China's Air Defense Nearly Impenetrable

While the US has been tied up fighting the war in Iraq, China has made huge gains toward modernizing its military and improving its equipment, and its air defenses are now nearly impenetrable to all but the newest of US fighters, the senior US military official in Japan said. Lieutenant General Bruce Wright, commander of the roughly 50,000 US forces in Japan, Washington's biggest ally in Asia, said in an interview this week the Iraq War is reducing the availability of US troops and equipment to meet other contingencies and eating up funds that might be used to replace or upgrade planes that are being pushed to their operational limits. China, meanwhile, is filling the skies with newer, Russian-made Sukhoi Su-27 "Flankers" and Su-30s, along with the domestically built J-10, a state-of-the-art fighter that Beijing just rolled out in January.