US-PRC Tech War: DeepSeek AI and 6th Generation Fighters — #78
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you can pretty much cover all of Asia from China with 3,000 kilometer. And that includes basically all of India, Southeast Asia, and a good part of the Western part of Pacific.

And you can probably fly north enough to Russia where if you get tanker up there to refuel over the Russian airspace, then you can fly and hit Alaska if you want to. So if this thing goes into service in 2031, 2032 range, it pretty much gives the PLA control of most of Asia. ♪

Welcome to Manifold. We're here again with T.P. Wong, a frequent guest or recurring guest on our show. And this is an extra that we're recording as a lead-in to an episode that we had already recorded about the new sixth-generation fighter jets that China revealed. So we had planned to release an episode today.

on the topic of those sixth generation fighter jets. But because of the recent events with the AI company DeepSeek in China releasing some really interesting models, TP and I thought we would discuss that for a little while, maybe 30 minutes or so before we get into the MilTech stuff.

And so the first part of this episode will be 30 minutes on DeepSeek and AI-related issues. And then the last part of the episode, which I think, as I recall, was relatively long, like maybe 90 minutes, is all about mil-tech competition between the US and China and balance of power in the Western Pacific. So TP, are you with me? Yes, I am. Glad to be back. Great. It's great to have you. I'm going to do a little bit of intro on DeepSeek and R1. And...

Just feel free to add anything you want. And then after I finished a little intro, we can just have just a conversation about it. So I'm going to pitch this at listeners who aren't obsessively following the Gen AI space, but we'll delve into some details that I think will be of interest to people who are actual experts in Gen AI. And so what happened recently is there was a release of a new model called R1 by the company DeepSeek.

DeepSeek is a very interesting Chinese company. It had its origins in a quant trading fund, but has since sort of pivoted to focus more on building foundation models. And they've been at the forefront of Gen AI research for a while now. They've produced some world-class models. Those world-class models were trained using very little compute, just a fraction, maybe 1 30th

of the compute required by labs like OpenAI or DeepMind or Anthropic to train their models. They perform roughly as well as the best current models. So O1 from OpenAI, people would often cite as maybe the best model that's currently available at scale. And also the inference costs, the cost to run the DeepSeq models is only about one 30th of the cost to run

the current best open AI models. So it's a very jarring and surprising development that a small Chinese company, I believe DeepSeek has about 200 people on its team, was able to ship a model which in some sense really is way better. I mean, if you count 30X as a big advantage while having parity in terms of quality is way better than what all the big labs in the US currently can offer.

And so this has caused a huge shift in people's mindset about the AI race between China and the US. There are many different topics we could discuss here. We could talk about a little bit about the internals of how the deep seek models are so efficient. We could talk about a breakthrough they made in the use of reinforcement learning for reasoning models.

And we could also talk about the impact on infrastructure, AI infrastructure planning. For example, the Stargate project, which wants to spend $500 billion on data center, power supply, and compute. So I think those are the three main things we can discuss. And then the other thing we could discuss, both TP and I have experience in really using the DeepSeq models in practical settings. And we can talk about whether the quality of the models works

lives up to the benchmarks on the benchmarks. It's top of class kind of model. But of course, the real world effectiveness of the model is something that you can only learn by using it in a bunch of contexts. So how does that sound as an outline TP?

Yeah, sounds great. I just want to make one other point out there is that DeepSeek itself is actually was not well known even inside China until the past few months. So I think I first heard of it maybe six months ago, maybe a little longer, but like middle of last year. And I'm someone that actually follows basically all the AI companies in China. So I always expected ByteDance to be the one that does the best. So the fact that

Basically, we have this no-name that's just jumped out of nowhere. This wasn't planned. Nobody could have guessed this, basically. So what they did is quite extraordinary, even by Chinese AI firms.

Yeah, I might have a lot more resource. I might have been on the deep seek trend maybe before you. I sort of read these papers, actually. And so I was very always very impressed with the way they write their papers. They're very open. They release their models, open weights. And so I was impressed with them from the get go.

We should mention, though, you mentioned ByteDance. Everybody knows ByteDance because they're the company that owns TikTok, for example. ByteDance also has released a, just recently, I think last day or two, if I'm not mistaken, Dobao 1.5. That's also a very efficient, hyper-efficient, optimized model that also is comparable to O1, I think, on the benchmarks. So ByteDance is not out of it by any means. Yeah, so I think maybe by the end of it, I would guess that

It's quite possible that big corporations and a lot of people in China itself will use Doubao just because of the fact that they're the guy that does TikTok or Douyin. Whereas DeepSeek, I think, got a lot of press release this week and just generally since December. So it's very possible that in the end, Doubao will be the one that's the best model. They'll be able to create the best model, but there will be so little difference between

for practical uses that the one that's like far more open, that produces all these great papers that people love to read, that's willing to, has this great story of a small, you know, David versus Goliath kind of thing will capture the heart of the AI community, basically. Right. So, yeah, I mean, now is Doba open source?

I believe they open source only a couple pieces of it. I think the main multimodal one, I'm not sure if that one is. I don't think that one is open source. I see. Because the thing that's happening in the U.S. is a lot of, like, there are a lot of companies that run servers and they can basically put up any open source model and then they charge people to use it. And so that's already the case. Like, we can get access to hosted versions of...

DeepSeek R1 offered by US companies at very low prices. So that is a difference in the way Dolbao maybe will get used in the West as opposed to in China. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, whenever the problem is, whenever like an American company or anyone in the Western world wants to use a Chinese model, they're always concerned about sending their data to China. Right. So open sourcing kind of get rid of that concern, basically, for most people. Exactly. Yeah. So if I go to like cluster.ai and I use the DeepSeek model, the data is just flowing through the cluster cloud instances and none of the data goes back to the company DeepSeek.

Well, if you use one of those distilled models, you can even run this in your own servers at home. So I have seen quite a few people running the 7 billion parameter or 8 billion parameter distilled models. And that's kind of interesting. I might set up that myself, actually. Yeah. Well, OK, now you're you're getting into some stuff here. So for the for the users, the listeners who are not AI experts, the word distill probably doesn't really mean anything here.

Let me just explain quickly why that's an interesting aspect of this. So along with releasing the core R1 model,

Deep Seek also released a bunch of distilled models. And so what that means is they take a smaller model, which is open source, maybe it came from a Chinese company like QN, or maybe it came from Meta, like in the case of Lama. They took a small model, and then they sort of used a technique called distillation, where they use the output of the big model to rapidly improve the capabilities of the small model.

And this is kind of an open question of in the real world. So we have benchmarks from these small distilled models, but we don't know how they really function in the real world. If in a practical setting,

these for say a narrow application in the enterprise or something, if these small distilled models are sufficiently good, then you have an even further reduction in inference costs. So not instead of 30X, you might have 100X reduction or more in inference costs if the small distilled model is actually good enough for what you want to do. And all of this has an impact

for infrastructure planning. So this Stargate project where OpenAI and some other companies together, SoftBank, want to like spend $500 billion on building out huge data centers, the power supplies for those big data centers, and buy a lot of NVIDIA chips to stuff them with. It's rather amazing to me that the DeepSeek release kind of coincided with them

pitching, you know, their huge ambitions. And it's kind of funny because if inference ends up costing 30X or 100X less than what you thought, surely that would affect your planning for a $500 billion decadal project, right? And so it sort of reveals that most of this infrastructure, AI infrastructure stuff, I call it the AI infrastructure grift,

isn't actually based on any solid projections. Because if it was based on solid projections, the new information that came from the DeepSeq release would modify their calculations. And yet there's no sign of that. Yeah, like if you have like a more powerful GPU at home and can run like the 32 bit, a 32 billion parameter distilled model, then...

Why do you need to keep paying OpenAI for that information to do the prompting? So I think that's an interesting part of this. Yeah. So both the inference costs, because of the very clever optimizations that the company DeepSeek made in its training process, just in the model itself, both the training and the inference using the model are way, way cheaper than what people thought was possible. Yeah.

And so that new information, I think, has not been incorporated into people's thinking about infrastructure requirements. So that's one interesting aspect of this news. For people who are really into AI and they follow it at the level of the foundation models,

They'll know that one of the big advances recently was so-called reasoning models. So models that in a way kind of talk to themselves, like you ask it to solve some problem and it sort of just talks to itself and breaks the problem into steps. And, you know, ultimately this reasoning capability of the models lets them solve problems that previously in just a sort of single shot response to a prompt, they weren't able to solve these problems, but like say a complicated math problem or physics problem or programming problem. But now by reasoning with itself, the model can actually converge onto some

very complex solution to a complex problem. That was the sort of main chunk of progress in the big labs, especially OpenAI, releasing O1, which is a reasoning model. What DeepSeq showed is that rather than

In order to train models to have this reasoning, rather than having to take lots and lots of annotated chains of thought from humans – so the big labs were paying humans to human grad students in physics or chemistry or something to solve some problems and record their thinking process, and that was used as training data for the models –

Deep Sea came up with a very automated way of doing this using reinforcement learning. And so that's actually conceptually the most interest, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the new paper and the new work is that they came up with a totally different way to get these to create these reasoning reasoning capabilities in the models. And so for people who have a more academic interest in AI, I really suggest looking into that because that that is a super interesting new aspect of reasoning models.

I do wonder if OpenAI itself behind the scenes is also doing something similar, but because they haven't really talked about how they got the results that they did for O1, that we just don't know what they're actually doing behind the scenes. Well, I do have insider information coming from companies that supply data. So it's actually not OpenAI or Meta or Google itself that

generates this data for chain of thought, annotated chain of thought data or curated chain of thought data to do the reasoning training, they actually buy it. They buy it from other companies like Scale.ai is a well-known company. It's a unicorn. And they're a data provider to these big labs. And I know other companies that are also data providers to these big labs. These guys are making billions of dollars a year in revenue

Not just providing low-level cleaned data, but actually this chain of thought stuff. So I know for sure these big labs are spending a lot of money to get sophisticated chain of thought training data, which now possibly they don't need, is not necessary if you use the DeepSeq RL method. So that's another earth-shattering piece, this new paper.

