WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – China is still years away from being able to field a stealth aircraft, despite the disclosure of images indicating that it appears to have a working prototype, Pentagon officials said yesterday.
The images have been posted on a number of websites and were published on the front page of The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. The Pentagon said they appeared to show a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter prototype making a high-speed taxi test.
The disclosure of the photographs comes just days before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is due to travel to Beijing on Sunday, and analysts could only speculate about the motives for their sudden appearance.
“This might be just a way of demonstrating that whatever obstacles there might have been (to China developing these technologies), they’ve overcome them,” said Randy Schriver, a China expert and former State Department official for Asia.
The pictures are likely to heighten concerns about China’s military buildup, including possible deployment in 2011 of its first aircraft carrier and a new anti-ship ballistic missile seen as a threat to U.S. aircraft carriers.
Some analysts say that the J-20 photos, if authentic, are a strong indicator that China is making faster-than-expected progress in developing a rival to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor, the world’s only operational stealth fighter designed to evade detection by enemy radar.
But U.S. Vice Admiral David Dorsett, director of naval intelligence, said deployment of the J-20 was years away.
“It’s still not clear to me when it’s going to become operational,” he said. “Developing a stealth capability with a prototype and then integrating that into a combat environment is going to take some time.”
He dismissed any suggestions that the Pentagon had underestimated China’s stealth capability.
Pentagon spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan said China was still having problems with the engines for its previous generation of fighter jets.
