CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VII (1, 2) Contemporary-Eurasia-3new

CONTEMPORARY EURASIA American Armed Forces that used to exist after the Cold War. On the other hand, the American military culture has a quite ﬂ exible tradition to rapidly assess their potential opponents’ capabilities, sometimes even overestimate them, to use them for developing their own projects thus contributing to the Armed Forces improvement. And here it is worth an- alyzing everything in terms of use of concrete available forces. It is clear that this hypothetical collision will be close to China’s coast involving also allies from both sides. And surely the main forces at play would be Navy and Air Force; involvement of other services of Armed forces can be limited, otherwise it might turn into a world war with the use of nucle- ar weapons, which is unlikely. The US Air Forces currently have about 600 two-engined ﬁ ghters of the fourth and ﬁ fth generation “F-15” and “F-22”. Of course, not all of them are combat-eﬀ ective at a time, the major part might be decommis- sioned by 2025, but the bulk of them will still have combat eﬃ ciency and after the speciﬁ ed time they will be replaced with more powerful aircraft. Within a short period of time they can be deployed to the Paciﬁ c zone. The radius of their ﬂ ight without extra tanks makes more than 600 miles. They can cover ranges of up to 800 miles with about 4-5 tons of pay- load and if ﬁ tted with additional fuel tanks. This ﬁ gure of aircraft should be added by 200 similar ﬁ ghters just to count for Japan’s and South Ko- rea’s involvement, not to mention Australia. If we add aircraft from Aus- tralian bases, the number will increase, amounting to approximately 900 platforms. Here we don’t count American heavy bombers, as well as 500 similar to “F-18E / F” Navy ﬁ ghters, about 200-300 of which can be con- centrated in this region. China, purely in quantitative terms can contrast with about 400 two-engined ﬁ ghters. Only the ratio of these makes 2-2.5 / 1. But that is not the point. Yes, Chinese ﬁ ghters have the same ﬂ ight range, as some American experts note. They are mostly Russian “SU-27” family’s old and new ﬁ ghter aircraft or their Chinese modiﬁ cation “J-11”. Although having the same ﬂ ight range as American ﬁ ghters they, still yield the top place to American platforms by some capabilities. First, these air- craft cannot carry as much payload; they can take on board amount of armament equal to American ﬁ ghters only in “air-to-air” mode, but as a multipurpose aircraft they lag behind on their armament. They have poor aiming equipment and limited range in air ﬁ ghts, relating to both radars and missiles. In Chinese Air Force particularly weak are refueling and airborne control systems, without which it is impossible to carry out a modern air battle. Chinese ﬁ ghters cannot carry operational range “air-to- surface” missiles, such as the “AGM-158 JASSM”, “AGM-154A JSOW” 10

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