Okay, that might explain why the scale.ai guy sounded kind of bitter on CNBC the other day. I think he should be bitter because like a lot of what, you know, he's built an infrastructure to like source human, you know, labor to produce this kind of data may not be necessary as better methods come online. So let's see, we've talked about

The technical innovations related to the model, we've talked about the infrastructure implications of the model. We could talk a little bit about the AI race between US and China. So I think prior to the deep sea papers coming out,

The position of most people in America would have been, even the so-called experts, would have been that China is somewhat behind, maybe a year or two behind the West or the US in particular in Gen AI, or particularly large language model Gen AI. And now I think a lot of people are realizing that actually there's kind of no gap, right? Because if you just look at benchmark performance, there are models now in China which are just as good as the best models.

US models. And going forward, then the issue is, well, the anti-China hawks are kind of hanging their hat on well, but eventually our sanctions will work and the Chinese labs won't have the cutting edge NVIDIA chips to train on. And so maybe we'll recover some kind of lead and hold it. What do you think about that?

Yeah, so recently I basically took a look at some of the, you know, just the physical hardware buildups going on in China. And I think, one, they have access to more chip than people think they are. I mean, they're smuggling H100 into China is actually a thing. Like that's been known for a while now. But aside from that, the domestic chip makers in China, especially Huawei, they're making like...

I wouldn't say pretty good, I would say pretty rapid progress on the development and scaling up production in China. And

Right now, I did some back-of-the-envelope computation recently just based on what ByteDance said they were going to buy from Huawei Ascend a couple days ago. And I think I could see easily that they're going to sell 1.5 million GPUs this year to the Chinese firms. And I do see this number going up over time as they get more 7 nanometer or maybe 5 nanometer capacity in there.

And one of the interesting things recently that happened is that one of the Chinese chip makers, CXMT, who produces DRAMs, they finally moved on to the DDR5 generations. And, you know, based on

what I've seen, you do need the level of memory chips that they produced is sufficient for making the HBM3. That type of chip is now prominent. They use that as a memory for the latest AI chips, for example. So,

So aside from just the AI algos, the models themselves, they're actually also building a hardware ecosystem underneath it, which I think is quite a sustaining process. So I think just looking at things, this points to a smoother path to them going forward.

Right. So let me, for the more expert audience, so the latest Huawei chips, the Ascend B or Ascend 910B and 910C, if you had to map that onto a more familiar NVIDIA product, how would you describe them? Like equivalent to an H800? Yeah.

to an H100? How would you describe the rough capability of those chips? Yeah. So the previous generation, SN910B, which I think they might have stopped production now...

is more akin to A800, so the slower interconnect speed version of A100. And the 910C is more like H800 because it has the same issue of lower interconnect speed and using HBM2E instead of HBM3.

So that's kind of where they're at hardware wise. So if in the next year or two, there are millions of 910Cs available to the leading Chinese AI companies and DeepSeek is now one of them.

I'm guessing there isn't any meaningful disadvantage. I mean, there may still be a disadvantage, but it's definitely not going to be decisive between what the US labs, big US labs can do and what the Chinese companies can do. Does that sound fair? Yeah. I always thought the issue with DeepSeek and some of the other smaller players in China were not necessarily the chips themselves, but just that they didn't have enough funding. Because aside from the

the access to chips, you also have to have money to actually rent them or buy them. And I think given the amount of chips that we're seeing coming into marketplace now, there's still going to be like a GPU deficit between the US market, the US AI hyperscalers versus the Chinese ones. But it's going to probably not going to be a big deal going forward.

And, you know, there was an assumption when they made the new AI export, like chip export rule, where they place the world into three categories of tier one, tier two, tier three. I think part of the rationale is they thought, okay, we just can't export any AI chip to China anymore, right?

And I think that's probably too late, my guess is. If they had enacted this from like 2021, I think that would have been an issue. But because, you know, the Chinese AI firms had like maybe a three or four year window to absorb the data.

the sanctions. So they're able to adjust to it. And as you can see with DeepSeek, you don't need as many chips as some people think to train a model. And a lot of the inference is actually not even done in China. It's done in America by all the open source companies.

to host all the models. Right. I mean, famously for people who are familiar with the DeepSeek paper, you know, they spent less than 6 million, like five and a half million to do the core pre-training

for one of their world-class models. And that was a shock to Americans. Actually, a lot of Americans, if you go online, you'll see they still don't believe that this was actually done. But I think it's pretty clear that they were able to do it. And so, yeah, we may need much less compute than people thought if we are smart about the model architecture and various optimizations.

So my feeling is that maybe because people didn't really ask any question about how much AI chips we actually need. People just thought we need to get to AGI. And there was never any question asked about the resource, the money that goes into it. That's why nobody questioned whether or not this can be done with less computation.

Yeah. I think, I mean, there's a meme, there's a particular narrative in the US now. So it's like kind of like the mid to high wit narrative, which is like, oh, well, gee, necessity is the mother of invention. And because they were GPU poor, the deep sea guys and other guys in China, they did all this hard work to optimize their architectures, et cetera, et cetera. But that leaves aside the fact that, look, this is extremely G loaded stuff. Like

Many people could not, even if you did have the necessity, you were not going to come up with the invention. And so they're just kind of overlooking how hard it was to actually, you know, implement all of these things and get it to run and then efficiently train models with it. I mean, it's very, very non-trivial.

Yeah. And if you look at globally, there's basically nobody, nobody else was actually training a competitive like model out there outside of America. Right. Exactly. My show kind of did for a little bit, but not really. Yeah.

Now, speaking of resources, there was a very, a lot of people are talking about the fact that the founder of DeepSea, Liang, was invited to meet with the premier of China, number two guy, Li Qiang. And it's very plausible to me that they will not have any resource limitations going forward. Yeah, and I think I just want to make it obvious out there that like computation power itself

I don't think it's as big of a deal as people say they are because in China there's these public data centers as part of the

EDWC project, East Data West Compute project, where there's going to be these 100 eFLOPs data centers being built across China at the moment. So the issue with DeepSeek is they didn't really have access to this before because they were not well known until the past few months, basically. They probably didn't get the attention of the Chinese government until the past couple months. So

I think they're going to have much less computation resource issues going forward. Yeah, I totally agree. When I was in China not that long ago, I had some meetings with some very high-level people, and we actually discussed the planning. It's joint planning between the major corporations and

AI leaders and the government about provisioning this compute that you're talking about. And, you know, maybe at that time, DeepSeq was not at the table, but definitely they're going to be at the table now. But the main take home is China is not going to be blindsided by this. The government is working with the companies to make sure that there's sufficient compute, that they can't end up way behind the Americans based on compute. And they're also part of the general policy setting process. And just, I think it's always good when

Especially if you're calling these things Manhattan Project, it's always good that the government understands a little bit of what the private organizations are doing and making sure that the process helps them in this thing. Like in America, right, like part one of the major issues with the entire AI rollout is the power constraint that we have here.

Part of the thing with Stargate was we need to build nuclear power stations, a bunch of them. Whereas in China, there are other concerns. So it looks like DeepSeek got a seat at the big boys table where they get to inform the highest level of the Chinese leadership on what's needed to accelerate the development. Exactly. Now, I was going to say that if you list the...

Chinese companies that have produced really state-of-the-art models. Okay, there's a huge list actually, but depending on exactly what you mean by state-of-the-art. So DeepSeek clearly has one in R1. We mentioned Doubao 1.5, which is also super optimized, has reasoning capabilities. But there's another one by iFlytech.

Which also, at least in terms of benchmarks, is one of the top models in the world. And that was the first model, I believe, that was trained 100% on Ascend, on Huawei hardware, not using any NVIDIA GPUs. So it is clearly possible for them to keep pace just using internally produced chips.

Yeah, like the issue with iFlightTech was they got put on the entity list several years ago. So they had no choice but to use Ascend chips from all the way from 2021 onward, I think. So the fact that they were able to keep the pace and they do a pretty good job with like multimodal type of models. So yeah, so I think it's interesting.

It's correct to assume that the send chips themselves, even if they are a little slower than the NVIDIA chips, even if they use a little more power, you know, if you get enough of them, they can do the job. Yeah, exactly. So I think, you know, the points we just made in the last...

Five or 10 minutes are really lost upon like, you know, high level people in Washington talking about the AI race or the chip war and even people in the valley. I think people in the valley are not tracking this sufficiently well to have just even the conversation that you and I just had. Let's shift gears and just talk a little bit about the real world.

capabilities of the deep seek models. I and a bunch of people that I keep in touch with who are, you know, people who actually read these papers, for example, have been testing deep seek V3 and also now R1 substantially more

I actually feel they're extremely good. I think they're on par with the best, say, 01 or any other Western model. I haven't used them for coding, so I can't comment on that very much. But in terms of just the ability to answer questions or solve difficult problems, I'm super impressed with the models. And I don't think the benchmarks are misleading. I'm curious what you think. Yeah, so...

I've also used them a little bit personally, but I also had a chance to actually apply the DeepSeek v3 just for some work-related stuff where I had to read some pretty complicated documents and answer questions about them. And

I just wanted to do some benchmarking to see how good the model is because if it is actually so much cheaper, then it might make sense down the road to use it or something like that. So what I typically run these things on are prompts which are written very much for GPT-4-0 purposes. And then I use the same prompt with minimal changes. I randomize

the DPC v3, and I found the results to be like maybe 90 to 95% what the GPT-4-0 performance looked like. And that's without even tweaking any of the prompts. And obviously, if each of the

Usually LLMs, right? The prompt itself makes a big difference. So I would imagine if I was to tweak the prompts a little bit, I can probably get the same performance on GPT-4.0 as GPT-3. Now GPT itself, like OpenAI itself, has some other functions that they're offering now that are probably not available on like an open source model yet. But just in terms of going through legal documents and financial documents that I tested, which is not simple at all, it seemed to do the job really well.

