What Satellite Imagery Can Tell Us About China’s Military Build Up
February 25, 2026
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This transcript was generated with the assistance of AI. Please report inconsistencies to comms@afa.org.
J. Michael Dahm:
So every good day starts with an intel brief, at least that’s what I told myself for my entire Navy career. So we’ll get started. What you’re looking at is a satellite image, a DCAT classified U. S. spy satellite image of the Chengdu Aircraft Corporation plant from 1982, which I expect is before most of you were born. In 1982 The plant was building, well they were just starting production of the third generation, full-rate production of the third generation J7 fighter. It’s a Chinese copy of a Soviet MiG-21. Meanwhile, in 1982, for those of you who either were not born or do not remember, The U. S. was in about its third year of full-rate production of the fourth generation F-16, and we were still secretly flying the F-117 Stealth Fighter, which wouldn’t be released until a year later. Over about 30 years, this Chinese plant produced about 2,000 third-generation J7s for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force and foreign customers. This is a more recent commercial satellite image of the Chengdu plant. Now the plant is almost exclusively dedicated to the production of China’s fifth generation fighter, the J-20. Word is that the Chengdu plant is running five J-20 production lines, cranking out over 100 of the air superiority fighters each year. I’ll talk about that a little bit more at the end of this presentation. The 1982 image that we were just looking at was taken by a Keyhole 9 satellite, codenamed Hexagon. The satellite, produced by the nice people at Lockheed Martin, was the size of one of those articulated two-segment city buses, 60 feet long, 10 feet wide, weighing 15 tons. The hexagon satellites may well have been the most complicated mechanical platforms we’ve ever put into space. In the early 1990s, this satellite couldn’t downlink digital images. Instead, it took pictures on wet film After days or weeks of imaging, the film was rolled up into film recovery capsules and then ejected back to Earth like a like an escape pod. As the pods parachuted in over the ocean, a specially equipped C-130 would snag the parachute with the trapeze, reel in the capsule, and bring the film in to be developed with a little help from the nice people at Eastman Kodak. Overhead, there are still highly classified imaging satellites that are operated by a handful of governments. But now constellations of hundreds of commercial satellites have joined the mix. Satellites like Vantor’s Worldview Legion satellite is a fraction of the size of the Keyhole 9, offering extremely high-resolution color as well as multi-spectral and near-infrared images that can be downloaded soon after they’re taken. Planet Lab Sky Sat satellites offer commercial satellite imagery, similar capabilities rather, but they’re only about the size of a mini fridge. The number of companies offering commercial satellite imagery is growing every year. Some are offering synthetic aperture radar imagery or hyperspectral imagery. More than their impressive imaging capabilities, however, are their numbers. There are a lot of them on orbit, which means greater revisit rates against targets around the world, sometimes daily, sometimes several times a day I’m highlighting Planet and Vantor here because they were kind enough to work with me on this project, and they have some truly outstanding images for us to look at today.
So, let’s get into it. Answer the question: what can commercial satellite imagery tell us about China’s military buildup? I think you’re gonna find it’s more than you think. And at least some of you are going to say, whoa, wait, can he do that? But I can assure you, no classified sources or methods were harmed in the making of this presentation. We’re going to start out in far western China, a place called Xinjiang. At AFA’s Mitchell Institute, we’re developing a China Air Power website, which I’ll talk about in a bit. But last fall, when I was pouring over commercial satellite imagery, I was trying to confirm open-source intelligence on China’s air order of battle. In this case, I’m looking at Hotan Air Base. reportedly home to the PLA Air Force’s 99th Air Brigade of 24J-16 fighters. So, here’s a picture of HOTAN on 30 October. I found my brigade of J16s, but I also found some things I wasn’t expecting. The J16s are lined up in the lower right corner. But there are also four H-6 bombers, 12 J-20 fighters in the middle of the screen, four Y-20 transports or tankers, and it looks like about eight special mission aircraft, including a few KJ-500 early warning and control aircraft. So, what’s going on in China at the end of October? There was nothing in the news about tensions on the China-India border or something that would justify a buildup in western China. When I started looking at activity at other airfields in the Western Theater Command, it became pretty obvious that I had found a major PLA Air Force exercise involving eight air bases. It was most likely the PLA Air Force’s annual red sword exercise, sort of like a U. S. Air Force red flag spread out over five weeks. I’d look at places like Corla Air Base, home of the PLA Air Force’s 111th Air Brigade of J-20 fighters. Here there were detachments of J-16 and J-10 fighters, 10 H-6 bombers, a couple of transports or tankers, and another KJ-500. Now there aren’t any J twenties in the image since they’re probably inside one of the thirty-six hangars at the airbase. And we don’t have time to walk through all of the air bases, but I was fortunate that there was good commercial satellite imagery of all eight airbases within a about a 24-hour period. Now a few of those aircraft could have moved around between imaging windows, but just to give you a sense of scale, I call I counted almost 200 aircraft on the ramp at the eight air bases Maybe not all of those aircraft were involved in the exercise, but keep in mind, just like the J-20s at CORLA, some of the aircraft at those airbases are likely in hangars or in shelters. So, the total exercise count could be north of 200, maybe as many as 250. Maybe more impressive. Maybe more impressive is that the exercise area in Western China appeared to span an area of over 1200 nautical miles.
