US Edition
Something strange and new took flight over China recently, attached to the belly of a heavy bomber belonging to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force, the PLAAF.
It might be a supersonic reconnaissance drone – one designed to hunt down US Navy aircraft carriers on the vast Pacific Ocean. Or it could be an even faster “hypersonic” vehicle. It’s hard to say from the single blurry image of the thing that has circulated on social media. All we can say for sure is that the Chinese military is up to something. And whatever it is, it’s bad news for the United States and the whole free world.
The photo in question depicts a Xian H-6 medium bomber flying high over the ground – so high that, from the vantage point of the photographer, it’s little more than a winged blur. Equally blurry: whatever the bomber was carrying under its fuselage.
That indistinct payload is dark in color, shaped like an arrowhead and around 33 feet in length. It gives the general impression of a drone – but which drone?
The PLAAF is known to be developing at least two types of high-speed unmanned aerial vehicles that depend on a bomber to launch them. Both roughly match the basic shape of the object under the H-6 in the photo.
One is the AVIC WZ-8. This supersonic UAV made its first public appearance at a rehearsal for a parade in Beijing in 2019. The UAV’s narrow fuselage and wings – ideal for fast supersonic flight – strongly imply the WZ-8 is a recon drone. One whose rocket engine isn’t suitable for takeoff from a traditional runway, and instead requires mid-air launch.
Chinese media concur with that impression. The WZ-8 “would be expected to play a key role should there be a conflict with US aircraft carrier strike groups in the South China Sea or western Pacific,” the South China Morning Post reported.
American carrier groups could lead any allied intervention on Taiwan’s behalf should China make good on decades of threats and launch an invasion across the 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. Stopping those carriers is one of the PLA’s top priorities.
The Chinese military has deployed an array of weapons specifically for attacking carriers: cruise missiles and ballistic missiles, in particular. But a missile is only as good as its targeting, and in the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, even something as large as a 1,000-foot-long aircraft carrier can be hard to find.
A camera-equipped satellite might be able to detect a carrier, but only when the satellite crosses the patch of ocean where the ship happens to be. Most satellites travel along orbits that allow them to surveil only narrow swathes of the Earth below.
A drone could help fill the surveillance gaps. But a drone, unlike a satellite, is vulnerable to interceptions by a carrier’s planes and escorts. In developing the supersonic WZ-8, the Chinese are betting that high speed – potentially several times the speed of sound – might give the drone a fighting chance of penetrating a carrier’s defenses and pinpointing the ship’s location for its rocket crews.
PLA leadership in Beijing seems confident in the WZ-8’s basic design, which might be why – according to a leaked US intelligence report – the PLA Air Force has rushed the drone into front-line service with at least one regiment in Liu’an, in eastern China.
It’s possible the H-6 in the notorious photo was carrying a WZ-8 for further trials, or as practice for combat operations. But it’s also possible whatever the bomber was hauling wasn’t a WZ-8 at all. Joseph Trevithick, a reporter for The War Zone, quoted aviation expert Andreas Rupprecht claiming the payload in the photo is too large to be WZ-8.
Be skeptical. Reasonable assessments pin the rarely-seen WZ-8 at around 37 feet in length. An H-6 is 114 feet long – and the thing it’s carrying in the photo stretches along a quarter or third of its length. Which could mean 37 feet.
Trevithick posited that, instead of a WZ-8, the bomber’s payload might have been an MD-22, a hypersonic drone Guangdong Aerodynamic Research Academy is developing for possible military use. A hypersonic vehicle travels at least five times the speed of sound while still being able to manoeuvre.
We know almost nothing about the MD-22 except that it’s very fast and around 35 feet in length. If the thing under the H-6 was an MD-22, then the MD-22 looks a lot like the WZ-8.
All this speculation might amount to a distinction without a difference. An operational MD-22 might perform the same role that the operational WZ-8 apparently does: penetrating US air defences in order to locate America’s most valuable warships, its carriers.
That the Chinese are testing or training with some kind of very fast recon drone – either a WZ-8 or MD-22 – is a reminder of just how serious they are about hunting American carriers. And it’s also a reminder of how important it is for the Americans to defend their carriers against high-speed drones.
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