F-35 Fighter vs. J-20 Mighty Dragon: We Might Not Like the Answer in a War

Key Points and Summary – A comparison between the American F-35 and China’s J-20 reveals the stealth fighter gap has narrowed significantly. The F-35 excels as a multirole “flying sensor node,” while the J-20 is a long-range air superiority fighter optimized for China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy.

-While the F-35 has an edge in overall stealth, the J-20 now boasts superior speed with supercruise, longer range, and is armed with very long-range missiles.

-In a potential conflict over Taiwan, embedded within China’s defense network, the J-20 is now the F-35’s operational equal, if not superior.

F-35 Stealth Fighter vs. China’s J-20: Questions and Answers 

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) has been the gold standard of fifth-generation fighters for years now. Stealthy, sensor-fused, networked, and battle-tested, with more than 2,000 projected to be in service by the mid-2030s, the F-35 has been a tangible representation of the West’s conceptualization of air dominance for the better part of the past decade.

In fact, that conceptualization has been so dominant that the very question of “what comes next?” has all but ossified in Washington, across the Western defense-industrial complex, and in much of the broader world of military analysis.

Save for the still-nascent F-47 program and the possibility of a sixth-generation leap in fighter design, there has been little that has felt truly disruptive of faith in the future of the F-35. Not the Su-57, long mired in problems and plagued by seeming irrelevance, and not China’s early J-20 prototypes, either.

The J-20 Mighty Dragon Fighter Reworked

Until now. Quietly but deliberately, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) has reworked the J-20 from a punchline into a platform that demands attention. It may not be equal to the F-35 across the board. Still, it is superior in certain key areas, and—crucially—it’s embedded in a broader Chinese strategy that is less about meeting the West system for system, aircraft for aircraft, and more about upending the very basis for what we consider “better” even to mean. The point isn’t that the J-20 is categorically superior. It isn’t. The fact is that it no longer needs to be. Backed by Chinese strategic posture and industrial logic, the J-20 has matured into a credible challenge to long-held Western assumptions about air dominance. It is a challenge no longer theoretical, but here.

The first, and most obvious thing to consider about both these fighters is that they are both fifth-generation aircraft. This is not mere marketing. Both the J-20 and F-35 embody core fifth-generation elements, including low observable stealth, sensor fusion, integrated avionics, and a high level of networked, multidomain interoperability. But there are apparent differences in the way each expresses that potential. The F-35 has been optimized for multirole flexibility and maximum situational awareness, made to function as a flying sensor node at the heart of the U.S. military’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) network. The J-20, by contrast, is a longer-range air superiority platform with higher speed and payload, optimized for regional anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) dominance in East Asia. Same generation. Different utility.

Stealth Characteristics

On stealth, for instance, the F-35 retains the advantage, especially in frontal radar cross-section (RCS) signature. The JSF’s internal weapons bays are tighter; its shaping is more ruthlessly optimized for radar-absorbing geometry; and its coatings are more mature and combat-tested.

Two U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II aircraft, with the F-35 Demonstration Team, approach a U.S. Air Force KC-135 for in-flight refueling en route to their next airshow at Pensacola, Florida, on 28 October, 2024. The F-35 Demo Team travels to various bases to showcase the capabilities of the most advanced 5th generation fighter aircraft. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Nicholas Rupiper)

But the gap has narrowed—significantly, in some areas—with the post-2023 Chinese J-20s now fielding domestically manufactured WS-15 engines. The WS-15, an area of sustained weakness in the J-20, now offers a practical supercruise ability, an edge the F-35A technically lacks. And the twin-engine J-20 has a more extended operational reach in the vast Pacific compared to the F-35A, whose solo engine limits sustainability on long-range patrols. That reach is a matter of survival. Stealth is no good if you can’t get to the fight (or get out).

The avionics arms race is closer than most Western observers are willing to acknowledge as well. The F-35’s Distributed Aperture System (DAS), Electro-Optical Targeting System (EOTS), and underlying sensor fusion software remain the gold standard. But the J-20 has made serious gains in this area as well, reportedly integrating a powerful AESA radar, a wide-angle holographic HUD, and an increasingly capable datalink with other PLAAF platforms.