This is the largest Red Sword exercise we’ve observed over the past several years through open-source intelligence. The media makes a big deal about the flashy one or two-day exercises the PLA conducts on the Taiwan Strait, mostly because that’s what the PLA wants you to focus on. But that’s just a busy day for the PLA. You can fly a two-day exercise and never have to turn a wrench on a single jet. The way the PLA Air Force is preparing for large-scale combat operations are exercises like this That involved hundreds of aircraft operating over several weeks. By mid-November, most of the aircraft that had deployed to the eight airfields appeared to retrograde to Dingxin Air Base in the Gobi Desert. Dingxin has been called the Chinese version of Nellis Air Force Base. In Dingxin we saw over 100 aircraft on the ramp, not counting those that might have been tucked away in hangars. Those aircraft operated out of the desert air base for a little over two weeks. Saying this was a red sword exercise is an assessment. We can’t tell the name of the exercise just by looking at imagery. But when 200 aircraft walk into a bar in western China, there are only a couple of ways that that joke ends, and Red Sword is at the top of the list. We’re limited in what we can know about the specific activities these aircraft might have engaged in while they were exercising in western China. But one of the most interesting things to look at was the mix of aircraft at each airfield. So here we’re looking at Golmud Air Base just north of the Tibetan Plateau. Golmud is home to a big wing special mission aircraft brigade. So, we’ll call this slide how to train your dragon. What we saw on the ramp at Golmud during the exercise was 12J20 Mighty Dragon, 8J10 Vigorous Dragon. an 8J16 hidden dragon. Interestingly, there was also a high-altitude long endurance UAV that you see getting ready to take off, the WZ7 Soaring Dragon. Now, keep in mind a typical fighter brigade in the PLA Air Force is 24 to 36 aircraft. So, what do we think is going on here with these small detachments? I’d say best case scenario, these aircraft might be conducting dissimilar air combat training. Fighters fighting fighters, fighting, fighters fighting different types of fighters. Worst case scenario, the PLA Air Force has moved on to fighter integration, developing tactics, techniques, and procedures to combine the capabilities of fourth and fifth generation fighters that you see here, along with special mission aircraft. So, we can see big things, but what about relatively small things? Can we leverage commercial satellite imagery for space domain awareness? Yes, we can. Last summer, this image of the Shergian 26 was taken by Vantor’s Worldview Legion satellite At a range of about twenty-nine kilometers, the Legion satellite snapped an image with a resolution of one point nine centimeters, or about three quarters of an inch. Xiang in Chinese translates to practice, and the Xian series of experimental satellites have done some pretty squirrely things on orbit, often performing odd maneuvers. The Chinese government was cagey about what this satellite did, only saying that it was an Earth observation satellite. It would be used for land surveys and environmental management. But this satellite looks to be about four to five meters in length, about twelve to fifteen feet in length, which could mean a folded focal length that would give it a very high-resolution imaging capability. Not the sort of thing you need for land surveys and environmental management. So I expect this has some military intelligence application.
