The very recent PLA sanctioned video of the 055 DDG Wuxi launching a YJ20 can't be a coincidence-I get the warning vibes of 1950's China-quite often too frustratingly restrained/cautious for us PLA wumao fanguys-where Mao warned the then superhyperpower USA not to invade Korea,threatening China and the power disparity between China/USA then to now is unimaginable-but world has the Orange Lunatic Trump on an empire's dying throes rampage-very dangerous times indeed.
H-20 bomber (with H-X, JH-XX)
- Thread starter Deino
- Start date
I think this is pretty likely as well. It is a tale as old as time in budgeting - the sheer cost of a the highest-cost programs leads to feet dragging and upgrading existing systems to make do, until a "back to the drawing board" moment is inevitable because the order of battle no longer looks like it did when the platform was first defined. At that point you have to define a new role based on the new order of battle.
The goal posts have actually likely shifted multiple times since the H-20 was first planned. The fact that programs stay alive as zombies instead of dying off is usually a combination of honor for the program's supporters, mixed with wanting to get funding for whatever region or company the program is supposed to be built by (plus personal benefit if you also own stock in the builder or get kickbacks). At that point a platform can be thought of as almost a brand, an abstraction whose champions are using it as a vessel for its name recognition as much as anything else to stay awash in funding.
Of course nobody here can say with certainty that this is the case here, but I suspect it has some role at possibly multiple times in the H-20 development cycle.
Nuclear deterrence option is aircraft in operational service, not aircraft taking its first flight.
H20 in this case, from IR perspective, is PR and only PR for Trump term. Provided it's the last one.
I’m not suggesting the H-20 is a obsoleted program looking for excuses to live. They still need a large modern manned stealth bomber.
I don't mean to suggest so either. Definitely not.
I just mean that there's a predictable phenomenon in budgeting and planning that flagship programs almost always suffer from mission creep until paralysis sets in. Eventually, if there is enough inertia/pressure, there is a reset (or as many resets as may be needed), until eventually the thing gets built.
Smaller projects with more limited scopes get built faster, but the bigger the program the more setbacks one can expect. Like you said, they first started work on the H-20 when 5th gen was the target. But now that milepost is history, so I beleive they may have rethought things.
Or not! It is also possible there will be an announcement just around the corner and a perfectly capable 5th gen stealth bomber will be shown. At this rate it's anybody's guess. We'll know when we know.
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My guess is that despite reworking the program we’re *probably* close? I guess we’ll see haha.
The reality is that China should've never tried to "reach the moon" with their first stealth bomber. They should've had a strike point where no new technologies are introduced despite changes, and this strike point should've been 5 years ago. This is like TVs, significant advances are made every year, but if you keep waiting, you're going to be stuck on that 10 year old LED forever.
Even if this "premature" bomber couldn't reach CONUS it can play a big role as a deterrent against Japan, US bases in the 1st, 2nd IC and carrier groups. Now, China's definitely behind where they want to be, considering how the world situation is turning out. So you have all these world class 055s, 003, J-20s, and....H-6K.
What would be a significantly greater failure would be to launch a new bomber that is not designed correctly to be able to survive in the modern EW-focused, drone-delegated, anti-stealth radar, and satellite constellation-monitored war environment. That is tens of billions or even hundreds of billions you will not get back, to produce a platform that cannot survive to complete its intended missions. Bombers are not a deterrence but merely a tool. A tool that needs to be able to do its job successfully in what is a rapidly changing war environment. Countless MIRVed ICBMs in silos that can survive a nuclear first strike, in more than sufficient numbers to guarantee mutually assured destruction, are a deterrence.
In which case China will keep refining and redefining this bomber for another 10 years.
We don't know if the issue is survivability, or range, or armament load. What we do know is the bomber fleet is the most outdated component of China's military if a war breaks out tomorrow in the Pacific. You have a 50 year old airframe design carrying YJ-21 against CVNs.
I would suspect it's all 3. In which case I would rather they keep working on it than launch and start producing something that is not going to be able to fulfill its expected missions.