The hold back of the PLAAF AWACS happened during a scenario or scenarios where the Chinese side took a conservative stance to protect assets. You should understand that this Chinese ADIZ is breaking new ground in the deployment of Chinese assets. There are no previous examples of PLAAF use of their tankers or AWACS any distance from the Chinese mainland.

? So… you are assuming the PLA haven’t flown AEWC or fighters outside of internal airspace before?

I never made any claim about tankers btw.

I think I need to ask you to clarify as to what you believe the PLAAF/NAF are capable of doing, because from what I’m hearing you make it sound like the PLA has never even flown or trained outside of internal airspace.

So the deployment patterns in COMMAND are based upon the best known evidence of PLAAF doctrine and operational standards.

The problem is we know next to nothing about PLAAF doctrine and operational standards.

If you know of a better example of PLAAF operations then please refer me to this information. The longest distance the PLAAF has deployed was that joint exercise with the Turkish airforce in 2010. No tanker support was used to support the PLAAF in that example.

“In mid-September, a fleet of Chinese Su-27 and Mig-29 fighter aircraft flew through Pakistan, refueled in Iran and reached Turkish airspace for joint military exercises with the Turkish Air Force.”

Like I said, I never made a claim about tankers — however PLAAF J-10s deploy with H-6U tankers over the south china sea on a fairly regular basis.
I can’t find the original pla website report, unfortunately, but the pictures are nice. A few years old I think, but nice.

http://chinesemil.blogspot.co.nz/2009/08/photos-of-chinas-j-10-fighter-jet.html

I expect KJ-200 to have similar peformance to E-767s in terms of range and detection, but being a erieye style balance beam array, it will lack some nose and aft coverage.

Bringing in an H-5 recon plane is confusing and makes me wonder about the credibility of this particular article’s simulation, because the PLA hasn’t operated H-5s in years.
Furthermore, I wonder if the simulator also considers the airbases both sides have in range of the ADIZ. I believe Japan only has Naha airbase that can deploy F-15Js to the ADIZ ECS region without refuelling, while I think the PLAAF/NAF combined have about 4 airbases fielding flankers and J-10s.

Before someone even goes about simulating an ADIZ confrontation, we need to consider how many planes each side can deploy, if they can’t even get that balance right, then the rest is effectively redundant.
If they can agree on an “average” deployment force for both sides, then they can start talking other assumptions such as AEWC range, weapons range or reliability, and ultimately, how aggressive each side will seek to command their own aircraft. If the assumption is that the PLA will naturally be more timid in this scenario, then we are effectively assuming they will come out worse on every occasion.

If we’re giving both sides the benefit of the doubt in the human factor (from equal commanding virtuoso and equal piloting skill), then it will be a far more unbiased measurement of simply seeing how the differences in machine quantity and quality play out.

Can Command process battles autonomously and give each side a similar “skill”/aggressiveness level, and simply give the user a battle outcome? If so, then we could try simply repeat the scenario, say, a hundred times and see which side wins more, and end up conducting a test to see if their win count is statistically higher than a win count if we expect both sides to be equal (i.e.: each side wins half of the battles).
It doesn’t say much if we conduct a one off simulation and end up giving one side a handicap of being automatically less willing to deploy assets in advantageous positions, and ignore the real world force balance which local airbase differences will provide.

—

Addendum: this entire scenario is basically BS because the article assumes both sides will immediately seek to fire on the other side’s breach of their respective ADIZs. That won’t happen, neither is going to start a shooting war, there will be some aggressive maneuvering and mock dogfights at most, but probably just fighters on both sides staring each other down before they need to return home.
The most realistic chance of conflict is an accidental shootdown or collision between fighters that leads both sides to start shooting at one another, probably within visual range, before the survivors withdraw and regroup, and emergency diplomacy starts talking to mitigate an escalation and expansion of the incident.