But just to poke back at the US, China posted this image of one of the Legion satellites that was taken by China’s Jilin 1 commercial imaging satellite. And that’s neat and everything, except that just about everything you’d want to know about this worldview satellite is available online, whereas nothing was really known about the Shergy N26 capabilities before it was imaged by Vantor. So we can create a record of relatively short-term events like military exercises, and we can even collect some high-resolution technical intelligence of military platforms. But one of the ways I like to use the volume of commercial satellite imagery that’s now available is to track change over time, especially when it comes to military infrastructure. So we’ll visit Woody Island in the South China Sea. Of course, the Chinese don’t call it Woody Island, they call it Yang Xing Dao or Eternal Prosperity Island. Now, Woody Island isn’t one of the artificial islands the Chinese were building in the South China Sea about ten years ago. Woody Island started out as a mostly natural feature, and the Chinese have expanded it over time. So here we see a color image that shows an empty ramp at the south end of the runway. About three hours after the color image was taken, we have the black and white image where we two where we see two H6 bombers. So remember what I said about the frequent revisit rates of some of these commercial satellites We now know from commercial satellite imagery down to a three-hour window when those bombers arrived. That’s pretty cool. But what I really wanted you to take away from this image is how crowded this little island is getting. And that the PLA seems somewhat challenged when it comes to parking their aircraft. It’s not exactly a well-executed parking job on the flight line. So they can’t really reclaim any more land on the reef around Woody Island. They’re tapped out. They could, however, build another artificial island, which is exactly what they’re doing at a place called Antelope Reef on the west side of the Parasel archipelago. Clouds notwithstanding, Antelope Reef is getting imaged almost every day with systems like Planet Lab’s medium resolution Dove satellites, also known as Planet Scope. This is what the reef looked like in December. Pretty normal. You can see that there’s, I don’t know, something going on on the east side of the reef. This is what it looked like in mid-January, just about a month ago. A couple of media outlets reported that China was conducting land reclamation activity of the reef. You’ll also notice they’ve cut a 250-meter-wide channel in the east side of the reef. This is what the reef looked like four weeks later, that is, last Friday. The Chinese have built about five square kilometers of land on top of the existing reef. Over the course of the next year, I think we’ll see the artificial island get built out, and I expect it’ll have a port, an airbase, and missile batteries, just like its cousins farther south in the Spratley Islands. The ships that are in the middle of the reef in the lagoon, those are suction cutter dredgers. At last count there were 22 of these ships in that were building Antelope Reef, which is an unusually large number of dredgers, even for a project like this. but that accounts for the rapid progress the Chinese are making. Suction cutter dredgers are reaching down and grinding up the limestone and coral in the lagoon and then pumping that ground up material onto the top of the reef where bulldozers and earth movers spread it out. and compact it. We hear a lot about new weapon systems and new satellites, but if you’re looking for insights about where the PLA is going, you need to look at infrastructure. And again, that’s a great mission for commercial satellite imagery with lots of wide area coverage over time. Beyond this island, the PLA is building other infrastructure at an astonishing rate. One of the weapons we hear a lot about is the DF-26 missile.
