U.S. Pacific Air Forces Commander Kenneth Wilsbach disclosed that the F-35 had a close encounter with China’s J-20 stealth fighter jet in the East China Sea and found that “our (U.S.) early warning aircraft could not see the J-20. However, this statement was widely questioned by Chinese netizens, who believe that the U.S. commander’s claim is only meant to confuse the Chinese military and cheat the U.S. Congress out of military funding.
Kenneth Wilsbach mentioned in an online seminar video released by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies that the U.S. Air Force’s mainstay E-3 aircraft is now facing “a lot of problems”, according to a March 17 report by the British “Flight International” website quoted by Chinese media. “The early warning aircraft now faces “serious obsolescence problems” and is unable to detect stealthy platforms like the J-20 at long range, making it impossible to adapt to future battlefield needs.
For the U.S. Air Force-equipped E-3 early warning aircraft, Kenneth Wilsbach showed obvious dissatisfaction: “Our E-3 fleet is really not in a good state of maintenance. The Pacific Air Force has four E-3s, but due to maintenance issues, they are often in a state where they are lying down together and can’t be deployed.”
In particular, Kenneth Wilsbach said, “With the E-3 AWACS in the air, the airborne sensors that we’re relying on are not really suited to the needs of 21st-century operations, especially against (stealth) platforms like the J-20 or similar. It can’t detect these platforms at great distances, and detection before the enemy can provide an advantage to the aircraft that are tasked with fire delivery.”
The U.K.’s Flight International website notes that early warning aircraft have been called “cloud tents” and “force multipliers.” The U.S. military believes that China’s KJ-500 early warning aircraft, equipped with advanced radars, is critical to enhancing China’s long-range strike capabilities, and Kenneth Wilsbach said it is “interested in how to interrupt the long-range “kill chain” that comes from the KJ-500 early warning aircraft.”
Meanwhile, Kenneth Wilsbach referred to the J-20’s encounter with the F-35 in the East China Sea in his speech, stressing “I wouldn’t call it an engagement. “What we’ve seen so far is that the J-20 is performing air control missions. We’ve noticed that they’re flying the J-20 very well. Our F-35s recently made relatively close contact with the J-20 in the East China Sea, and we were impressed with the command and control system that the J-20 belongs to.”
Chinese media outlet Global Times noted that the U.S. F-35 had a close “encounter” with China’s J-20 in the East China Sea, which should be officially endorsed as “the world’s first stealth fighter engagement record.”