It doesn’t matter if China’s new J-36 stealth jet is a fighter or a bomber

Last December, images and video clips emerged online of two new stealth aircraft the Chinese military now has in testing. One of these two jets appears to be a twin-engine aircraft with a Lambda-wing design that, despite its exotic appearance, doesn’t depart much from what we’ve come to expect of modern stealth fighters, with a twin-engine configuration and overall size that’s in keeping with small tactical aircraft. The other, however, was different.

This aircraft, dubbed the J-36 in media reports, is larger than any of China’s in-service fighter aircraft, with a delta-wing design and perhaps most notable of all, a unique three-engine configuration unlike any fighter currently in service anywhere. In fact, because of its unusual propulsion layout, heavy-duty landing gear, and larger overall size, many have taken to arguing that this new aircraft isn’t a fighter at all, and is instead meant to serve as a “regional” or medium-range bomber — a claim that is in keeping with the Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2019 assessment that China has such a bomber in active development under the designation “JH-XX.”

Yet, debate about whether this new aircraft is a fighter or bomber misses the target in favor of outdated semantics since potential roles and use cases for a heavy stealth fighter and a medium stealth bomber in the Pacific heavily overlap.

Fighters , bombers, and the death of the ‘Attack’ aircraft

In traditional terms, the differences between fighters and bombers are stark: fighters are designed to intercept and destroy other aircraft (or airborne threats), while bombers are aptly defined as aircraft meant to drop bombs on surface targets.

Throughout most of aviation history, these very different mission sets required very different overall designs, with bombers prioritizing range and payload over aerobatic performance and fighters prizing maneuverability (and eventually, energy conservation) for air-to-air combat. The avionics, onboard systems, and weapons were likewise specialized, with bombers carrying equipment meant to allow for the accurate targeting of structures on the ground, often using unguided gravity bombs, and fighters using systems like onboard radar to target enemy aircraft first with guns, and eventually with increasingly complex and capable air-to-air missiles.

Fighter and bombers have long operated alongside several other classifications of combat aircraft, including attack aircraft (denoted by the “A” prefix) that specialized in engaging shorter-ranged surface targets. Over time, however, advancing technology increasingly made it possible to pack more capabilities into smaller airframes, and as such, single-role aircraft designs quickly began to give way to newer “multi-role” aircraft.

The F/A-18 Hornet, which first entered service for the U.S. Marine Corps in 1983 and the U.S. Navy in 1984, actually carries both the F (for fighter) and A (for attack) prefixes to highlight this groundbreaking multi-role capability. In 1991’s Gulf War, the Hornet became the first aircraft in history to transition from “attack” to “fighter” modes with just the flip of a switch, engage an airborne target, and then simply switch back to attack mode to continue with its intended mission. Today, all modern 4th and 5th generation fighters are expected to be capable of doing the same, and as a result, that A-for-attack prefix is an increasingly endangered species.

As fighters grew more capable in this “attack” role, they soon began encroaching on what was once firmly established bomber territory as well. Just four years after the Navy started operating its Hornets, the Air Force introduced its new “multi-role strike fighter,” the F-15E Strike Eagle. Built upon the incredibly capable F-15 Eagle airframe, the Strike Eagle was not only among the most capable fighters in the sky, it also delivered air-to-ground combat performance that would put many World War II bombers to shame.

As such, some even call platforms like the Strike Eagle “fighter/bombers” because of the blurring lines between their roles.

For another stark comparison, we can look to the B-17 Flying Fortress, which was also classified as a heavy bomber when entering service in 1938 thanks to its ability to fly long-range missions to targets roughly 800 miles away carrying payloads of up to 4,500 pounds. Today, the F-35A can carry 5,700 pounds internally, without compromising its stealth profile, at a publicly disclosed 770 miles. By early World War II standards, the F-35A could easily have been classified as a heavy bomber.

Related: Fighter pilot breaks down how aerial refueling works

Bombers are changing too

Likewise, today’s heavy payload strategic bombers are capable of feats the military planners of World War II might have struggle to fathom, conducting truly global operations and occasionally remaining airborne for nearly two days at a time. America’s in-service heavy payload bombers carry maximum payloads of 75,000 pounds (B-1B Lancer), 70,000 (B-52 Stratofortress), and maybe better than 50,000 pounds (B-2 Spirit) and thanks to mid-flight refueling, their range is vastly expanded.