More significant is China’s development of artificial intelligence and pilot decision-support systems. Beijing is quietly, rapidly embedding AI into its cockpit environment in ways that suggest a recognition of what fifth-gen air warfare will look like—less raw data, and more bandwidth to sort through that data in real time. Western pilots will maintain an edge here for some time, but the fighter cockpit is quickly becoming a thinking machine’s domain, not just a human one.

Weapons are one area in which the F-35, with its established loadout and thousands of combat hours in flight, clearly retains the advantage—AMRAAMs and JDAMs in the internal bays, with optional external pylons for less stealth-sensitive, kinetic missions.

The J-20’s weapons suite is less well known, but it too can carry the long-range PL-15 missile in its internal bays. A missile with a reportedly range of over 200 km, potentially incorporating an AESA radar seeker that could outperform even the AMRAAM. Distance is no small thing in the Indo-Pacific, and the J-20’s future PL-21 missile, if it is real and works, could be even more game-changing than the PL-15. The jury is still out on the maturity of those systems, but the jury is also on the clock. The PLAAF is all-in on long-range first shots, and the J-20 is being built to make those shots count.

The F-35’s real advantage, of course, has never been any one-on-one matchup. Its actual utility is as part of a larger battle network. The fighter is as much quarterback as dogfighter, gathering, fusing, and disseminating multidomain information in real time. But this advantage is not what it once was. The PLAAF has been working hard on its kill-web approach, linking J-20s to KJ-500 AWACS aircraft, ground-based long-range radars, and new satellite surveillance in a manner that, in a Taiwan contingency or South China Sea standoff, would not only envelop the J-20 but other Chinese PLAAF platforms as well. J-20s would not be flying alone, but as part of a highly integrated, data-dense web of AI and human-directed sensors and shooters. Designed to saturate, blind, and deny access to U.S. and allied forces.

The J-20 doesn’t have to be better than the F-35 on paper. It just has to be good enough to hold the F-35 down while the rest of China’s A2/AD umbrella comes to bear.

Production scale, maintenance, logistics, pilot training, export potential, and many other vectors still favor the F-35, though, as well they should with so many more years in service. The JSF is flying with 17+ nations, has a known maintenance pipeline (expensive as that may be), and has logged thousands of combat hours in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The J-20 is not battle-tested. Its combat performance parameters remain unverified. And its logistical support and maintenance, while improving, is still essentially regional.

But then, Beijing doesn’t need the J-20 to be exported or combat hardened. It needs the J-20 to project air dominance in the Taiwan Strait, the East China Sea, and the First Island Chain. In that narrow but geopolitically crucial sense, the J-20 has become more than a technological, industrial bandwagon. It is a deterrent. And with that focus, the J-20 is not just competitive with the F-35, but a genuine potential match in its region.

The contest, in other words, between the F-35 and J-20 is not over which is the better fifth-generation fighter jet. It’s a question of how the character and logic of airpower is being (re)conceptualized and operationalized in a multipolar age.

The F-35 is a triumph of Western systems thinking and systems integration. The J-20 is a blunt statement of Chinese techno-strategic intent. One is a scalpel, the other, a spear. And while each may be optimized for different theaters, under various theories of victory, there is no doubt that both are dangerous.

Both are the leading edge of larger, brighter, and more lethal military ecosystems.

F-35 vs. J-20: Which Stealth Fighter Wins? 

So, which is better: the F-35 or the J-20? Today? On August 4, 2025? The honest answer is that if you are flying solo or in a vacuum, the F-35 is superior. If you are flying in a U.S.-led coalition, in Europe or the Middle East, it is not even a question – of course it’s the F-35.

But if you are thinking of what will happen the day after the balloon goes up over Taipei, and the ensuing battle is fought under the cover and among the vast, overlapping sensor arrays and long-range missile fields that characterize China’s A2/AD umbrella, then the J-20 is the better platform.

Air superiority is no longer just a matter of the capabilities of individual aircraft. It’s a question of posture, doctrine, and overall warfighting infrastructure. And in that domain, the contest is no longer so lopsided. The West can no longer take comfort in its F-35 fleet.

The J-20 has evolved into its operational equal—if not its superior.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for National Security Journal.

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