J-31 - An F-35 with Chinese Characteristics?
There is little doubt that China is seeking to to catch up with and surpass the United States, and employs a pervasive espionage effort to acquire sensitive American technical data. But it is important to avoid making things a bit clearer than the truth. Recently Nick Schifrin reported on PBS "... the US says the most expensive weapons system ever, the American F-35, looks just like the Chinese J-31 because Chinese hackers stole the designs." The Chinese J-31 stealth fighter is a case in point. While the Chinese have acquired some technical data on the similar F-35 stealth fighter, it stretches the truth beyond the breaking point to claim that the "J-31 is an F-35 with Chinese characteristics".
The F-35 is a single-seat, single-engine fighter aircraft that was developed primarily by Lockheed Martin to be used by the U.S. armed forces, as well as allied countries. The plane is optimized for use as a multirole fighter, with the ability to perform air-to-air; air-to-ground; and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Program development officially launched in 2001, and deliveries began in 2011. The program’s cost to complete is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars.
Cyber espionage is common, and there are those who believe China was able to get plans of the F-35 joint strike fighter, which they incorporated into its J-20 stealth fighter. China was suspected of being behind a reported 2009 cyber intrusion that resulted in the theft of a very large amount of design and electronics data on the F-35. Pentagon and Lockheed Martin officials said no classified information was stolen. In 2012, it emerged that China had hacked UK defense firm BAE Systems to steal data about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).
Larry M. Wortzel testified before the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on 09 July 2013 that "A number of U.S. press reports indicate that since as early as 2007 Chinese cyber operators have repeatedly infiltrated the networks of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s major contractors – Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and BAE Systems – and stolen aspects of its design plans." [U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 2012 Annual Report to Congress (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, November 2012), p. 155.]
As noted by Department of Defense undersecretary Frank Kendall on 19 June 2013, these breaches “reduce the costs and lead time of our adversaries to doing their own designs, so it gives away a substantial advantage.. It’s the amount of time and effort they’re going to have to put into getting their next design and staying with us”.
Yu Long, 38, a citizen of China and lawful permanent resident of the US, pleaded guilty December 19, 2016 in New Haven federal court in Connecticut, to charges related to his theft of numerous sensitive military program documents from United Technologies and transporting them to China. from approximately May 2008 to May 2014, Long worked as a Senior Engineer/Scientist at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) in Connecticut. Long’s employment at UTRC included work on F119 and F135 engines. The F119 engine is employed by the U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft, and the F135 engine is employed by the U.S. Air Force F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft.
The Chinese may be able to steal the plans related to the F-35, but it is quite another thing for them to find the materials and develop the manufacturing processes to build one. The is particularly the case with engines, an area of notorious Chinese weakness. One sign of Chinese backwardness on this front was their decision to buy a number of fighters from Russia, to cannibalize for their engines [Russian engines are not held in very high esteem in the West].
It has been verified that malicious cyber activities were carried out by foreign agents, with the Chinese national Su Bin pleading guilty in 2016 to stealing data related to the F-35 seeking financial gain by selling the illegally-acquired data. Su Bin, also known as Stephen Su and Stephen Subin, 50, a citizen and resident of the People’s Republic of China, pleaded guilty 23 March 2016 to participating in a years-long conspiracy to hack into the computer networks of major US defense contractors, steal sensitive military and export-controlled data and send the stolen data to China. Su admitted to conspiring with two persons in China from October 2008 to March 2014 to gain unauthorized access to protected computer networks in the United States, including computers belonging to the Boeing Company in Orange County, California, to obtain sensitive military information and to export that information illegally from the United States to China.
Some observers, noting some resemblance between China’s newest stealth fighter, the J-31, and the F-35, suggested the J-31 was developed using F-35 design plans. In September 2012 Trefor Moss [who was Asia-Pacific Editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly until 2009] wrote of the J-31, "It looks like an F-22 from some angles, and an F-35 from others; but there seemed to be no mistaking that this was essentially an American stealth fighter with Chinese paintwork.... the F-35 will have to compete for export sales with a Chinese copy of itself. "
This appeared to some to have been the case, as observers have noted that the J-31, a Chinese stealth fighter introduced in 2014, appears to have been modeled on the F-35. If the Chinese did use designs stolen from U.S. contractors, it could have allowed them to cut down significantly on the $350 billion spent by the United States through FY2017 on development and production for the F-35.
Richard Ellings, Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, testified October 10, 2017 before the U.S. International Trade Commission "... the record of Chinese theft of intellectual property in the aerospace industry in this country is extraordinary, whether it was essentially downloading the F-35 and countless other systems."
US National Security Advisor John Bolton accused China of “stealing” plans for the F-35 fighter, claiming the newest Chinese aircraft looks exactly the same. “The fifth-generation Chinese fighter aircraft looks a lot like the F-35, that's because it is the F-35, they just stole it,” Bolton said during a press conference in Kiev on 28 August 2019. Bolton went on to link the issue to the ongoing trade war between China and the United States, repeating long-running claims by President Donald Trump and previous US administrations that the Chinese are stealing American intellectual property over the past decades. Bolton did not specify which Chinese aircraft he had in mind – but it would take a lot of squinting to confuse the J-20 with the F-35.
The foreign policy publication The National Interest published a piece October 19, 2019 forwarding the idea once more, reviving a Task & Purpose article from August 2018 and calling it “an outrage,” stating unequivocally the “key point” was that “Beijing has long stolen foreign technology and used it to reverse-engineer its own weapons.” Asia Times then presented Bolton’s comments, made at a press conference in Kiev, alongside the Task & Purpose observations, as a “report,” endowing them with a further air of legitimacy. By the time this story got to Asia Times, though, the similarities became “striking,” and the stealthy curves don’t just resemble, they “mimic” the F-35.
Stealth requires certain airframe shapes, and requires designs of somewhat similar configuration, just as commercial passenger aircraft are increasingly difficult to tell apart. Airframes have settled into uniform features – a cockpit and jet intakes in front, wings on the side, and engines in the rear. Modern aircraft are mainly about internal systems. Basing charges of industrial espionage on looks alone is a stretch - the laws of physics and aeronautical engineering are universal, and not particular to one country. The mockup of the British BAE Systems Tempest 6th-gen fighter seen at the Farnborough Airshow back in 2018 looked similar to the F-35. The mock-up of the Tempest fighter jet is. The New Generation Fighter project, unveiled by France and Germany in June 2019, has similar features as well. Turkey has its TAI TF-X (Turkish Fighter – Experimental) project.
But the J-31 and the F-35 are no more than superficially similar. By one estimate, the Chinese fighter has a maximum take off weight of 25 tons and a combat range of 1,200km, while the American fighter’s take-off weight is between 27 and 32 tons, and it has a range of up to 2,200km [your mileage may vary - apples to apples performance comparisons are notoriously hard to come by - but these numbers are in the right ball park]. A few moments contmplating a side-by-side comparison of the two aircraft will reveal numerous differences in the configuration and placement of wings and tail elements. These are different airplanes.
Most notably, the J-31 has two engines instead of one - a fundamental difference that should be obvious to even a neophyte. This difference becomes even more apparent when the aircraft are viewed from below. The J-31 has what amounts to a single weapons bay, with air flowing from the intakes along the periphery of the fuselage to the twin engines. The F-35 has two weapons bays, on either side of the single central duct leading from the air intakes in front to the single engine in the rear. One variant of the F-35, the Marine Corps F-35B, is specially configured for vertical takeoff and landing, but there is no indication of a Chinese counterpart to this capability.
About the only thing the two have in common is that the machines are modern stealth fighter jets.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
