The Japanese Zero was a nasty surprise 68 years ago. It would be unwise to assume the Chinese incapable of building a surprisingly good fighter, too.
Alot of the other things the Chinese build is EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD.
“But many remain unconvinced about China’s timelines for an advanced design.
“But we’ve yet to see a real organic design [emerge] from China. So far they’ve leveraged Russian or Israeli technology. They don’t have a lot of radar engineering capability, nor experience in integrating a complete structure.””
This is valiant effort to assuage one’s fears. They can build lots of good enough stuff. With their capture of strategic materials around the world they will also have the resources to do it with.
I don’t think we can pull off another Spartan like effort of the 300 with 187 dispersed F-22s. Even the Spartans were wiped out in their defensive action.
Don’t get me wrong, we are good and have really good stuff but you can’t turn a tidal wave when it comes ashore no matter how hard you try. Even though outnumbered by 8:1 the Marines and remnants of the army escaped from Chosin but all they could do was escape.
Even the Pakis will eventually outnumber our F-22s by 2:1 with aircraft that are probably good enough though we should overwhelm those numbers with other factors but what about the Chicoms? What if they field 2,000 of these good enough airplanes?