Yeah, so at Superfocus, I know we are in the middle of testing to see to what extent we can replace, for example, GPT-4.0 with DeepSeq models or other open source models. And I know other founders of other applied AI companies, the ones that are really building products that are used in actual enterprises, everyone is basically going through this testing now. And so like six months from now, you could see a huge shift

where there's much less utilization of, say, open AI models and much more utilization of these really good open source models. It feels like the entire AI community overnight is basically trying, testing the DeepSeek models out, whereas before they might have been using LAMA, you know, just so they're not beholden to the open AI issues and costs and such thing, right? The interesting thing I find about DeepSeek R1 is that

And one, you know, you can run it on like your local computer if you wanted to, like the distilled models. The two, one of the main issues I have with O1 is that it's just very slow because it takes so much time to think about questions and things like that. So, and another issue that I personally have with open AI is the fact that sometimes it just goes down intraday for four hours at a time.

And you can imagine like if you're a corporation and one, you're already scared of sending your private data to an AI firm. And two, you need 100% uptime in your system. I just don't see how you can trust yourself with like a closed source AI if the open source AI is close to its performance. Yeah, absolutely. That's how I see it as well. And that's how I think other founders that are in the

kind of the applied, not the foundation model space, but the people who apply foundation models to solve real world problems. Okay, so we've done a little over 30 minutes. Any last things you want to say about the, what I would call the deep seek R1 Sputnik moment that we just went through? Yeah, I think that this AI race, and I really hate to think of as an AI race, but it's quite significant. And my personal view on this is that

If we can lower the price of AI to as cheap as what we're seeing out of these Chinese firms have done recently, that's actually a huge plus for accelerating the AI utilization going forward.

And open sourcing something probably gives more customers more confidence that they will have control of their data sources and things like that. So I think it's actually not relying on closed sources is actually a major help towards just full deployment of AI in the next five years. Yeah, I totally agree. That's my hope. Yeah, that's my hope on this. And the other thing I've been paying attention to is the DeepSeek app.

So I was listening to the All In podcast today and they mentioned that one of the main treasures of like with one of the main, you know, properties of one assets of OpenAI is ChatGPT, the app itself, right? Or their website, right?

And I was looking up on the list and I guess it's due to the, you know, it's due to like the huge wave of press they got recently. But I saw the DeepSeek app skyrocket to like third on the iOS list for productivity gains. I think ChatGPT is number one, but...

DeepSeek is now above Gemini on the iOS store. It's also above Gemini on the Google Play store. So

Yeah, so I think, you know, ChaiGBT has a challenge on their hand from the app point of view. I think DeepSea can keep this going. I'd be curious to see, like, just how much the app side of things make a difference going forward also. Yeah, incredible. All right, well, thanks for joining me again. And for our listeners, now we're going to transition and you'll hear a conversation that TP and I had yesterday.

a few weeks ago about sixth generation fighter jets and military technology competition between the United States and China. See you in the next segment. Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is TP Huang. He's been on this podcast before. TP is a very, very active poster on X-Wing.

And I suggest you follow him if you're interested in technology, specifically in US-China technology competition. And he follows many different verticals ranging from batteries, alternative energy, electric vehicles, AI, and what we're going to talk about today, which is military technology. I've said it before, I'll say it again. I think of all the people I know of, including people in the think tank business, they're

in the Pentagon, academics. Nobody is following this hugely complex and important set of subjects with the granularity and deep insight of T.P. Wong. And I have no idea how he does it because in his day job, he's an AI engineer. T.P., welcome to the show. Oh, hey, Steve. I'm really happy to be back. Great. So...

To lead into this subject, here's TP talking to a common group of people that we know about maybe not a month ago, three or four weeks ago. And he's saying, hey, guys, be ready for some big news. And everyone's like, oh, what is TP talking about? What is it? A new missile? Or what's going to happen? Like drones? And...

Of course, TP was referring to the reveal, which happened just recently, of two sixth-generation, I believe, fighters, but you'll clarify, TP, if that's correct, but two sixth-generation huge stealth airplanes that the Chinese military or companies that work with the Chinese military have developed. And these are really the first sixth-generation planes

planes that any country has, although they're not in full production yet. So TP, maybe you can just start out by introducing what it is we know about these new planes.

Yeah. Hi, Steve. So what we know about the planes so far is that they're in the initial phase of their flight testing at the moment. So just to put things into perspective, what we have right now is what we consider to be the sixth generation or at least the new generation of fighter jets.

And, you know, previous generation, like the fourth generation would be in China side would be J-10. In America side would be F-15, F-16s and F-18s and F-14s. And then the fifth generation would be like F-22s, F-35s. And then on the China side, it's like J-20s. So just to put things into perspective, like China flew the fourth generation plane for the first time in 1998. Yeah.

And the aircraft joined service in 2004. J-20 project first flew in 2011 and it joined service in 2018.

So what happened in December was that we had the two major Chinese fighter jet design bureau, one in Chengdu, one in Shenyang. And they both had their prototype, not demonstrated actual prototypes, but

fly for the first time and this was made public. So there was a lot of questions out there about whether these are demonstrators, like how early in the process they are. But due to, you know, like things that the PLA watching community have followed in the recent, in the past few decades, we believe that these are actual prototypes.

And so we think that the planes that fly now are going to join service in around the 2031, 2032 range, just based on previous two examples in the fourth and fifth generation. So they're still like about seven years from joining service based on what we know. But, you know, they are definitely happening.

I guess. Got it. And from the American side, do we know anything about where the American sixth generation program is? Yeah. So what we do believe is that the American side, there's two programs right now that we know of. One is the Air Force has what they call the NGAD project, the Next Generation Air Dominance project. And the Navy have the FAXX project.

And the NGAB project was formed around 2014. And what we know about it is that it had demonstrators or like X-planes around that range fly around 2020, maybe like more like, you know, they're still what happens is like companies like Lockheed, Boeing and Grumman, they will try to submit proposals to try to win the contract and

For example, for the F-35 project, you had the X-32 and the X-35 between the Lockheed and Boeing proposals. And then eventually Lockheed won the F-35 contract. So we are, for the NGAB project, we're

A lot of people believed that they were going to select the winning proposal sometime in 2024, but that got delayed because of cost issues. So America currently is in the middle of what we call the nuclear triad renewal program, which is basically we're refreshing the three-legged nuclear deterrence program.

And the Air Force right now has to shop a lot of money to pay for the Sentinel ICBM and also the B-21 bomber project. So...

It was feeling a little cash strapped. And I guess it was not expecting the Chinese program to proceed this quickly. So for the NGA project, the current status is they're basically punting the decision of what to do with the NGA project to the Trump administration. And then the Naval Project, FAXX, they did say that they would like to pick a winner.

of the project in 2025. But prior to this, they also have their own budgetary issues. And that is mostly also due to the nuclear triad renewal because we have a new class of ballistic missile submarine, the Columbia class, and that is under

construction because the Ohio class is getting too old and they need to be replaced at some point. So from the Navy point of view, the submarines normally rank as the highest in priority, and especially the ballistic missile submarines are the highest priority in terms of the budgetary concerns. And also just due to the very weakened shipbuilding industry in America, the warships, a lot of them are costing a lot of money to build.

And due to that, there hasn't been as much money allocated for the FAXX as for NGAD. So while they're saying that they would like to pick a winning proposal in 2025, that remains to be seen. But so that's kind of where we are with the American programs at the moment. If the US had already chosen its winning designs for these sixth generation planes, at what point would those go into production?

Generally speaking, I'll just use F-35 as an example. The winning program was picked in 2001, I believe. And then after the winning program was picked, it took another five years for the first flight to happen. And then after the first flight happened, it took another 10 years for the Air Force version to achieve initial operating status.

So, you know, the F-35 program was kind of a mess. So I'm not sure that's the best example, but the F-22 program, the winning proposal, I think was picked in the early 90s. And then it first flew in 1997 and then joined service in 2005. So generally speaking, we're like in the fifth generation program.

you were looking just for like three to five years

from picking the winning proposal to the first flight, and then another eight to 10 years for the testing to be finished. Now, many people would argue that there was a lot of problems in the way that the fifth generation program was run and that they were getting rectified. And that also because America wasn't feeling peer competitor back then. So they just felt that they had more time. So

So the sixth generation program probably would not take as long. So my assessment is the sixth generation program, even if things go smoothly, it would take about three years from taking the winning proposal to having the first flight of a prototype. And it probably would take another 10 years, not 10 years, seven years for it to actually achieve the initial operating status.

Okay. So, but in terms of the, you know, back in the Cold War, we used to talk about the missile gap between the Soviets and us. Here, maybe we're talking about five years, three to five years, where maybe the Chinese have an operational sixth generation fighter and the U.S. doesn't have one. Is that fair? Yeah.

I would say probably closer to five to six years based on my own estimations. Like I would put Engad as likely entering service around 2037 range. Okay. Okay. So, but the main shock is like maybe the US side thought they were getting it to the sixth generation way faster than the Chinese since they've been producing fifth generation planes for a long time since the F-22 first came out.

Yeah, so I think that if we look at the Cold War, even from the start of jet fighter, jet aircraft age, right? America has never fallen behind at any time. Like the Soviets had some good aircraft, but they were never able to match the American pace at developing and innovating new aircraft. So...

If the most likely case is that the Chinese program does enter service first, it will be the first time in the history where America has fallen behind in military aircraft. And, you know, the American military,

hard power is rested upon its air power, right? So if you have a situation where you want to fight like a pure competitor 6,000 miles away and you don't have the best aircraft, it's kind of, there's not much deterrence there really. Right. So given that the American way of war has been predicated on air dominance basically forever, right?

And they may not have it in the West Asian theater. Let's talk specifically about the capabilities of these planes. So they're huge, they're stealthy, and they may have very advanced radar and electronic warfare capabilities. So maybe you could elaborate on that. Yeah, so...