So let’s take a look at the infrastructure around the PLA Rocket Force 611 Brigade, a missile garrison located in the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command. The DF-26 is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that can deliver a 3,000-pound warhead over 2,000 nautical miles. Nicknamed the Guam Killer or the Guam Express. The D F-26 can cover a distance from the garrison location to Guam in about 17 minutes. With a high-loft trajectory, the missile could reach Okinawa in about half that time. In 2023, the outline of the 611 Brigade garrison looked like that foam finger shape in the bottom of the screen. Now this is just where the missiles and their operators and maintainers live. The DF-26 is road mobile. So they wouldn’t shoot from garrison where they could be targeted. Instead, they’d head out to hide sites where they’d set up, launch, break down, move, and shoot again. But all of that takes time. It adds to the 17 minutes of flight time to Guam, and it makes logistics and resupply more difficult for the fielded missile vehicles, what we call transporter erector launchers or TELS. But what if they could bring the hide sites closer to the garrison? Maybe just on the other side of those hills. It appears that may have been exactly what they did. North of the garrison, there’s now a network of roads, man-made tunnels, and about 50 launch pads. This is a close-up view of the middle of the launch complex. You can see the concrete structure in the box there. That’s what’s labeled as a missile tell garage. There are several of those scattered throughout the complex. Missiles could also hide in any of the small rectangular blue buildings. You can see the launch pads as well. Some of these are just turnouts on the road, some are more substantial. I’ve talked to other PLA watchers, and there’s some debate about what this is. Maybe this is just training infrastructure, which would suggest the PLA is very, very serious about training. Maybe it’s like a combat town for missile tells. They have to move around, camouflage their position, simulate firing, and then move to another launch location. Worst case scenario though, this is where the PLA plays the shell game in a conflict. It’s right next to the garrison, so personnel and equipment can get here in minutes and stand alert for weeks. If I’m the PLA, I put dummy missile tells and camouflage netting all over this complex. Back of the envelope weaponeering on this facility in the garrison is over 100 weapons. If you wanted to double tap all of the targets Make it 200 weapons. And even then, maybe the DF-26 is about to shoot Guam in Okinawa. They aren’t there at all. Maybe they’re out in the hills hiding somewhere.
For those of us old enough to remember hunting Iraqi Scud missiles in the desert during the 1991 Gulf War, this would be a next-level scud hunt. And this is just one of several DF-26 garrisons. For the moment, it this looks to be the only one with a launch complex like this And infrastructure improvements aren’t just happening at the missile brigades. Over the past several years, there’s been a fantastic amount of building at air bases, Navy bases, and space launch facilities. Building infrastructure takes time and it’s expensive. If you see an increase in infrastructure, it may be a good indicator of what’s important to the PLA and what’s coming next. So I mentioned that China was building out its space launch infrastructure. Let’s take a look at the Wenchang Space Launch Facility Chinese are all about heavy-handed zoning and eminent domain. They’ll simply move populations out of the way and knock down villages to create areas where they can generate synergies for industrial or military purposes. The Wenchang Space Launch Center consists of a government space launch center there in the north, adjacent to a dedicated space launch industry and technology zone where they’re developing and building rockets and satellites. We’ve also seen a surge in China’s commercial space industry and a growing demand signal for commercial launch facilities like the commercial launch site in the green shaded area. The commercial launch area has an option to expand into the purple shaded area in the coming years as well, which I’ll talk about in a minute. I just think this is a fantastic image from Vantor. And so this in in itself I think is worth the price of admission. But this government site is the this is the government side of the launch center Chinese are very proud of their space program. There’s a lot of open source reporting on Wenchang and other Chinese launch centers, but I wanted you to see what can be seen and the capabilities of commercial satellite imagery to monitor change over time. This image is from last month and you can see the two new vertical assembly buildings under construction in the upper right corner of the screen. In the middle, there are the existing launch complexes 101 and 20. So even if China is not announcing an upcoming launch, we can use commercial satellite imagery to monitor day-to-day activity at these government launch complexes for indications of an impending launch. The new launch complex under construction there on the left will accommodate China’s new super heavy launch vehicle, the CZ-10, or Long March 10. The Long March 10 will give China the capability to launch manned missions to the moon. Also keep in mind this launch center is on High Nan Island, 10 degrees or about 600 nautical miles closer to the equator than our own Kennedy Space Center, meaning that it has an advantage in launching site satellites into geosynchronous orbit or GEO. The CZ-10 will allow China to put increasingly heavy payloads into zea into geo or cislunar orbits out near the moon. So now we’re looking a little farther south. On the right, that’s the government side of the launch center. There at the top is the commercial satellite and launch vehicle manufacturing facilities that we’ve watched China build out over the past several years. There are two dedicated commercial launch complexes you see toward the left side of the image, but what I wanted to show you was the building in progress on commercial launch complexes three and four, which will effect effectively double the facility’s commercial space launch capability. Looking at Chinese open sources, there are discussions underway to double the commercial capacity again, adding four more launch complexes south of the first four, highlighted in purple. So if you thought you knew where China was going with commercial space launch, you might want to double it. infrastructure leads the way. And once we look at our commercial satellite imagery and start seeing ground scarring and clearing of trees in that area, we’ll know that China is beginning to make good on those plans. China has five launch centers, all of which are controlled by the PLA Aerospace Force, or ASF. The Oriental Maritime Spaceport, which I’ll discuss more in a minute, has been associated with launches controlled by Taiyuan and the ASF Base 25. And just like our Space Force, China’s military sees the value in leveraging commercial space. Most of the ASF bases have dedicated commercial launch complexes or accommodate commercial launches.
