Key Points and Summary – China’s new sixth-generation J-36 fighter represents a game-changing strategic pivot designed to counter American airpower.
-While the U.S. focuses on producing small, technologically superior “boutique” fleets like the F-47, China is emphasizing both quality and quantity.
-The J-36 is a large, multi-role stealth aircraft designed for mass production on a scale the U.S. industrial base may be unable to match.
-This strategy aims to overwhelm the technologically superior but numerically inferior American forces in a potential future conflict, operationalizing the classic military principle that “superiority of numbers is the most common element in victory.”
The J-36 Fighter Threat to the F-47
America’s air supremacy model has been predicated since the onset of the Cold War on the idea that technical superiority could offset numerical inferiority. The J-36 reflects a different approach—one that emphasizes both quality and quantity.
More specifically, China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) is now developing an unequivocally sixth-generation fighter aircraft. Still, one designed for mass production on a scale that the USAF will simply not be able to match.
The operational goal: nearly equal the USAF’s sixth-generation aircraft in quality while dramatically overwhelming it in quantity. The hoped-for strategic consequence: the promise of victory over US forces not only in the aerial battlespace but in the associated maritime and land battlespaces as well.
Quantity and Quality
The J-36 is a game-changing reimagining of Chinese airpower. This aircraft is not intended to be an incrementally improved “fifth-plus” system, but a bona fide sixth-generation multirole combat air system designed to strike the optimal balance of stealth, range, network connectivity, and weapons capacity with scalability to high rates of production.
In shape, size, and spirit, it is almost the mirror image of the American F-47, the centerpiece of Washington’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program.
But there is one key difference: the J-36 is intended to be built to scale. In that sense, China’s sixth-generation multirole combat aircraft reflects both the need to achieve near-equivalence with its USAF counterparts in terms of technical capability while also operationalizing the Clausewitzian view that “superiority of numbers is the most common element in victory.”
Thus, while Washington has bet for decades on boutique systems – small fleets of peerless planes – the J-36 reflects China’s new bet that victory in the air depends on both quality and quantity in equal measure.
The “quality” half of the equation is on display in the J-36’s physical specifications. Coming in at over fifty metric tons maximum takeoff weight, it is on par with a light bomber in terms of physical size but a multirole fighter in terms of versatility. Its tailless double-delta wing suggests strong optimization for low observables and aerodynamic efficiency.
It will probably not be as maneuverable as the F-22, but that is more than compensated for by its range and payload, as well as its ability to act as a networked battlespace command and control node. The advanced turbofans (variants of the WS-10 or WS-15) will likely give it the ability to supercruise, another staple of sixth-generation systems.
A side-by-side cockpit arrangement, which sacrifices a bit of stealth for avionics and mission payload capacity, makes it clear that this is not a dogfighter. This is a heavy command-and-weapons system. It is a combat system designed to be both scalable and deadly.
The “quantity” half of the equation is derived from the lessons of the J-20. A decade ago, few would have believed Beijing could mass-produce a fifth-generation fighter. The J-20 proved skeptics wrong. Ten years and over two hundred aircraft later (with planned production exceeding eight hundred by 2030), China has demonstrated that it can reliably mass-produce stealth airframes, integrate advanced avionics, and churn out high-performance engines on an industrial scale.
The J-36 is being designed with that experience in mind. Integrating advanced propulsion, materials science, and networking into a scalable design will be orders of magnitude more difficult, but that is precisely the point: China has already proven that it can mass-produce high-end fighters. The path to a sixth-generation aircraft will be the same: one that combines competitive capabilities with large-volume manufacturability.
America’s Boutique Future
Washington’s NGAD future looks very different. The F-47, for example, is expected to be a highly agile, stealthy, sensor-stuffed air-superiority fighter, supported by a swarm of drones. The B-21 Raider, on the other hand, is a long-range stealth bomber optimized for global strike.
America has drawn a bright line between fighter and bomber and put its chips on two different systems. The J-36 obliterates that distinction, bringing both under a single multirole airframe.
The F-47 and B-21 may well outperform the J-36 in various respects, but they will be built in limited numbers at an astronomical cost. The F-47 could cost over $300 million per copy, making it the most expensive fighter in history.
Even the B-21, which is designed to be cheaper than the B-2, will be restricted in its production run. The J-36, by contrast, was apparently intended from the beginning as a system that the Chinese defense-industrial complex could produce in the hundreds. Breakthroughs in turbine technology, composite materials, and modular system design have given Beijing the wherewithal to plan for series production rather than boutique runs. America’s atrophied industrial base will not be able to compete on that model.
The Strategic Implications
The strategic implications of these facts are staggering. A force of J-36s numbering in the high hundreds could project power far into the Pacific, all the way to the second island chain. With less dependence on tankers, these aircraft could loiter in the battle area, striking at American airpower’s critical enablers: AWACS, tankers, and command-and-control nodes. They would be able to direct swarms of their own drones, stretching already-thin American defenses even further.
In a Taiwan contingency, massed Chinese J-36s could degrade incoming American reinforcements before they even arrive to fight. This is not the competition for a competitive edge. This is a concerted attempt to blunt American air supremacy in the Indo-Pacific theater.
The United States is not idly by while China gets into the air. The F-47 will likely be unmatched in terms of agility, AI-enabled warfare, and the integration of manned-unmanned teaming. The B-21 will revolutionize global strike.
Together, they will form the backbone of American airpower well into the 2030s.
But they will be built in small numbers. And that is the rub. The US has already struggled to churn out F-35s at Cold War levels of production. Building enough F-47s and B-21s to compete with a mass-produced Chinese sixth-generation air arm might simply be beyond Washington’s industrial capability.
The question is no longer whether US systems will be better (they will be), but whether the US can build them in numbers that can compete in a war of attrition.
What Happens Now?
The J-36 is not just another Chinese fighter. It is the material expression of a different vision of airpower: not a small fleet of overmatching airframes, but a system that combines “good enough” quality with crushing quantity.
Clausewitz knew that tactical superiority mattered, but also that by itself, it would never outmatch numbers at the decisive point. “Superiority of numbers,” he wrote, “is the most common element in victory.”
Beijing seems to have learned that lesson, too. Even if Chinese fighters are not individually superior to their American counterparts, massed together, J-36s could yield decisive force superiority.
The sad irony would be if Washington, once the master of industrial war, relearned Clausewitz’s lesson the hard way: that technological prowess without numerical heft is a recipe not for air supremacy, but for strategic defeat.
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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