One of the things that we noticed with the Chinese, the two projects, and they're very striking, actually. It points to that something that China identified as a weakness for America.

And I would say is that American aircraft has been designed to be a little smaller than they should be. And the implication of when you have smaller aircraft are, you know, a couple of falls. One is because they're smaller, you can't carry as much jet fuel in them, so they don't fly as far. So that's one problem. But the more pressing issue when it comes to the

Next generation is what we are seeing right now with the F-35 program. So the one major factor going forward is that you're going to see the need for storing, having more high power radio frequency like radars and, you know, any kind of electronic warfare kind of equipment in your plane that will require a lot of power generation. And they also require

they require not only for the emitters, like the stuff that sends out the radio waves and receive the radio waves, but also the computation powers, the cooling capacities. And in the future, I would assume that these aircraft also need like a laser for, you know, what we call the direct energy weapons against threats that are coming in. So, yeah,

Why would I say this is currently a weakness for U.S. Air Force? So we're seeing that right now with the F-35 program, where it was originally designed with the cooling capacity for, I think, under 20 kilowatts. And as part of the first upgrade, they were able to raise the cooling capacity of F-35 to 30 kilowatts.

And now they're saying that for the Block 4 F-35, they have to make this huge modification just to get the cooling capacity up to 60 to 80 kilowatts. And they think that it's going to future-proof their requirements.

And the reason why this is a problem is that when F-35 first came out, the radar itself was very advanced for the time. But it was using, you know, what we call the gallium arsenide technology. So the first generation of ASA radars all used gallium arsenide radars.

And these are the fundamental to, you know, sending out the radio waves and receiving them, whether it's for radars or for the electronic warfare portion of things. And the F-22, when it first came out, it had like a 20 kilowatt radar, powered radar. And F-35 actually has less than that.

So, and, you know, that's because obviously F-35 is a little smaller. And also, you know, they stuck with the gallium arsenide technology, thinking that, you know, other air force can't catch up to them in any quick, like, you know, rather speedy fashion. But unfortunately for America, like China actually caught up to them pretty quickly on that part of things. So then the F-35 project with APG-4,

81 uses gallium arsenide technology on its radars. And it was probably using the best gallium arsenide technology that, you know, that was available at the time. But essentially they were still using radars.

what we now consider to be quite legacy technologies. And it uses basically the same type of material as the F-22, which also uses gallium arsenide. So that's why with F-22, you had maybe 20 kilowatt for peak power on the APG-77. And F-35, I think it was a little less than that. And because F-35, it's a little smaller.

And it has a little less interior space. So even though it did have a better version of the gallium arsenide, we didn't see, you know, like it wasn't like significantly improved over F22.

And what we also know when we think about gallium arsenide is that it is like relatively weak compared to the third generation semiconductor material that's become available like gallium nitride. So if you want to think about it, gallium arsenide is what we use in our phones for what they call power amplification. And so that's, you know, take signals and then amplify the signal and send it out.

And gallium nitride, on the other hand, is used by 5G base stations and also, you know, the satellites in the space as they're trying to transmit data back and forth. So basically, it's more ideal to use gallium arsenide for low power applications and better to use gallium nitride for the higher power applications. So basically,

So the F-35 has this limitation right now where it's using gallium arsenide, ASA radar for all its electronic radar-related stuff. And we're expecting it to go to...

gallium nitride with the next generation APG-85. But the problem with that is now we're limited by this concept where it only has maximum of 60 to 80 kilowatts of cooling. So there's a limit to basically how powerful the radar itself can be.

And I think China really saw this as a possible advantage. So that's why when we're seeing the sixth generation aircraft being developed by China, they all have huge notes in the front.

When you have huge notes in the front of the aircraft, and if you take the picture of the J-20 versus J-36 side by side, and also you can take the picture of the Flanker Su-27 variant in China and the Shenyang sixth generation project and put them side to side, you can notice that the notes of the sixth generation project to be humongous, like

they are at least twice as wide as the fifth generation or the fourth generation aircraft. So when you have something that's twice as wide, then, you know, and you think about things from two-dimensional point of view, then the area of it is like four times at least as large. And that means is the radar you can fit in front of the nose can be four times as large, right?

And on top of that, you have four times as volume to stick in like any kind of electronics you want to put in the front, any kind of cooling, you know, power generation equipment, thermal management, any kind of CPU, GPUs that you need in there to do computation and run these large AI models to control drones and whatever. So the more interior space you have, the better it is.

And what I'm anticipating based on the size of the nose of these aircraft is that we could be looking at like megawatt power kind of platforms with the sixth generation. So like maybe they will not be like generating one megawatt of power to start off from day one, but they can be, you know,

in the future generations to support one megawatt or even higher power generations. And, you know, when you think about matching up like a future Block 4 F-35 with maybe 60 kilowatt of power and then match it up against a Chinese sixth generation aircraft with one megawatt power, that's a huge difference. Like if you do, if the radar wave you send out is 15 times as

as much, then the distance of your radar waves can go four times as long. And then when it comes back, it's basically a power of four relationship. So basically when the power is 16 times as much, your radar can see twice as far, basically.

And when it comes to electronic warfare, you can basically suppress radars or generate big signals as received by the other side. That's four times as higher. So there is significantly higher amount of power, electronic power coming out of these new Chinese aircraft. And so that's one of the main advantages they have. The other advantage that I think that people notice very early when they look at the Chinese sixth generation project is technology.

None of them have tails. So these are novel designs.

They're, you know, they're like kind of like F-20, not F-22, B-2 and B-21 in that way, in that they're more like kind of like flying kind of design where you don't really have a tail. And that makes the aircraft really hard to detect from all angles and by different wavelengths. So one of the things that separate the, you know, the B-21 type of stealth versus F-22 type of stealth is that

you're stealthy to a different degree and from every angle. But more importantly, you're also stealthy against like what they call the ultra high frequency radar. So radar where the wavelength is much longer. When you use flywheel designs,

tailless designs, you're basically very stealthy against those kind of radars also. So from fifth to sixth generation, you're seeing not only like a lot more power, you're seeing a lot more stealth and you're seeing a lot more range.

And with the J36 design itself, it uses three engines. So J36 is basically the Chengdu 6th Generation Project. And it has three engines. And the reason why it has three engines is because one, it needs it for the power generation. And two, it needs it because it wants to be able to

cruise at supersonic speed without using afterburners. And you can do it based on the three engine configuration. We think it can go as high as Mach 2.0. So it can sustain cruising at Mach 2 without using afterburners. And that makes a huge difference because then it can get to the battlefield much quicker without using up a lot of the fuel. Because

Using afterburners are really not very efficient. So when you're flying, you'd like to stick with the non-afterburner version as much as possible. So what do you think the level of stealthiness is, i.e. what do you think the radar cross-section of these flying wing designs is? You know, that's something it's really hard to say, but I would guess that it's probably...

significantly better than F-22, but probably not as stealthy as B-21s because B-21s aren't expected to fly at cruise supersonic speed and make turns as much. So if you look at the J-36, it does have these surfaces on the back of the aircraft that

you know, is used to try to maneuver. So there's some really complex flight control software that needs to be written and tested to validate their performance because, you know, it doesn't have tails. Yeah. The control surfaces are just these little things at the end of the wing or at the back. Yeah, they're not like major deflectors or anything like that. I'm curious though, you were mentioning all angle stealth. Now, if you're directly above any of these planes, right?

Wouldn't they actually have a kind of large radar signature? Yeah, I guess so. But in most cases, once you get to the point where they're right on top of you, you're probably dead by that point already. But I'm thinking in the future when, and we're going to get to this in a second, but when you have a crewed

you know, a fighter with pilots in it, a pilot in it, and then you have drones. The drones could be at maybe a much higher altitude and with their radars pointing down. So I always wondered, like, I don't want to say game theory, but the strategy or tactics of stealth seem much more complicated when I have multiple platforms around and they could be at very different altitudes. And I just don't, I've never seen any full analysis of all this stuff, probably because it's classified.

Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons that fifth generation went from it was really hard to find and obtain weapon quality stuff

tracking on F-35 to become not so hard, or at least for the two major powers, China and the US. Because when you have a lot more sensors from different angle on different wavelengths, it became a lot easier to actually first figure out which direction they came from. And then once you figure out which direction they are, then you can have your weapon grade radar just target that direction, focus all its power on that direction.

And then it can, because it's scanning a much smaller area, then it can obtain weapon grade tracking from much longer range. So one of the big improvement from fifth to sixth is you have to get to a much higher level of stealthiness.

Okay. So you've got a big plane. It's got potentially a big fuel capacity because the tanks might, you know, they're in that giant wing. It may have very large range. It may have very powerful radar and electronic warfare capabilities. How do you see these things being used? Sure. So

I think generally speaking, when these aircraft first came out, the Chinese commentators generally said basically something along the line of Guam, you're in trouble or something like that. So we believe that they probably have 3,000 kilometer combat radius in order to reach Guam. And probably the actual range is probably close to 10,000 kilometers, just based on what people are saying.

So these are, you know, they can go a long way and they can do the battle and then they can, you know, lead a bunch of drones and come back. So we, from fifth to sixth generation, it's important for people to think about these new sixth generation systems as systems. So,

One of the questions that got raised by people online was, well, this thing is not very maneuverable. If we get in a dogfight with this thing, then we can move much better than it. But the reality is that these aircraft are expected to operate

like in a team, it's expected to have a bunch of what the American Air Force call as CCAs or collaborative combat aircraft. So a bunch of drones that are operated by the piloted aircraft. And the piloted aircraft are expected to be really high value assets. So they're expected to be a little further back. And the drones are expected to be operating further in the front, right?

