China Wants Its Very Own NGAD 6th Generation Fighter

Summary: As the United States and China accelerate their efforts to develop sixth-generation warplanes, the dynamics of global military competition enter a new, more complex era. China's revelation of a mockup for its proposed sixth-generation fighter in 2021 and the U.S.'s ambitious timeline to deploy its Next-Generation Air Dominance platform by 2030 underscore a significant leap in aerial warfare technology. At a time when everyone is still racing to build their own fleet of fifth-generation warplanes, both the United States and the People's Republic of China are already racing toward building an even more complex sixth-generation warplane. Even if the American timeline for deploying the sixth-generation warplane is accurate, and the plane beats its Chinese sixth-generation rival to the unfriendly skies by five years, the fact remains that China can still make its plane in far greater numbers than can the Americans. What's more, China would benefit from being second because it could learn from whatever mistakes the Americans made in their rush to get the plane into service earlier than China. Whatever China cannot create on its own, it will happily steal from its rivals. The problem for the Americans is that, as the nation doing the real innovation into this program, it will invariably end up spending more time and money developing a system that will simply be easily stolen by their main strategic rival in China.