This aerial activity, which now occurs on a near-daily basis, is reported by the Taiwan Defense Ministry. The Taiwan ADIZ Violations Database, compiled by independent defense analyst Benjamin Lewis, illustrates a marked escalation in Chinese military operations near Taiwan in recent years.
They have over 3500 aircraft, although a large percentage of them are outdated and almost all of the types used, except for a relatively small number of Russian imports, are untested in combat. Their operational history is universally one of accidents and/or dangerous provocations. Expect even the latest types, which appear modern on paper, to lag at least a generation or more behind any current Western designs in actual capabilities.
It also doesn’t help that there is no institutional knowledge due to a complete lack of combat experience anywhere in the PLAAF, that Chinese military pilots are poorly trained and that China appears to have no ability to deal with American countermeasures and tactics, as evidenced for example by their chaotic and unsuccessful attempt at intercepting Nancy Pelosi’s flight to Taiwan.
It’s weird, I’m seeing very different numbers between Wikipedia pages.
This one says the PLAAF has 565 J-10s for example. This one on the other hand says it has 1000 of them.
They even quote the same book and everything. How do I tell the Wikipedia people about this? I don’t know if I should make an edit either way.
I went through the trouble of tracking the publication down:
https://i.imgur.com/xvTBSm3.png
In more readable form:
According to the source used by both lists, the numbers in the second list are complete nonsense. It’s not just limited to this plane and its variants though. J-11 numbers are also wrong, even though they also cite this source. I corrected these two and might go over the rest of the list later.
You are awesome.