China continues to grow by leaps and bounds, not just economically but militarily. For years, Washington soothed itself with the notion that whatever advances China made in growing its economic power, it could never match the technological wizardry of the United States Armed Forces.
That belief is being put to the test as China’s massive economy, underpinned by the world’s most efficient manufacturing sector, now supports a wild military modernization program.
China J-20 Taking on Fuel Chinese Military Photo
J-20 Stealth Fighter Creative Commons
Strangeness Abounds
Unusual fighter-shaped objects have continually appeared at Chinese airfields.
These strange aircraft frames, which looked vaguely like China’s fifth-generation stealth air-superiority warplane, the Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon,” puzzled observers spying on the Chinese airfields. After all, they looked similar to the J-20.
Yet, they were different.
The wings were noticeably different.
The noses were wrong. In fact, some looked to be little more than crude decoys. Others, however, were sophisticated enough (in terms of their appearance) to make some observers believe China was experimenting with variations of the J-20 variants unknown to the rest of the world.
While China’s military is advancing, it is not from the future. Indeed, the strange shapes appearing on Chinese airfields, according to reporting from The War Zone, a popular online trade publication, were merely training devices for its airfield firefighters.
In fact, some ground-level photographs obtained and analyzed by The War Zone show how firefighters were spraying the mock aircraft as part of emergency-response training.
Often, militaries deploy decoy aircraft and other equipment as part of disinformation campaigns aimed at confusing enemy intelligence agencies (or even encouraging an enemy to waste expensive weapons on fake, meaningless targets).
Some decoys are so convincing that they don’t even include every detail of actual warplanes, meaning that, for a very low price, China can deceive American intelligence analysts, who might assume the decoys are something more, and work that erroneous analysis into a wider US strategy.
In 2025, however, another mysterious aircraft appeared.
What’s Going On?
Imagery showed a different fighter-like structure at the Jining Qufu Airport. It looked like a new, modern Chinese fighter that did not match any known class of Chinese warplane.
And while that raised the interest level of some foreign intelligence analysts and experts, the Jining Qufu Airport mystery plane appeared again–this time being used as a firefighter training plane.
Both mystery planes feature diamond-delta configurations, canards, and twin vertical tails.
Some have speculated that the cockpit of this mystery plane resembles that of the Shenyang J-35 fifth-generation multirole stealth warplane more closely than that of the aforementioned J-20.
Firefighting replicas are reusable structures designed to simulate the basic challenges firefighters face when extinguishing fires at an airfield.
These dummies let firefighters practice how best to approach a burning aircraft, suppress fires, reach the cockpit, and perform rescue procedures around wings, engines, and other obstacles. China is not alone in using these dummy craft.
But the concern is that the appearance of these previously unidentified planes at Chinese airfields underscores a larger problem among Western analysts and intelligence officials.
They clearly fear that China is catching up to the United States in technologies like stealth warplanes.
What’s more, the fact that China can essentially mass-produce any advanced plane at a greater rate than the United States and its Western allies ever could means American observers can no longer write off the prospect that China has some advanced birds it has been keeping “off the books,” as it were.
Western Observers Miss the Mark
While Western observers and analysts can likely breathe a sigh of relief over the prospects that these new airframes represented a new, dynamic threat, the less interesting–but all the more important–possibility is that China’s air warfare capacity is growing so much, it requires greater levels of training equipment and personnel to ensure the country’s military can handle all the new warplanes and drones coming online.
America is lucky that the warplanes detected on Chinese tarmacs recently were nothing more than firefighting dummies.
At the same time, Washington would be foolish to write off what the rise in these dummy craft represents: a growing Chinese air force that is increasingly more capable (and can, therefore, match the United States and its allies).
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert is the Senior National Security Editor at 19FortyFive.com. He also manages The Weichert Brief on Substack. Weichert also hosts “National Security Talk” on Rumble. He is the author of four bestselling national security books, the most recent of which is A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine (Encounter Books). Follow him via Twitter/X @WeTheBrandon.