And in the battlefield, the role of the piloted aircraft is not only to find other systems, but also work together with all the drones and other aircraft that's in the theater and then use what we call sensor fusion to have a full view of what they think the actual aircraft

battlefield look like. So if you're trying to find, for example, F-35 directly heads on, it's kind of hard to find it because that's where it's most stealthy at. But if you have a bunch of drones in different directions and they're all scanning to find where the F-35 is, then they can capture it from a different angle. And once you

transmit that data to your piloted fighter, then it can find it a much longer range. And then once you do this, you can see where all, once you have a situation awareness of where all the enemy assets are, whether it's the aircraft, the naval ships, the land-based radars, and the satellites, then you can make decisions on what to do about them. For example, in some cases, you might want to jam certain things like the satellite signals

In other cases, you might want to use electronic warfare to confuse the other side. So one example of this is in 1996, there was a famous example for the PLA where they noticed on their radar system that there was hundreds of American planes coming at them. So then they scrambled a bunch of their old, very archaic second generation aircraft, like MiG-21 variants into the air. And then

And then once they got in the air, they realized there was no aircraft coming to them. And then later on, they figured out that basically what happened was the American electronic warfare planes, most likely the EA-6B, basically just confused them, confused their radar, making them think that there's like hundreds of aircraft coming when there's like

So that is part of the power of the electronic warfare is that you have like a system and its goal is to confuse the other side into thinking that there are aircraft in places or there are like stuff in places that...

There isn't anything there. And when there are things there, they think they're not there. So an important part of the piloted aircraft in this case, so the J36 in this case, is direct its drones and other assets to provide a consistent story to the other side to tell it, okay, these are where our aircraft are coming from.

and confuse the other side into thinking about these things. And this actually has a lot of possible dire consequences because let's say you are aircraft carrier coming in and you get to maybe 3,000 kilometers away from the Chinese border. And suddenly your face was a bunch of, you know, you have your air wing out, but then you're dealing with maybe J36 and drones from like five, 600 kilometer away.

And they're executing like electronic warfare against you. And they realize you're there. So they have targeting data about you because you're a big carrier, right? And they know where the warships are. But they also have these DF-26 and DF-27s back on the mainland. And you can imagine if they are executing electronic warfare against you, then they will try to

make you think that there are more DF-26s and DF-27s coming than there actually are. And that makes it a lot harder for the defender to actually intercept the missiles. So it increases the probability that they're going to get hit by an attack. And so this applies not only to the aircraft carrier that are defending, but also the land force, like in Guam, where maybe you have some ballistic missile defense or just...

the regular Patriot missiles or whatever. And then you are dealing with these, you're already dealing with the pressure of these advanced DF-26 missiles that you think you can try to trick into sinking into missing you. But now you're dealing with a lot of electronic warfare pressure coming from the Chinese Air Force. And that makes it a lot harder for you to actually intercept the missiles that are coming at you. And

it's also harder for you to confuse the DF-26 into thinking that you're not there. So in terms of a Pacific conflict, that's kind of the main problem that the Guam defender or any kind of aircraft carrier entering anything within 3,000 kilometers of Chinese border it will be facing. So in terms of the components that would make up this hypothetical system,

Do we already know what kind of supersonic drones would accompany these sixth generation fighters on a mission?

So we're not really clear what kind of drones are going to be coming along yet. I think those are to be developed. It's not clear to me the drones themselves necessarily has to be supersonic. I think that some of them can be subsonic and some of them may be supersonic and some of them might be hypersonic, right? So they all need to get to the battlefield at a certain point, right? But they might be starting their flight profile at a different point in the...

at different times. And some of them might arrive at the battlefield not at the same time. So these are the things that as an Air Force, you need to test out during your validation process and tactical development. This is something that PLA itself has to develop over time. And it's probably going to try out a lot of these concepts with the world's only fifth generation twin-seater, which is J-20S.

So one thing you notice with the Chinese planes like J-36 is it has two pilots. And part of that is just because it's controlling so many drones that you probably need a second pilot in there to help with the directions. They think probably the AI itself is not alone in determining that. So-

So that's part of the evolution in air warfare from what we know in the fourth generation to fifth to sixth is that we're moving to systems of systems, and it's going to take some time for the air force themselves to understand how to actually use this technology correctly.

And I think as amateurs like myself, I'm only speculating that's how things are used right now. I can see some of the technologies that are being developed, like the hypersonic drones that they have. They're still several years from actually being able to be put into the battlefield. Another question, do these sixth generation prototypes tell us anything about the development of the WS-15 engine?

So I would say that WS-15 right now is proceeding pretty nicely. We're seeing them on the newer J20s being tested at the moment, and I do expect them to actually be used on J20s in production units this year or next year. So I think the project itself is progressing pretty smoothly. What I would say is that the...

It's kind of risky to be testing a new airframe with its own novel flight control software and to test a new type of engine at the same time. So it just didn't make a lot of sense for them to be using WS-15 in the first prototype. But I would expect that once we get to 2031, 2032, when this thing's going to production, that they will be flying with WS-15 and

Just because once you go from a previous generation, even a really upgraded previous generation, you're probably looking at maybe 15% to 20% improvement in the thrust. So that gives you quite a bit more power.

Now, in introducing this subject, I should have mentioned that you've written a long Substack post with this analysis in it. And in that post, you have figures where you've basically painted maps, which indicate something like a 3,000 kilometer operating range for one of these fighters. And I think the point you're trying to make is that, you know, taking off from relatively protected bases on the mainland of China, you

or on existing Chinese bases, they have quite a lot of range. It can cover huge parts of the Pacific, huge parts of Asia. Maybe just comment on what you were trying to illustrate with those circles.

Yeah, so I kind of went into it with just, I wanted to just test it out to see what 3,000 kilometer means in the real world. And what I found is that the 3,000 kilometer for a land-based aircraft means that you can pretty much cover all of Asia from China with 3,000 kilometer. And that includes basically all of India, Southeast Asia, and a good part of the Western part of Pacific Asia.

And you can probably fly north enough to Russia where if you get tanker up there to refuel over the Russian airspace, then you can fly and hit Alaska if you want to. So if this thing goes into service in 2031, 2032 range, it pretty much gives the PLA control of most of Asia at that time. And America does have...

allies that has defense treaties with. So I think it will become an uncomfortable situation for some of those countries. And even beyond that, the Shenyang project, I think is two engine. And I think most of us expect that we have a Shenyang project because they needed a slightly smaller aircraft, but also pretty huge that can go on aircraft carriers.

So we think that the Shenyang Project's aircraft is probably more like 2,000 kilometers or 1,500 to 2,000 kilometers in combat radius. And if you have a J-36 that can protect them, like maybe up to 2,500 kilometers, 3,000 kilometers out, then...

and then you have a carrier for these Shenyang six-generation projects, then they can hit areas that...

people don't think of right now for the PLA. I think that's probably one of the reasons that the Indians are really freaking out at the moment, because it's kind of interesting when the news about these aircraft come out, most of the American national security types, they were pretty alarmed by the situation, but the media didn't really cover it that much.

And a big part of that is if you just plot the map, the J36 can cover all of India almost. And then if a dirty J36 can cover all of India, then basically the aircraft carrier can operate from Bay of Bengal. And then anything that takes off from aircraft carrier in Bay of Bengal can control like

large part of India and the Indian ocean and, and, and,

yeah, control that area pretty well. It really is like a, you know, if you're Indian and Indian government and you see China as a security threat, then it's really a very uncomfortable situation. And, you know, we, we're already seeing the Indians say, basically some of the Indian commoners say, maybe like, you know, we, you know, we have to negotiate with China a little more because we're, we're coming into those, we're not in a good security situation. So those are the kind of conversations I think are going to take in, be taking place from, uh,

for a few years there when once China does have a sixth generation and nobody else has. Just so I understand this better, I mean, obviously, when you talk about the range, the range does imply, you know, hypothetically, the maximum reach of the airplane. But

Are you assuming that air defense, you know, that they can just overfly India with one of these things? Because wouldn't they have to contend with air defense? And, you know, even a fourth generation fighter can sometimes shoot down a fifth generation fighter or etc. So what's the actual assumption you're making there?

The assumption I'm making is that it would be very hard if you are a country with, let's say, S-400 surface-to-air missiles and using older Russian air defense technology, and then you're dealing with the other side coming at you with sixth-generation aircraft and really stealthy drones that are backed up by ballistic missiles, then

It's very unlikely for you to be able to defend yourself before the ballistic missiles or the drones launch standoff cruise missiles hit you. Like maybe you can detect, you know, a drone from like, you know, a couple hundred kilometers out. Unlikely, but maybe it's possible. But then you're not going to detect the J-36 before it detects you first. And...

Because of that, it is always at a better situation and awareness than you. And it can prosecute electronic warfare to you to a degree that it's very hard for you to counter. And so that would be the problem facing whether you're India or Japan or Australia in this case. Okay. Just to be clear, you're talking about a situation where one country is trying to

get air dominance over the other by attacking its systems, which is different from saying like, I have something which is so stealthy, it can just overfly your country and you don't even know it's there. Yeah, I think if you fly something like J36 over the air defense radars, it'll get detected eventually, but maybe pretty close to the air defense system. And I would expect the air defense radars to improve over time.

And the methodology they do to improve over time, but it'll be hard. So I'll give you an example. So I spoke with Paul Huang like up on this issue like a while ago. And he told me basically the Taiwan Air Force has never tracked a J-20. Interesting. So that gives you a pretty good idea. Yeah, that's pretty interesting. Although I'm not that familiar with their, the level of their radar systems, but...

Like, like basically he's the way he made it sound like, you know, they can kind of feel like the radar system can kind of see something there. So, you know, like they can figure maybe a J 20 is there, but they would have to send an aircraft out there to verify that it's there.

So, and that we're talking about is still a fifth generation aircraft. So, you know, with sixth generation, it would be even- And also, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but among fifth generation planes, J-20 is not especially stealthy, right? F-22 and F-35 are actually more stealthy?