For the most part, however, bombers remained largely specialized in their roles, prioritizing range, payload, and to some extent, loiter time for air support operations. Throughout the latter years of the Cold War and the Global War on Terror – unlike the bombers of World War II – these aircraft increasingly came to rely on fighter escorts, electronic warfare, and in the case of the B-2, stealth to provide survivability against ground-based and airborne threats, keeping their offensive capabilities relegated to the bombing mission. But as these capabilities continued to mature, they expanded despite maintaining their bomber focus. The B-52’s new upgraded onboard radar, the APG-79 active electronically scanned array, is based directly on the advanced radar found in today’s F/A-18 Super Hornets and is more technologically advanced than the systems found in many foreign fighters. As a result, the B-52 now carries many of the requisite systems to leverage air-to-air missiles simply because it enables better targeting for the air-to-ground mission.

In 2011, the Air Force started planning for the next generation of stealth bombers, and with it, a significant shift in the way bomber missions play out in American air warfare doctrine. This new effort, dubbed the “Long Range Strike Bomber” (LRS-B) was built around the concept of having a single platform that could complete entire kill chains on its own — commonly broken up into six steps: Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, and Assess. This means the new bomber would need to carry the necessary intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems to find, fix and track an intended target. It would then need the systems onboard to guide its weapons into that target, and again, the ISR capabilities necessary to assess the strike afterward. More so, the platform needs to be able to share all of this data with other aircraft and surface systems in the battlespace, making this bomber not just an airstrike package unto itself, but a real time battle manager as well.

Accomplishing all of this means this new bomber, now known as the B-21 Raider, would need to carry the most advance avionics suite in American service and the ability to leverage a wide variety of in-service and still-in-development weapon systems. In fact, it may even ultimately be accompanied by AI-enabled wingmen or single-use air-to-air hunters like DARPA’s Longshot missile to maximize its air-to-air prowess. This all points to a bomber that is just as capable of engaging airborne threats as ground-based ones increasingly blurring the line between fighters’ and bombers’ traditional roles.

Tellingly, the Congressional Research Service has even stated plainly that America’s next air superiority fighter being developed under the Next Generation Air Dominance program may have more in common with the B-21 than it does with the F-22 Raptor that came before it.

Related: What really happened when F-22 Raptors squared off against the Eurofighter Typhoon?

What does this all mean for China’s new stealth aircraft?

China’s new stealth aircraft, appears to straddle the line between fighter and bomber even more dramatically than the B-21 Raider does. The B-21, after all, is meant to serve as a (fairly small) strategic bomber with truly global reach, whereas the J-36 appears to be aiming for a more modest range of about 2,000 miles. Likewise, its payload bay, while large for a fighter, is fairly small for a bomber, and while its lack of standing vertical tail surfaces does lean more toward the stealthy design of stealth bombers, 6th generation fighters are largely expected to adhere to a similar style of all-aspect stealth.

This aircraft is clearly meant to fly at high speeds and high altitudes, carrying larger payloads than any of China’s other fighters – and that is notably something China needs to keep the airspace over the Pacific contested in a potential conflict with the United States. How it could go about doing that would likely borrow heavily from both traditional fighter and bomber mission sets: Air-to-air missiles (potentially carried in the small, side bays) could be used to engage enemy aircraft at extremely long ranges through the use of advanced kill webs, offboard sensors, and its own onboard targeting systems, and either guided bombs or air-to-surface missiles stowed in the primary weapons bay engage airstrips, air defense systems, and command structures on the ground.

Assuming this aircraft can conduct either mission effectively, the debate about designation becomes a question of which mission set is truly prioritized above the other. With modern fighters expected to prioritize range and payload over aerobatic performance, and modern bombers now expected to be capable of engaging enemy aircraft in the sky, is it possible to even find the line between the two in an aircraft that is truly meant to perform both?

This line of questioning isn’t meant to suggest that compromises are no longer a part of aviation design – getting better at one thing usually comes at the expense of being better at something else. Yet, as modern targeting systems grow increasingly capable of both mission sets, and as fighter payloads get bigger and bomber payloads get smaller, debate about what to call these new aircraft becomes an increasingly academic exercise with no real-world application.

Eventually, we’ll need to find new, more useful ways to categorize platforms – perhaps by payload and range rather than intended target set. But in the mean time, I won’t correct anyone for calling the J-36 a fighter or a bomber. At least, not until it demonstrated a clear propensity for one mission set over the other.

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