So let’s take a look at Jochuan, a remote facility way out in the Mongolian desert. This is one of those dedicated commercial launch pads at Jochhuan. Here we see the Jurchu two EY2 just hours before liftoff. The rocket body is mostly behind that fall away gantry The Juchou 2E is China’s first liquid methane-fueled rocket that is built and launched by a Chinese company called Land Space. Liquid methane rocket technology is the same thing that powers SpaceX’s super heavy launch vehicle Starship Landspace recently secured a contract for launch services for both of China’s mega constellation projects, which have a goal of putting up over 25,000 low-Earth orbit satellites to rival Starlink capabilities. And just like many SpaceX launch vehicles, Landspace is working on recoverable and reusable rockets. They tried to return the first stage of the Jochu 3 in a December test, but that ended in failures, in failure. They’ll try again later this year. China’s commercial space industry is moving fast, but land space is probably the Chinese space launch company to watch. One of the things I really wanted to show you was this very modest-looking port that supports launch services for the Oriental Maritime Spaceport. China has dozens and dozens of oversized large deck cargo ships like the one you see in this image next to the keywall. These reinforced flat deck ships can be as large as a football field. What they do is load a rocket on board, take it to sea, raise the rocket up, and launch it off the back of the ship. And having tracked some of these ships, it doesn’t look like it has to be specially equipped. Seems like any any large deck cargo ship will do All of the launch equipment is modular and loaded onto the back of the ship. More than that, the ships aren’t limited in where they can launch from. For the Smart Dragon 3 launch that occurred two weeks ago The ship’s shown in the inset traveled from this port all the way down the coast to the South China Sea to put the rocket in the perfect spot for the most efficient launch into its low Earth orbit. The Oriental Maritime Spaceport is said to be want to ramp up to 50 launches a year, about one a week. I’d say this capability has some serious implications for how China does operationally responsive space. Using commercial satellite imagery to keep tabs on how China is building out this facility and the ships that come and go from the port will be a key indicator of how they’re executing those plans. So I’d like to circle back to aircraft development and production for the last few minutes that we have this morning. To start, we can look at a small test and evaluation base in Lapnur, China. This place is super remote. This base has been called China’s Area 51, but compared to Area 51, it isn’t much to look at. A couple of abandoned dirt strips and a 16,000-foot runway with a small cluster of hangars and buildings there in the green boxes. Back in September, Planet Labs captured this image of the facility, which showed China’s prototype sixth-generation fighter, the J-50, outside the hangar. The Chinese are very conscious about operational security, so maybe leaving the J50 out was a mistake. Or maybe the Chinese just don’t care. You’ll recall that we saw the J-50 first doing flight tests around a city of 9 million people back in December and again in April of last year. And in the they just don’t seem to care category, if we roll back a few weeks to August of 2025, we can see China’s other sixth-generation fighter, the J-36, out on the ramp in broad daylight. And just like the J50, we saw the J36 making lazy circles in the sky in December and April around Chengdu, which is a city of about 21 million people. So Maybe you don’t fly the highly classified sixth-generation aircraft around a city of 21 million people if you don’t want someone to see it. And that brings up an interesting point about what we see in commercial satellite imagery. There are lots of things like island building or military infrastructure development that China can’t hide. But in some cases, China can now assume that someone is always watching. Someone is always watching from space. And if there’s something they want you to see, Something they want you to be talking about, they can maybe accidentally leave something out so that we’re talking about that instead of focusing on the big picture. And if we look at the bigger picture at the tested and evaluation base, we see what looks like the beginnings of construction activity back in August inside of these green boxes. That’s what it looked like this month. Six months later, the facility has an additional 60,000 square feet of hangar space and over 300,000 square feet of additional facility space. Maybe some of that is test and evaluation facilities, maybe some of it is just additional housing for personnel. But in any case, in less than a year, China has effectively doubled the size of this remote testing base. which gives us some indication of where they might be going with test and evaluation and future aircraft development. But it’s easy to get distracted by small fines at secret