So the interesting part about this is after I spoke the last time to you about this topic, I had another chat with some people and they mentioned to me that the latest FJ20s are considered to be as stealthy as F-35s from the front and the sides. But it's, you know, so I don't know how true that is. I would assume like it's in the same category.

as an F-35. It's not like something that's a lot harder, a lot easier to track in the air. Yeah, I mean, I would guess most of this stuff, it's very hard for people who are not, who don't have top secret clearance to know any of this stuff. Yeah, we do know that like, you know, China has been making some real progress in what they call the matter material, which are basically the material on the aircraft that absorb, um,

so that they don't come back. And, you know, they're on fourth generation of that material now. So we've seen like a, you know, progressive improvement in their stealth level over time. Yeah, kind of interesting because in the old days, I mean, not that long ago, they used to say that J-20s, whenever they flew near India, they would always put the reflector on. So when they're flying and they're not trying to be totally stealthy, in fact, they want maybe their friendly planes to be able to detect that.

a self-fighter they put this little reflector mirror on and the claim was they always did that for the indians as well because they didn't want the indians actually to get any data on what a fully you know stealthy j20 would be like so it's interesting that they're doing that with taiwan

Yeah, so I don't know. Maybe they don't think that the Taiwanese air defense can get good readings on it. But my impression is when Chinese Air Force is dealing with F-35s in East China Sea,

They generally have those radar reflectors on at some point. And the same with F-35s. If you take it off, then you're giving information about the, you know, even though it's a stealthy, weak radar reflection kind of airplane, you're giving free data to your enemy. Yes, yes. I mean, the deflectors not only amplifies it, it modifies your signal. When they're wearing the reflector, it doesn't help them in actual wartime detect your plane because the signal will be totally different than what the reflector on.

But it is interesting, and I don't know how true this is, is like whether or not how well those deflectors work against very long wavelengths. So for the X-band waves that the fighter jets normally use, they probably show a significantly different signature, but for like an X-band wave,

L-band or ultra-high-frequency band radar that are much longer. I don't know if the small deflectors actually make a huge difference to the radar signature. But those are part of the methodology in which they actually figure out something's coming. And then once they figure out something's coming, then they can try to obtain weapon-grade tracking on things. But I think this will put

you know, India in this case in interesting buying actually. Yeah. You know, it's all, so, I mean, all of this is very theoretical. So it's like, you know, for a nuclear armed state, it's like, yes, you might be at a big disadvantage in terms of conventional capability relative to the enemy. But in a way like you, you know, there's a limit to how much they're going to push you. Right. Because nobody wants to have an exchange that destroys a city or something like that. Right. So it makes the game theory very complicated. Yeah.

Yes. But like, I think one of the point I was trying to make with my post about the secondary and tertiary effect of sixth generation aircraft is if you have a situation and we get to like, you know, 2030s, we have a situation where China has these like, you know, next generation fighters.

in service and they're capable of attacking Guam and take it out completely. They're capable of scaring the carrier groups from getting too close. And they're also capable of, say, hitting one of the bigger air bases in Anchorage, Alaska, right? Then that actually will be a pretty big deterrence

In like a West Pacific conflict scenario. So how that does things, we'll see. So my reading on this is that I think if you're America and you want to keep your military power in people's eyes, you have to have something that counters this.

Right. But yeah, it's hard for me to reason about this stuff because, for example, the US let the Chinese build up their anti-ship ballistic missile system for a long time, and they were just in denial about whether those systems worked. And now they seem to have finally realized that, yeah, probably these systems work.

And so in a way, I feel like they already have A2AD, anti-access aerial area denial in the West Pacific. This just makes the problem worse, obviously. But the military, I mean, these days, the US is so dysfunctional, people can just cope. And the Chinese side maybe is a little bit too rational. It's like, look, guys, you're to the other side. Look, guys, you guys are in trouble. Look at these systems we've developed. The other side can just cope and pretend the systems don't work.

Yeah, so that's one of the interesting things to me, right? It's very hard to reason with certain people that the ballistic missiles themselves are that useful that they can just...

cause like you know the Guam to not be useful in like a West Pacific conflict I would think I would have thought that the having something like J36 flying would alarm a lot more people but right now it's pretty much restricted to the to the national like the you know the

the national security types on social media, like Tyler Rowe, the guy that does sandbox, people like that. They just have no idea how war works in the first place. And then even guys who are in the military, like in the US military, sorry, I'm going to say something really controversial, but having not fought a peer competitor in really a very long time, I'm not sure they can really reason properly. Like, you know, I just saw a quote from some Marine Corps jarhead guy saying like,

Well, we're not afraid of the Chinese. They have not fought a big war in a long time. You know, they don't know what they're doing. And it's like, maybe that's true, but it doesn't mean their missiles don't work. Like what, what, what kind of argument is that about like whether their missiles are actually going to sink your ships, right? It's, it's, it's kind of like, doesn't really go there. Right. To say like, oh yeah, they haven't fought a huge infantry battle.

I haven't conducted an amphibious invasion in a long time or ever, but it doesn't really say one way or the other whether the missiles will actually hit the ships. But I just feel like the whole thing is so different from the Cold War that I grew up in where in the Cold War, you had genuinely smart people.

Who understood physics and engineering reasoning about all this stuff. And they called the shots. It wasn't like some dumb people could just call the shots like the dumb people would ask the physicist what is going to happen if we push the Russian if we push the Soviets too far. And the physicist would give them an accurate answer. Whereas I just don't see any of that any of that level of quality of reasoning on the US side here.

Yeah, so I think there was probably people lived through the unipolar moment for too long. And a lot of people just assumed that this would last, right? So I think one thing it's important for the people that are following this from the military, the defense establishment, security establishment in D.C. to understand

to understand is that this is not like an accident, right? Like this is something that China is achieving because it has human capital resources and there's a lot of young engineers working on this project. And what we're seeing is that the cadence for China in fighter jet development is under 15 years between generations. You know, when I started following things, PLA, America already had F-22 in 2015.

in service and China had J-10 that just joined service. Right? And now this is like 20 years later, America's best fighter is still F-22 and China is testing sixth generation aircraft. So if you think about things from that direction and maybe it's not even...

what China has achieved with sixth generation, but what about 20 years later when they're developing things that nobody's seen in this world, right? So people were raising the prospect that this J36 can fly into space. It can't fly into space, right? It can't go hypersonic. It doesn't have Ramjet or anything like that. That's crazy. But they are testing with a lot of rotation detonation engine technology recently, right?

And, you know, they are doing hypersonic flying vehicle testing, not just ballistic, not just like missiles. They're doing actual vehicles that can fly 8,000 kilometers at Mach 7 speed. Like those are going to join service at some point, right? So, yeah.

They're continuing to make these developments on really high-speed platforms that the current generation of missiles can't even shoot down. I wanted to discuss something with you, which I think is under-discussed. In the Ukraine war, we're seeing the Soviets use at least some moderately advanced missiles, Kinzals, Oreshnik, things like this.

And, you know, I think one of the things that people should distinguish between is if you want to take out an air base and you're hitting the runway, you know, maybe you can take it out for a while, but then both sides have developed methods for, you know, quickly filling in holes in the runway and stuff like this and getting the air base operational again. So taking out Guam is still kind of challenging, and maybe that's really why you need these sixth generation fighters with long range.

But a ship is a totally different thing. Like if you have a ship and you nice clean hit from a hypersonic missile, probably a mission kill. Probably that ship is going to be immediately looking for a port to get some repairs done. Right. So ships are much more fragile than trying to take out like an entire division of Ukrainian troops.

or an air base or something like that. So I think people can't really distinguish between those two situations. Tell me if you agree or disagree with me.

Yeah, so I think I generally agree with what you're saying. Like, it's actually quite difficult to take out air bases just because of the fact they can be repaired relatively quickly. And especially in the case of like, you know, let's try to attack, if you're trying to attack a basin in Alaska or a basin like, you know, close to southern China, there's a lot of people nearby with materials or they can rebuild things really quickly, right? Guam is a little different just because there's just fewer people there.

But, you know, just a few ballistic missiles can maybe disable the airfields, but you need to actually probably be able to land a bunch of bombs afterwards to actually take them out for a longer period of time. A lot depends on whether the people running the base have hardened bombs.

Their radar systems and their power systems, like if they haven't hardened those things, yeah, a few missiles, if they really have like five, 10 meter circular error probable, you could take out some systems that they're not going to be able to easily fix.

And they can disperse, right? Like the people that are in these bases can disperse the rest of the island. Yeah, but the power systems and the radar systems can't really disperse. Like if you really... Yeah. Yeah, so you can like, if you are attacking a place, if you destroy the energy infrastructure, it's going to make it a lot tougher, especially in a place like Guam, right? But I think you're right in saying that if you hit like a carrier with a ballistic missile,

And basically, it's air wings. Yeah, I just, you know, even if you don't come close, like, I've heard a lot of carrier guys say like, oh, yeah, we can fix stuff to on the carrier, and you won't sink it. And I just, I just think like, yeah, you might not sink it, but you're going to reduce the operational efficiency of that thing by a lot if you just hit it once with a hypersonic missile. So, yeah.

Yeah, like it's much different to hit something with a Mach 10 missile versus like a subsonic missile, the radar system on like a ship. So, yeah, so there is a difference there. But the other thing is like once you hit it once, your entire air wing operation goes down. Then they can hit it again, right? So, it's not a – so, it's a lot –

easier to target. So the U.S. situation, if they really want to come to the aid of Taiwan, is they're going to need carriers in places where they can be hit and or they're going to have F-35s operating at very long ranges from air bases in, say, Japan or something like this. It's very, very tenuous. And so, I don't know, I think already the situation is kind of bad for the U.S. to operate out there. So it's kind of like this sixth generation thing, like

It may make things even worse, but I think already the situation was pretty tenuous in the Western Pacific. Yeah, and I think part of the planning for the people around Pentagon is that things are bad now, but we're going to get like NGAD and we get B-21s into service. And then we can...

then things will get better for us because we have aircraft that have longer range than China. So we can fly something from Guam over to China and destroy their air bases before they can do that with us. We can fly from Anchorage, Alaska over and hit them with standoff missiles and weaken their air defenses, right? So I think that's probably part of the thought process behind this, but unfortunately...

if China gets to their first, then your entire case for like one basically goes away. I never thought. So I don't know if you remember, but in the actual Pentagon strategy papers on this, they used to call this like air-sea battle or something. They had a funny acronym for this, which literally meant like they were going to attack bases on the mainland of China in defense of Taiwan. But-

I think history already shows they're not going to do that because we wouldn't dare attack Russian bases. Right. So Russia is much weaker than China militarily in a sense.

