At China's biennial air show in Zhuhai this month, an imposing fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles was on display - drones bearing a striking resemblance to the American aircraft that have proved so deadly in attacks on insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Israel, Britain and the United States have pretty much had a corner on the global drone market, but the recent Chinese air show and a Pentagon report have exploded that notion.
"In a worrisome trend, China has ramped up research in recent years faster than any other country," said the unclassified analysis published in July by the Defense Science Board. "It displayed its first unmanned system model at the Zhuhai air show five years ago, and now every major manufacturer for the Chinese military has a research center devoted to unmanned systems."
The report, which said "the military significance of China's move into unmanned systems is alarming," suggested that China could "easily match or outpace U.S. spending on unmanned systems, rapidly close the technology gaps and become a formidable global competitor in unmanned systems."
Two Chinese models on display at the Zhuhai show - the CH-4 and the Wing Loong, or Pterodactyl - appeared to be clones of the Reaper and Predator drones that are fixtures in the U.S. arsenal. A larger drone, the Xianglong, or Soaring Dragon, is a long-range, high-altitude model that would seem to be a cousin of the RQ-4 Global Hawk.
Huang Wei, the director of the CH-4 program at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, told the state-run newspaper Global Times that his lightweight drone can carry cameras, ground-searching radar, missiles and smart bombs.
"As the Americans say," Mr. Huang said, "the U.A.V. is fit for missions that are dirty, dangerous and dull."
The paper reported that the drone's range of 3,500 kilometers, or about 2,200 miles, made it "ideal to conduct surveillance missions" over a small group of islands in the East China Sea known as the Senkakus in Japan and the Diaoyu in China. The islets are claimed by Beijing, Tokyo and Taipei.
My colleague Scott Shane, in an article on drone warfare last year, posed a few of the tough questions about the spread and use of drone warfare:
"If China, for instance, sends killer drones into Kazakhstan to hunt minority Uighur Muslims it accuses of plotting terrorism, what will the United States say? What if India uses remotely controlled craft to hit terrorism suspects in Kashmir, or Russia sends drones after militants in the Caucasus? American officials who protest will likely find their own example thrown back at them."
"'The problem is that we're creating an international norm' - asserting the right to strike preemptively against those we suspect of planning attacks, argues Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh and author of 'Missile Contagion,' who has called for tougher export controls on American drone technology. 'The copycatting is what I worry about most.'"
Dozens of countries have bought or built their own unmanned aircraft, primarily for surveillance, but as Scott points out, "adding missiles or bombs is hardly a technical challenge."
There were no drone flights or demonstrations reported this year at Zhuhai, although the Global Times suggested that 20 red stars and 15 rocket outlines painted on the fuselage of a Pterodactyl indicated 20 airborne missions and 15 missile firings.
And a Japanese military plane recently took photos of a drone circling some Chinese naval vessels on a training exercise near Okinawa. The Pentagon believes the drone had been deployed from one of the Chinese ships.
There was no sign this year of Anjian, or the Dark Sword, part of a rumored new generation of Chinese stealth drones. The Pentagon study said the Anjian "represents the aspirations of the Chinese to design something even the Western powers don't have - a supersonic drone capable of air-to-air combat as well as ground strikes."
Defense News reported recently from Zhuhai that there was a change in tone in how the Chinese were marketing their drones. At the show in 2010, videos and publicity material showed unmanned aircraft attacking American naval vessels, "swarming over aircraft carrier battle groups like angry bees," Defense News said. This year, however, "a stealthy Blue Shark" drone was shown attacking a Russian carrier.
Michael Schiffer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia, said last summer that Beijing's broad and rapid military buildup is "potentially destabilizing" in the Pacific, as my colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported. That buildup was detailed in this Pentagon report.
"The scope and speed of unmanned-aircraft development in China is a wake-up call that has both industrial and military implications," said the report by the Defense Science Board. "U.S. exports of unmanned systems are highly constrained. China, with no such constraints, has made U.A.V.s a new focus of military exports."
The analysis recommended that U.S. military planners and the Defense Intelligence Agency should "aggressively" incorporate drones and drone warfare into their war games, simulations and exercises.
Structure of the Lead：
WHO- People in China
WHEN- 2012.11.29
WHAT- Recruiting
WHY- Needed
WHERE- China
HOW-
Keywords:
1. impose 推行
2. notion 觀念
3. worrisome 令人著急的
4. classified 機密的
5. surveillance 監視
6. rumor 謠言
7. carrier 事業
8. constrain 限制
9. implications 暗示
10. drone 嗡嗡聲