The Chinese are providing SIGINT in the form of an up to date electronic order of battle. Watch for the day-to-day operation of the Chinese ADIZ to become a model replicated during a Red Flag exercise with Aggressors playing the role of the Chinese air force.

Signals intelligence (often contracted to SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of signals, whether between people (“communications intelligence”—COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication (“electronic intelligence”—ELINT), or a combination of the two

You make it sound like the US has never done ELINT or SIGINT of PLA flight operations or naval operations in the East China Sea before.
Chances are, anything that the US EP-3s have to glean, they’ve already gleaned it.

Also, if one takes your opinion that an ADIZ somehow immediately reveals everything about your signals and electronics, then chinese ELINT and SIGINT aircraft that regularly “defy” the Japanese ADIZ must know everything there is to know about their defences as well. Y-8GX ELINT planes that orbit USN-JMSDF exercises in the East China Sea must obviously know how to easily defeat aegis and USN CVBGs.

[the last paragraph was obviously sarcasm to demonstrate the absurdity of your suggestion that an ADIZ or any kind of peacetime military exercise will inherently give away everything and the kitchen sink to opposing ELINT or SIGINT assets. If that were the case, no nation on earth would ever activate active sensors during non-war scenarios at all]

typical sinosentric view. if anything Japan attempted to de-escalate the situation. yes that’s right.
take your choice
Japanese government buys the islands
or
Racist mayor of Tokyo who is blatantly anti-Chinese buys the islands.
The Japanese government did what it had to do to prevent a worse case scenario. It was also done by the left wing, liberal, pro-Asia government, not the current conservative one. duh duh duh

I am of course aware that Japan bought the islands to “stave off” the Tokyo mayor purchase, I can’t recall his name.

So basically instead of kicking china in the balls Japan decided to stomp their head against the curb instead.

It’s kind of difficult for china to see that act as a less inflammatory move when even the previous government also called the territory undisputed. If anything it would make an outside observer wonder if the desire to buy the islands from the Tokyo mayor was just a ploy to allow the government to buy it instead on pretext of avoiding “escalation”.
If the Japanese government wanted to minimize the escalatory and “undisputed sovereignty” connotations of the move, they could have made some diplomatic statements regarding the harmlessness of the move and that they weren’t trying to change the status quo.
Oh, but look at that, the statements they made were the exact opposite.
Clearly china should have been infinitely grateful that Japan nationalized the islands instead of letting the racist mayor buy it instead!

Dun dun dun…

This sh*t is not something that can’t be resolved on the political arena.
Alltough not the similar example, but take a look at the deal on the border in the Barent Sea between Norway and Russia. That worked out pretty smooth.
I’ll take a loong shoot and propose a similar deal will be struck between Japan And Russia on their Border Issues within this decade.

Thank god there is People up on their high horses that do the right moves and get thing done the right way.

It does not look very promesing, this China sea dispute.. this **** can get messy. But i still think it can be sorted out the right way.. never give up hope People.

I want to agree with you, but there’s too much bad history to let this stupid islands dispute be resolved amicably. What Japan wants is for china to give up its claim over the islands completely. What China wants is to have both sides agree that the territory is disputed.

At this point, both of the goals each of the two sides have is incompatible with the other’s position at this stage, and is virtually impossible to achieve in the forseeable future unless one side has a dramatic political change.

Part of the tension is that when the original Chinese-Japanese friendship and peace pact was signed in the late 70s, I don’t think either side expected China’s economy and military to rise so suddenly and certainly neither side probably expected the fall of the USSR, removing a “common enemy” and thus bringing the attention back to ideological and historical differences between china and japan (as well as some western countries at large).

Now with China rising in such a way that isn’t following the western model along with ideological differences such as the fact that china isn’t a democracy, there are bound to be frictions. For japan, you just have to add in some wartime atrocities and historical revisionism and fear of “communism” as well as perceptions of Chinese expansionism and you have almost a perfect storm for butting heads.