And or at least in, you know, in its theater versus China in its theater. And we're not, you know, both countries are nuclear armed. So, you know, we're the threshold for the US to directly attack like an air base near Shanghai or something, or Fujian, you know, I just don't see it happening that like, that would be crazy. And literally analysts like Lyle Goldstein and others at the time of this air sea battle kind of strategy, you know, of course, it was this was like in the 90s, early 2000s, when it was all so hypothetical.

But like anybody who looked at that would just say, like, did you guys forget about nuclear weapons? Like when you start attacking the air bases of a country, like they just drop one nuke on Guam just to show you they mean business or something. And then the whole calculation goes out the window. Yeah. So I think thankfully we're at the point where, you know,

I don't think China is at a place where it needs to use nuclear weapons at any point. So, you know, that's right. Right. I mean, it could be that they, right. It could be that conventionally the balance of power is such that the U S wouldn't even necessarily succeed in attacking mainland bases with conventional air power.

Right. But I guess I'm going back further in time where, like, people thought that was actually the plan. Like, it was the plan. And there was a debate within the U.S. defense community. Like, that's a – one side said that's a crazy plan. That's a recipe for World War III and nuclear weapons. And the other side was, nah, they'll take it. But, like, we won't even do it to Russia right now. Yeah. So, I think, like, one of the concerns that the Pentagon planners had before, like, 2010 was that China –

If there was a Taiwan scenario, that China would actually use nuclear weapons against the carriers. So that was one of the scarier problems. Yeah, now I think they don't need to. But if you start attacking any nuclear power that has a kind of mad capability with the United States, I don't think any president is going to lightly attack their home soil. I think that's already been shown.

So it would be very foolhardy because things could easily escalate out of hand. Yeah. So I think that this entire reveal in the path of

A couple of weeks has been quite powerful. And, you know, alongside the sixth generation aircraft themselves, we also saw like a couple of drones being tested that we think will be part of the or could be part of the grouping. We have one that I can take off also from like aircraft carrier and also the new Type 076 landing amphibious ship.

And then we have another, like, it looks like just a giant unmanned airborne radar, basically. And its goal is to send really ultra high frequency radar waves to detect like really stealthy aircraft like B-21s or F-22s and things like that. And so from that, and they also did the KJ-3000 advanced early warning command control aircraft. So that's

We're seeing them developing and testing a lot of systems that will go toward fighting really stealthy aircraft. Rangers are far from there. You know, the mainland airspace, for example. Right. One of the things I wanted to mention is, so I'm sure you know who Elbridge Colby is. He's been an outspoken, you know, pro-pivot to Asia guy.

I mean, just at the purely strategic level, I've been saying this for a long time. The U.S. needs if the U.S. is serious, that needs to actually pivot to Asia because that's where the real threat to U.S. dominance is. And and Colby is one of the few people who understood that, I think, when other people were focused on the stupid Ukraine conflict and stuff like this. And so now it appears he's going to be assistant secretary of defense in the in the new Trump administration. And.

I'm curious, like, let's just suppose for a moment that you're advising Elbridge Colby. Because he is flexible in his thinking, right? So the question is, what is the U.S.'s best strategy? Like, imagine you want to push things toward a peaceful resolution between Taiwan and China. So you want to kind of help the Taiwanese get the best deal they can possibly get.

But you're not willing to bet the future of the whole human species on, you know, on Taiwan, keeping Taiwan from reunifying with the mainland. What is the best strategy for the U.S. given its resource constraints?

Yeah, so I kind of enjoy following Kobe once in a while because he was, it looked like for a couple of weeks there, he was openly using social media to lobby for Trump. Well, he got it. He got it.

And I think Kobe, based on what I read from his tweet, he understands that America might not win. And this was before the sixth generation stuff comes out. So I think once you get into the administration, he's going to get a further briefing from the Defense Department to understand what the current situation is like. So I think he...

I think my opinion of him is if it gets to a situation where he thinks China has too much of an advantage and Taiwan is not doing enough about its own defense, I think he would move from the defend Taiwan group to like, you know, let's see the best deal we can, you know, best situation we can get out of China. And I'm not really sure what he could advise, what the American government could do

advice to Taiwan right now that, you know, obviously I would say that the balance of power in the Pacific Ocean is changing. And I don't know if the people in the Pentagon have fully accepted that yet. I think, you know, we're still in the five stages of denial at the moment. Well, this is why I find Colby interesting because as I said earlier, he's a little more flexible in his thinking than the typical jarhead.

And so, yeah, let me give you a hypothetical, which is, I think, sort of where Colby has gestured, at least in some of his stuff. Actually, at one point he was going to come on my podcast, but we never got it scheduled. So now I doubt he's going to come on my podcast. But, you know, let's imagine. So remember the U.S., you know, the reason the U.S. doesn't have intermediate range ballistic missiles and stuff is there was a treaty for a long time, right? Yeah.

So the treaty is no longer there. And let's suppose the U.S. decides they're going to develop a lot of, you know, maybe they can't manage the DF-17 because they don't have hypersonic glide. But, you know, things like the DF-26 and the DF-21, I think, are certainly within reach.

at least the previous, before America declined a lot in manufacturing capability, the previous America could easily build such things like Pershing missiles and stuff like this, Pershing 2s and stuff. So, you know, something with ranges of one to two and a half thousand kilometers, decent accuracy, GPS plus local targeting capability, you know, stuff like that I think America could build. And then why not just put tons of these in

The Philippines, Taiwan, if the Japanese will accept them, put them in the island, Japanese islands closest to Taiwan. It at least makes things tough because in the same way that I say the Chinese could sink US aircraft carriers in that theater, the same way these missiles could sink US.

you know, Chinese ships, amphibious landing ships, Chinese carriers. I think it's, I mean, when I reason about these things, I'm not biased, you know, like I think there's an asymmetry. Missiles are very hard to intercept and missiles are good enough that they can find ships at sea and hit them. And so I think like installing lots of things around the first island chain would make life harder for the Chinese planners. Do you agree with that or disagree with that?

So America does have a program called AGM-183, the ARW program that is working at the moment. And that is an air launch program. So right now, the big problem with hypersonic program from America point of view is just the cost side of things. Like it's very expensive to...

Get one of these into a production, right?

and the final targeting capabilities of the Persian II. They already have the ability, well, we used to have the ability to make Persian IIs, right? So those would already be pretty dangerous to ships, right? Yeah, I would say so, actually. I haven't seen any such development for a ground-based missile. I think it's always been the...

the American, the Pentagon philosophy to use more of like air launch platforms because, you know, we expect most of the, most of the actions to take place far away from American homeland. So while we're developing these weapons, we are developing them

for the Air Force and the Naval Air Force to use rather than the ground force. But I think Colby has specifically, which is why I think he's not your average jarhead in the Pentagon. He has specifically advocated for this strategy as something that at least could throw a wrinkle into the Chinese plans and that would maybe put Taiwan in a better negotiating position.

And I'm curious what you think about that. So, so imagine they sit like Colby gets in there and he's like, Hey, fix, go get the Pershing to dust it off, fix it in the way that I described. And then it is really a threat to all Chinese ships in that theater. And, and,

convince your minions in the field you know your your captive regimes in the philippines and japan and other places and maybe even taiwan is that kind of the last place you would think it's ironic that taiwan's the last group that wants to install this because they actually don't want to be too much of a prop a porcupine like they they're actually afraid of getting you know i think wiped out like ukraine so so in a way like they're reluctant to really become a porcupine but but you can

Put these things around that theater, and I think it does make things complicated for the Chinese. I think in the case of Taiwan itself, I think China would invade if that happened. I think Philippines and Japan would be a little harder to say. I assume that they wouldn't do it for Philippines or Japan because…

There is the MTCR, so I don't know how you get around that issue. But I think it would make it harder for China. Yeah, because even... Philippines is a little different because it doesn't really have much of air defense. So if you're China, the first thing you do is just go take out the missiles coming from Philippines. Yeah, you don't have to deal with air defense. But it's hard to take... I mean, look, even the Houthis, you can't take out their missiles very easily. So...

You put these things on jungle islands. Okay, maybe the roads there are so shitty that it's really bad. But you make some road mobile. I think Persian 2 was road mobile, right? So you have these road mobile things. They're just like moving them around all the time. And I think it's just hard. I'm a fair...

So like if it's hard for one side to defeat this kind of threat, it's hard for the other side too, right? So – and putting them in the Philippines and the Japanese islands close to Taiwan, they're still in range. So –

I think targeting a limited number of missile launchers is different from targeting a lot of the cheaper ones dispersed apart. That's my assumption because these things will have to be a lot harder to... Because once you get hypersonic stuff, you need like...

technicians really people who really know how to operate them to to be using them and well I think they'll be decent size these would have to be Americans operating these things

Yeah, so I think it would be a lot easier if there's only a limited number of them to get targeted. Whereas if you're dealing with Houthis, right? I think the problem with dealing with Houthis, there are just so many of them around with missiles that...

Even if you hit a few of them, the rest of them are still with these cheap missiles that are hiding underground and things like that. Yeah, okay. But my hypothetical, the porcupine strategy ex-Taiwan, because as you said, Taiwanese really actually don't want it. And it might actually trigger an invasion by itself. But you might be able to just...

force the Philippines to host them on some islands which are closest to Taiwan or something, and then maybe the Japanese as well. And, you know, pretty hard to eliminate those things if it's done right. I think the Japan case, I think...

