China, Pakistan have secret plan to build new fighter jets: Report

In a development that is expected to cause diplomatic ripples, the New York Times reported on Wednesday China and Pakistan have a “confidential plan” to jointly build a new generation of fighter aircraft and other weapons as part of Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative.

The report by Maria Abi-Habib in the New York Times is significant as it challenges China's frequent assertions that the Belt and Road Initiative (also known as One Belt, One Road) is a purely commercial venture with peaceful purposes. Pakistan plays a key role in the Belt and Road Initiative, having received nearly $62 billion in Chinese investments for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

CPEC involves a highway from China to Pakistan's Gwadar port, which would allow Beijing to bypass the Indian Ocean route for trade and shipment of imports and exports, both shortening transit time and also preventing China's rivals from blocking supplies.

Providing details about the defence manufacturing proposal, the New York Times claims the plan was created by the Pakistan Air Force and Chinese officials early this year. It envisages using a special economic zone built under CPEC to produce a new generation of fighter aircraft. The two countries are also expected to jointly build new radar systems and other weapons.

While the New York Times did not specify what kind of fighter aircraft China would build in Pakistan, Beijing is currently focusing on two stealth aircraft—the J-20 and J-31—and indigenous derivatives of the Russian Sukhoi SU-27 family as well as the single-engine J-10.

Over the past decade, Pakistan and China have been cooperating on manufacturing the JF-17 low-cost fighter in the Punjab province. While China has developed the JF-17, it has not inducted the aircraft into service.

“i dunno about flying in anything built in Pockeestan,”

My career in the military industrial complex began in 1980 and ended 2012. I started at Honeywell where they had an extremely well educated workforce of professional technicians who produced satellites and rocket engine controllers with superb reliability numbers. These devices didn’t have nearly the degree of integrated circuits we see today and had thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individual hand solder joints and hand built cables.

As time went on those workers retired and we ended up with, quite literally, people off the street and from welfare programs building military hardware. As the reliability guy and then the engineering manager for (at the time) the Army’s largest production contract, I had to make it possible for people who had zero background (like, I’d imagine, most Pakistanis) to build this hardware. We reduced the complexity to a handful of simple steps with a lot of visual aids. We trained each individual; sometimes over and over. We fool-proofed the design; for example, it wasn’t physically possible to plug anything in backwards. Any wires that needed to be plugged in were placed so they couldn’t be left unnoticed. Any complicated steps, like stuffing a PC board, were automated.

So, yes, I could take a cadre of motivated stone age villagers and train them to assemble a fighter jet. They probably wouldn’t have the gimme-dat psychology of the workers we used, who resented being forced off the welfare rolls. They are also unlikely to be heavy drug and alcohol abusers. (To prove that was going on, I left a meeting one morning just after the floor break and returned with the remains of two still cold beers and a handful of glassine envelopes and other drug paraphernalia from the parking lot. My boss freaked out and I was forbidden to mention the drug problem ever again.)

There are plenty of Pakistani engineers who could do the same thing I did. A Pakistani built jet, off a mature production line, should be comparable in quality to any US made product from a similar production line.

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