The best we can hope for is a “new” status quo. there is the US factor, for they at the end of the day have the most influence over japan which any other country doesn’t have. If the US can rein Japan in a little tensions might dial down. China’s demands aren’t high — simply admission that the islands are under dispute.

This will probably require some level of Chinese assurance that they are not territorialy expansionist, which may mean “concessions” in the SCS. However the US’s foreign policy at this stage is also looking aimed at containing China more and more. There’s just not a lot of trust and good will to go around.

Consider this scenario: The USAF uses its B2’s based in Guam to probe the Chinese ADIZ. Or uses F-22’s to probe the Chinese ADIZ by just flying through this zone. Since they know that China has made an issue of claiming detection of intruding aircraft the detection or lack of detection of stealth aircraft will provide the USAF with valuable intelligence on Chinese electronic capabilities. In fact these probes may already be underway even as we discuss this issue. I know if I were a USAF planner I would be doing just that. Responses?

Needless risk, unnecessary escalation. The relatively measured US response of sending in a couple of unarmed, high RCS, and vulnerable B-52 was clearly calculated to both show support for Japan while also not drastically heightening tensions with china. If they wanted to seriously provoke a response they could have sent in a squadron of strike fighters or a couple of B-1s.

If you want ELINT then sending in EP-3 is enough (which is what they’ve been doing)

Besides you make it sound like china hasn’t used AEWC to survey airspace beyond its borders as common practice prior to this ADIZ. Chances are the US already knows most of what it can know via passive detection from years past.

In my opinion this festering dispute has all the earmarks of what happened in the Falklands. A distant piece of land, located remotely at sea and with two modern powers ready to defend. All the ingredients for a clash are in place.

I doubt it. The Argentinians weren’t exactly modern, and even the Royal Navy of the 1980s wasn’t quite as modern for its time as various PLA and JSDF ships and aircraft and fighters are for today.

And the UK and Argentina weren’t the worlds second and third largest economies, and any potential conflict wouldn’t spark over one of the world’s most economically important regions that could drastically impact maritime traffic and trade.

And also, the Falklands war never had the potential to rope in two nuclear powers either, whereas a china and japan disagreement could lead to the roping in of America.

No, war is still very far on the horizon. The ADIZ move was an inevitable tactic for the PLA to more rigorously defend the nations airspace from modern US bombers and strike aircraft, while serving the dual purpose of trying to bring Japan to the negotiating table over the disputed islands.

You answered your own question. Until just recently China couldn’t establish a distant ADIZ because they didn’t have the resources nor equipment.

I never said they didn’t have the resources nor equipment until recently? I’m not sure how I answered my own question.

If anything, they’ve had the resources to set up an ADIZ for the better part of a decade, even when they were still using ground based radar and control centres.
Obviously having more AEWC now (4 KJ-2000 and some 11-13 KJ-200 I believe) and more longer range and modern fighters gives them greater confidence to assert control should they need to, but the resources were there for most of the 2000s.

And the thing that makes this ADIZ different is the language that China is using to define this ADIZ. The terms “emergency measures” makes this ADIZ sound quite ominous.

If you look at the wording of all nations ADIZ, they all reserve the right for “emergency measures”. Go google the US FAAs ADIZ policy. Now, China’s sounds ominous because the way it was written was that “non compliant aircraft will face emergency measures,” however it has since been clarified by mainland state media that it means china reserves the right for emergency measures, again, the same as any nation with an ADIZ.
Of course that fact has largely been ignored in media, because a chinese aggression narrative sells better and sounds better to the audience.

China is the imperial power now and China is the one creating conflict by claiming territory it has no right to. What “imperial power” can China blame for its claims in the South China Sea? If we were talking about Hong Kong or Macau then you might have a point, but there is no similarity between either of those and China’s current disputes.

