceps, knives and brass knuckles, both dismissing the capabilities and intentions of the other.
Except, of course, we are not exactly dealing with biceps, knives and brass knuckles. Two stupid nuclear-armed superpowers with erroneous understandings of each other’s intentions and capabilities are the last standoff that will occur in human history. But at least we’ll get to see lots of cool weapons being showcased.
So what is the most likely scenario? As much fun as both sides being stupid would be, Han Feizi dismisses that possibility because China has managed to grow its economy over 45-fold in real terms since the last time it was at war (the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979). Navigating that kind of tumultuous growth without fighting wars is unheard of in human history. China is clearly not run by imbeciles.
Five days before Hamas attacked Israel, Foreign Affairs published an article by Jake Sullivan saying that “the [Middle East] region is quieter today than it has been in decades.” This is the same Jake Sullivan presiding over the war in Ukraine. Given his questionable senile state, it would be unfair to pin the blame on President Joe Biden. Of course, blaming it all on Jake Sullivan is also unfair. Anthony Blinken and many others were just as stupid.
And, of course, blaming the imbeciles of the Biden administration is also unfair. The US has been at war for over 95% of its history and has only suffered significant setbacks in the past 50-60 years as global empire proved to be too much of a stretch. Old habits die hard and the knee-jerk habits of empire may be unavoidable stupidity given a couple of centuries of successful expansion.
While the likelihood of the US being stupid is high, China would probably prefer a smart America. Forcing a stupid US into a Soviet-style downward spiral is a risky proposition in the nuclear age. Who knows how dying empires might lash out? The world got lucky when the Soviet Union, in its death throes, either refrained from or did not have the energy to lash out.
What a smart China should want is a smart US that recognizes that it cannot compete militarily in Asia and that its industries and institutions have become too degraded and ossified to shoulder the burdens of empire. Nestled in North America, the US is the world’s most secure nation, perfectly situated to circle wagons, lick wounds, rebuild and bide time.
The discussion is already underway. The H1B controversy is, at its root, a debate over whether the US wants to compete with China and how to do it if so. This is a worthy debate to have if done in good faith. Unfortunately, America’s polarization and social media do not make it easy. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are just another flavor of globalists despised by the Heritage MAGA crowd.
Elon Musk has publicly told opponents of H1B to “F—K YOURSELF in the face” and that he will “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” His capitalizations. So far, no congressman nor senator has yet come out to oppose H1B, despite rumblings from the MAGA crowd, which we attribute to a not-so-veiled threat of being primaried given Elon’s infinite war chest.
While the US sorts through what MAGA represents and what kind of society it wants to be, China has already decided. Fourteen years ago, the introduction of the J-20, China’s 5th generation fighter (4th generation in PLA nomenclature), marked a seminal moment in China’s Industrial Party consciousness.
Upon seeing the J-20, Wang Xiaodong, a leading Industrial Party intellectual, dismissed the Sentimental Party and their precious left/right obsession as hopelessly ineffectual, writing:
When I saw the fourth-generation fighter take flight, I did not break down and sob as some young people did, but a tear did come to my eye. That is emotion, but it is the emotion of the Industrial Party.
A young person summed it up quite well:
The rightists would say that a fourth-generation fighter could not be developed without constitutionalism. The leftists would say it could not be developed without the four freedoms (the free _expression_ and airing of views, mass debate, and big-character posters) [enjoyed during the Cultural Revolution but removed from the country’s Constitution after Deng Xiaoping came to power]. But we have a fourth-generation fighter! How can they explain that?
Fourteen years later, China’s Industrial Party stands vindicated as the flight of two 6thgeneration planes renders inconsequential the handwringing angst of the Sentimental Party. Wang Xiaodong’s dismissal of the Sentimental Party 14 years ago has proven prescient:
This is the difference between the Industrial Party and the Sentimental Party. Sentimental Party does not talk about facts but only what they feel. China has so many excellent engineers and scientists, toiling unknown to the public, and making great contributions to the nation and humanity. Meanwhile, the intellectuals who skim along the surface of things have a limited perspective on these contributions, sometimes even denying them. The useless Sentimental Party looks down on other people. We need to figure out why.
While the right and left wings of the Sentimental Party bloviate, China’s industrialization has stealthily reached a higher level and is wider in scope than they know. Will any other country in the world be able to break our stride? I believe they cannot stand in our way. Some people may believe it is possible, but I do not see it. Perhaps it might have been possible ten years ago for some countries to unite to contain China, but that is now impossible, even with all their forces combined.