That would be interesting seeing what happens in the Pacific Sea. I could see, like, if Japan starts hosting some things, if a West Pacific conflict breaks out, China will just attack the power stations and bases around there first to, like, you know, decapitate, to try to decapitate. Well, they'd have to be designed that they could operate independent of those resources, at least for some period of time. But yes, I mean, you're pointing to this issue that, like,

similar to the European leadership right now, like the leadership is going to do stuff the Americans want them to do, which is not in the interest of their country. Right. So, so the Japanese don't want to get dragged into this war. Right. But the Americans may twist their arms and say, look, you've got to deploy this stuff. And these are remote islands. If they get bombed, you guys don't really care. And, but we need them in place to help defend Taiwan if necessary. And same thing with the Philippines. Yeah. I mean, I,

In my opinion, it will be kind of hard to pull off, but I could see this as something that gets at least explored. When you say hard to pull off, do you mean politically getting buy-in in these countries, or do you mean technically, or do you mean like the practical deployment would be hard?

I think the practical deployment process of putting it in another country and also of them actually working in the battlefield, because I think the level of surveillance technology China has around right next to its water and the number of military assets it has in terms of hitting things is a much higher magnitude than what America has around the HUSIs.

Like it has a lot of missiles that you can flatten Japan with. So this is like once, if you're flying over, like you think about it, right? Like if you were flying a strategic bomber after you already take out much of the radar defenses over a country, you can do, you can land a lot of missiles, land a lot of munitions that can hit car, that can hit vehicles. So it, it,

It's hard for me to see them getting more than a few missiles off the ground. If I'm running one of these Pershing 2 mobile launcher type things, upgraded Pershing 2s, I'm basically hiding like the whole day under camouflage nets. And then I'm only moving at night. And, you know, then I occasionally, you know, when I ordered to, I fired the missile.

And I think it's pretty hard. Yeah, but once you fire once, they know where you are. Yeah, you fire and you scoot and you hope that they don't get you right away as you're pointing out, right? So, yeah. Yeah, like that's the other thing that we saw recently. The HQ-19 came out, which is like basically the Chinese version of SADD.

And they claim, they claim at least, that these things are able to intercept hypersonic live vehicles. So we think that they probably tested them against DF-17s. But I guess we won't find out until something happens with them. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, but I think if these countries are dealing with the process of having an aircraft they can't detect at all flying over their head,

As a threat, it should force the defense establishment in those countries to think about things a little bit. Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, all these things, I think the Chinese strategy is to build up capability. If you need it, you might have to use it. But the best use of it is just to intimidate the Japanese and Philippines and Taiwanese to just not want to have a war at all.

Yeah, and I think that's like, you know, people talk about deterrence and things like that. Deterrence goes both ways. Like America can try to deter China and China can try to deter the other sides also, right? So in the end of the day, everyone wants to deter the other sides so that you can get a favorable political result without having to fight, basically. The part that this, you know, this kind of rational planning thing

What it really depends on is that the other side has the capability to make an evaluation of the strength, your own strength and your opponent's strength, and then you behave accordingly. But I feel like the US has totally lost it. The US will just cope. Even though like the sixth generation thing, I think when you and I were discussing it, I was like,

US is not going to care about this. A few military fanboys are going to care, but even they will cope. Like say, yeah, these things are no good. But then like the average American just doesn't have any idea what the current balance of power is or how a war over Taiwan would go like literally today. I don't think how many of our leaders in Washington, DC have any idea how it would go. I think very few. Yeah. And I think that has played out so far and it really...

It really is one of those things where, you know, in a logical, if you had a logical system, right, when you have a, you know, a Sputnik moment, you want your country to react by really getting itself in shape and then, you know, trying to... You may have...

Trying to like, you may have seen the tweets I put out. Like somebody was like, so how I was, I was on Twitter and I, you know, I got into this conversation about this and I started putting up these historical videos. I found a whole documentary about like the, the,

the effect that Sputnik had on American society and stuff. And the quotes are just unbelievable where like leading figures like Hubert Humphrey or Adlai Stevenson, you know, like historical figures from that era are literally saying, they're literally saying in the New York Times or in the national TV, like this was a humiliating event. We have to recover American prestige worldwide. Like they were saying, like we must react.

And then what people don't realize is the amount of money that went into not just military programs, but just building up science and engineering programs on every university campus. It all dates back to that Sputnik moment. So if you go to like typical Big Ten University, like you go to the Rutgers campus or you go to the Indiana campus or you go to the UCLA campus,

You ask, how old is this engineering building? Well, usually that engineering building was built right around the Sputnik time. And the reason is because that university didn't have

a serious PhD program in arrow E or double E or physics. And they literally built it because of Sputnik. And that's what people today do not understand. They do not understand the level of reaction that actually happened. The jump from like backwards, technologically not so great set of universities in the United States to literally world-class and able to dominate by attracting the top people from all over the world. That was a result of Sputnik.

So the people today just living today who are younger than me, they just literally have no idea what what it means to have a Sputnik moment and react to it. They just don't understand what it means. Yeah. And I, you know, that's why I think this will be interesting to see is how America actually responds to this. And, you know, I was expecting some congressional hearings about this issue. Actually, we'll see if that happens or not. Yeah.

But it appears that things were just going to be like slid under the table and pretend that that didn't happen at this point. I mean, you know, maybe we're already at this point or we'll soon be at this point where both the Russians and Chinese have...

very sophisticated hypersonic missile programs, which are nuclear capable. And really, they can just fly around the earth and drop like a dozen nuclear weapons on the United States or precision conventional munitions. And we just don't care. We're just like, whatever. We can cope. What are you worried about that for? Democracies always beat autocracies. Let's go back to sleep or let's go back to the football game.

Yeah. And well, the one thing that I am curious about is, you know, if the Defense Department will get at least get more funding from this. I do expect there to be a renewed push into like a greater defense budget with Trump in the White House. And that means we're probably run bigger deficit as usual. And then.

I want to see if both the Air Force and the Navy will get funding for their sixth generation program. And then we can get a good sense of how many years of advantage China has.

Absolutely. But, you know, like even that, even the significant jump in the Pentagon budget is very far short of a whole of society effort, which is what happened after Sputnik. Okay. Like when you reach down to the like curriculum that sixth graders have, like suddenly the math required for sixth graders got much more rigorous, right?

Stuff like that. Like, I see no evidence of anything like that happening in the United States. So I don't see any indication of. No, there's nothing we can do here to get the kids to try. Well, even but we even reached a state where the leadership of the country doesn't really think it's important. Right. Like they never learn any math. So why do they think we the kids need to learn any math?

That's a good point.

It's very tough to go back to eating bitterness and working hard. Like people are just going to resist it. They don't see the reason for it. And maybe that's why most empires collapse or slide at the end. Well, I think also part of the problem is especially this is especially common amongst the national security folks. They assume that China got where they are through stealing and copying. That's a big example of what I call copy. It's like that's...

So when you think about things from that perspective, your automatic assumption is what America has is better. And what America has, if America hasn't shown it, that's because they're just doing a much better job of hiding it. Never mind the fact that the stuff that you use in the sixth generation fighter jet is...

requires modern technology that China is actually ahead of right now. So these things are never thought of. That's such a nuanced thing that literally no people on Capitol Hill understand this. There are literally no technical people on Capitol Hill. So that nuanced statement that, oh, they're deploying stuff that we don't even have yet. So how could they have stolen it from us?

That argument with some lawyer is somebody whose highest degree is from a law school is probably not going to, it's not really going to move the needle. This is why it's so amazing to go back. I encourage everybody to go back and look at the Sputnik quotes that I put up on X and

You know, these were not technical people. These were our political leaders. And they were literally saying, we don't, we cannot do this. There's a little ball of light, an artificial satellite orbiting the earth. Every night we see it, you know, it passes over every American, every American can see it. And it's humiliating for us because they did it and we literally don't know how to do it. And so they were just openly, they were not coping.

Right. They were saying, look, this is humiliating. We have to rectify the situation. It's going to be an all of society effort to fix this problem. And there's just no there's no coping. Whereas nowadays, our political leaders would be like, oh, you know, Chinese moon base. We could have a moon base to that moon base is useless. It's probably fake, actually. And they probably stole it from us.

Actually, I did have this conversation with a friend. Do you think that America will get more alarmed by sixth generation flying first or getting back to the moon first before, getting to the moon before America gets back to the moon? And at the time, everyone thought like moon would be a bigger story. But now that my sense is, if China gets to the moon before America gets back to the moon,

That would just get dismissed as people saying that. I struggle to come up with an actual event that would break the Cope spell. That's why I'm so pessimistic. Like what? You know, oh, they can build an electric vehicle with 5000 mile range. It costs $5,000. They stole that from us.

You know, what can they do that would actually wake us from our slumber? It's very hard. That's why when you and I were talking about this, I think I just said, like, this sixth generation thing is not going to, like, capture that much attention in the United States. We're way too confident. Our self-esteem is way too high for some stupid sixth generation flying stealth wing to make a difference.

Yeah. What I did not anticipate is that the Indians are the ones that are the most alarmed by the situation. Well, I think part of it could be what you said, that they understand strategically the implications. But I think part of it is just that, remember, they have been coping for a long time pretending to develop their own fifth generation fighter, right? They've been pretending, but there's no fifth generation Indian fighter. They're not even really close. And now they see the Chinese with a sixth generation fighter. So I think that freaks them out.

So maybe the gap just needs to get a little wider, a little bigger. Maybe, maybe. Yeah. So, all right. Well, we've been on for a while. I think we covered a lot of stuff. Maybe this is a good place to stop. Yeah, it was great talking to you, Steve, and looking forward to seeing how these things change over the next few years. All right. Thanks a lot, TP.