military test bases. Again, we should take time to look at the big picture and see what kind of infrastructure China is building and why. China’s military aircraft industry is controlled by a state-owned conglomerate known as the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, or AVIC. There are seven major aircraft factories across China that specialize in the production of different types of military aircraft. First we’re going to look at Cheng He, the helicopter plant in eastern China, then revisit Chengdu in the West. And then head up to Shenyang in the north. This is Avik’s Chenghu Aircraft Industry Corporation facility. Looking at commercial satellite imagery, this plant over the last 18 months or so We can see that the plant is in the process of completing construction of about one million square feet of additional manufacturing space that’s highlighted by those green boxes This plant is responsible for building attack helicopters and heavy lift transport helicopters, the types of helicopters that might come in handy for, I don’t know, large-scale military operation if you catch my drift. I’m just guessing, but if they’ve increased the size of this manufacturing facility by 30%, we’re probably going to see start seeing more of these types of helicopters showing up in the PLA soon. So now we’re back at the Chengdu fighter plant. This is the one where they made over 2,000 of those third generation J7 aircraft. The 10-lane highway that we saw in the prototype J-36 with that J-36 aircraft making its approach there is on the left side of the screen. Currently, the print’s reason for being is to make as many J-20 fifth generation fighters as possible. And again, estimates put annual J-20 production at between 100 and 120 aircraft per year. So what indications do we have that might confirm such manufacturing capacity? Well we probably could have seen this coming. The yellow shaded area is manufacturing space completed by 2021, about 800,000 square feet. The red-shaded areas are aircraft manufacturing space completed in 2022, about 2. 5 million square feet. And on some maps, what shows up as aviation equipment test base is there in purple, about another 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space. So I think that’s a yes. Looking back at commercial satellite imagery, the substantial infrastructure improvements support the assessment that the Chengdu plant has increased its capacity and could be producing as many as 100 J20s a year. What’s happening now is there are about 50 acres on the north side of the plant that have been cleared. The site had previously been occupied by Sichuan University, which announced that they were closing that satellite campus without saying what they were going to do with the land. I expect that that will become another expansion of the Chengdu plant, possibly for more fifth gen or maybe sixth gen aircraft production China’s other key fighter factory is up north in Shenyang. This factory is where we saw the J-56th generation fighter flying around last spring. This plant is where China is producing the J-16 Hidden Dragon and the PLA Air Force’s for, I’m sorry, producing the J 16 Hidden Dragon for the PLA Air Force And the J-15 and J-35 Blue Shark for the PLA Navy and their aircraft carriers. Both the J-15 and J 6 Both the J-15 and J-16 are Chinese production models of Russian flankers. The J-35 is a Chinese knockoff of the US F-35, at least based on external appearances. You don’t need to look much beyond this Google Earth image to see what they’re producing at Shenyang. Now, AVIC recently announced that in addition to produce the J to producing the J35 for the PLA Navy The PLA Air Force has also ordered a variant that they’re calling the J-35A. So what can we see as far as infrastructure improvement to tell us what might be happening at this plant? Yeah, turns out not much has happened. They added about half a million square feet of manufacturing space back in 2023. Maybe that was related to low-rate production of the J35. So what do we think is gonna happen? Maybe they’re going to slow down or even stop J15 and J16 production and retool the plant for J35s. Time will tell, but I expect this plant will keep putting out 4. 5 generation fighters like the J-15 and the J16, and here’s why. This is farmland about 10 miles north of the Shenyang plant. This image is from about two and a half years ago. Something bad is about to happen to those two little villages inside the Green Line. This new production facility is still under construction, but this factory has about four million square feet of manufacturing space. The large production hall in the center of the image is 2. 