The South China Sea dispute is a result of the nine dot line that Chiang Kai Shek drew in the ROC, and when the PRC assumed control of China they inherited that territorial claim.
To this day the ROC (Taiwan) still claims the same waters the PRC does in the South China Sea.

I won’t look at the historical justification for the ROC’s original drawing of the nine dot line, because personally I believe the waters of the South China Sea needs to be resolved with all sides losing a bit of their claim, China included. The SCS is far too crowded and important and it is impossible for any one nation to even lay claim to half of it.

I’d prefer to see a negotiation of settlement regarding the SCS, and the recent Chinese moves at the ASEAN and APEC conferences tend to head in that direction.

However SCS and the Diaoyu/senkaku islands are different topics.

(My reference to “imperial powers” was to the foreign invasions of China in the 19th century, leading to an inability for the country/empire to properly defend its territorial sovereignty both in terms of territories seceded to foreign powers in the “unequal treaties” as well as an overall weakening of the state and the inability to control more anciliary territories which led to a few decades of pseudo-independence for various regions such as Tibet, and various outlying islands, to name a few. Whether you agree with me basically depends on whether you agree that the foreign invasions of China in the 19th century were legal or not, and that is the rub of it.)

Creating an ADIZ over a sovereign state’s territory is a hostile act, and the Senkakus have been part of Japanese territory for over 100 years. (a portion of which the US administrated them following WWII along with Okinawa and some other islands)

And China says the islands were taken from them in the first sino-japanese war and should have been returned under the potsdam declaration and cairo declarations.
If you do not recognize that there is a territorial dispute then obviously there is no need for further discussion because you would see the ADIZ as an aggressive act.

If you understand that the island’s sovereignty was always under question then you’d recognize that Japanese moves in the last few years had led to this present stand off.

If these islands were inhabited with a Chinese population then perhaps there could be some discussion, but given that they are uninhabited and have been a Japanese possession for the entire 20th century then their ownership really isn’t subject to negotiation.

And China has always challenged Japanese possession of the islands for the 20th century because they should have been returned to China after the second world war. The fact that China hasn’t made a big fuss of the islands until now is because when China established diplomatic links with Japan in the late 1970s both sides agreed to “ambiguity” of the island’s sovereignty.

China had always officially protested Japan’s “administration” over the islands and that hasn’t changed for the entirety of China-Japan relations and prior to that, and both China and Japan had the verv to value the larger chinese-japanese relationship and to solve the dispute amicably far in the future where both sides are friendlier. But that all changed in the last few years when Japan claimed “undisputed sovereignty” and conducted hostile acts such as arresting a Chinese fisherman and threatening to shoot down drones and nationalizing the islands.

In effect, Japan was changing the previous status quo of sovereignty ambiguity.

Hell, there wouldn’t be a dispute today if the US didn’t want to give the islands back to PRC after its occupation and if they wanted to give them to ROC/taiwan instead, because that was the percieved promises made in the potsdam and cairo declarations — but the US effectively spat in China’s face and gave them to Japan, who took the islands by force in the first sino-japanese war, effectively giving a middle finger to both PRC and ROC.

These two articles below basically are the Chinese argument for why the islands should belong to them. You can argue whether it belongs to China or Japan, but you cannot deny that it was the recent moves by Japan in 2010 and 2012 which had thrown a wrench in previously relatively positive Chinese-Japan relations where both sides basically agreed not to open the can of worms which was the diaoyu/senkaku islands. All China wants now is to sit with Japan at the negotiating table and return to the previous status quo which the recent Japanese administrations had taken a massive smelly dump on.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stephenharner/2013/02/20/japan-and-u-s-ignored-chinese-signals-and-history-blundering-into-the-senkakudiaoyu-crisis/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/9583883/Diaoyu-Dao-history-shall-not-be-reversed.html

One might debate whether uninhabited islands should generate a massive EEZ, but that is a separate question and unrelated to the current conflict.

Agreed.