5 million square feet all by itself. There’s also a 12,000-foot runway and what looks like a pretty impressive glass and steel headquarters building. This new plant is probably where AVIC will initiate J-35 production for the PLA Air Force and Navy. and they might even do some initial sixth generation aircraft production. The big question will be about whether they keep the old plant producing the flanker variants, shut it down, or retool it to produce something else. In any case, in about four slides, I’ve shown you over eight million square feet of new additional aircraft manufacturing space. That’s additional aircraft manufacturing space. Those eight million square feet are more than the entire F-35 manufacturing complex in Fort Worth, Texas. I expect the old Shenyang factory will keep cranking out J-15s at the very least for the Navy. Because China will keep building aircraft carriers. This image is from October of last year, just before the carrier on the bottom was commissioned. That’s the Fujian, China’s third aircraft carrier. The one with the electromagnetic catapults that you’ve been hearing about. The aircraft carrier on top is the Shandong. Now look, I get it. I used to be in the Navy. Satellite images or ship of ships are cool. You can see a lot of detail on these giant machines from space. And the US Navy has made a big deal about how China has the largest Navy in the world and how the US needs to build more ships. There’s a shipbuilding office in the White House. And that may be true, but what’s more true is that we need to build more aircraft. We need more Air Force. Let me show you what’s about to happen. China’s inventory of fighter and attack aircraft is going to grow significantly over the next five years. You heard it here first. As of 2025, the PLA Air Force has purged itself of all of its old third-generation J7 and J8 fighters. That’s what shows up in the cream bars there on the left. With that done, the PLA Air Force can now focus on growing. Based on the factory infrastructure that we were just looking at. Combined with some other reporting, I’d say that starting next year, AVIC will have the capacity to produce 300 fourth and fifth generation fighters for the PLA each year. Will they? They have the infrastructure. Maybe they’ll just leave it sitting there. Or maybe they’ll use it. We’ll have to see. Maybe annual production will cap out at 250 fighters per year, but I seriously doubt if it would be less than that. Based on the worst case numbers, the PLA Navy and Air Force will have a fighter force as large as the U. S. Fighter Force by 2028. That includes all U. S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force fighters. By 2029, China will have the largest fighter force on the planet and will continue to grow. So here’s something to think about. Those aircraft carriers we were just talking about. Sure, they’d play a role in a Taiwan operation, but that’s not why you build aircraft carriers. China wants to build a world-class military. Aircraft carriers are meant to go far away for a long period of time and do far away, long period of time things. They want to conduct military operations around the world. So China is growing its Air Force. Why? Maybe they think they need more Air Force for Taiwan. Couldn’t hurt. Or maybe they’re going to do exactly what they’ve told us they’re going to do. They’re building the capacity to have an expeditionary Air Force. In the coming years, we’re going to start seeing China’s Air Force in other parts of the world. Not just in East Asia. We’re going to be challenged in other places, not just the Taiwan Strait. If we want to get ahead of China, we should start to prepare for that. So that was my mic drop moment.
But before I go, I want to announce that AFA’s Mitchell Institute has just launched our China Air Power Tracker. You can find it at MitchellAerospacePower.org/China. We’ll call this version 1.0, and we’re looking forward to adding features on in the coming months. You can use the tracker’s interactive map and satellite imagery to visualize how the PLA Air Force is arrayed at air bases and surface-to-air missile sites across China. Right now, you can sort by different categories of aircraft, fighters, bombers, and transports. And again, we want to build this map out in the coming months to include additional features and additional ways to sort. You can zoom in on a base and use archived satellite imagery, sort of like Google Earth. And it’ll give you, and if you click on a site, it’ll give you information about subordination and the type of equipment located at each base or SAM site. From there, you can link to the platforms and weapons page for information and news articles about Chinese aircraft and missile systems. I don’t think we have it up yet, but I’d like to include it. Excuse me, I’d like to include a link on the page for feedback. I’m looking forward to evolving the tracker over time to provide our users with more information about how the PLA Air Force operates and the emerging challenges that are going to be facing our Air Force and Space Force And that is about all the time that I have. Hope you’ve been able to convince some of you about the power of commercial satellite imagery and what we can learn about the People’s Liberation Army from space. Again, a special thanks to Vantor and Planet Labs for supporting this presentation with their imagery. Please visit us at the Mitchell Institute booth located outside the expo hall and have a great air and space power kind of day.