Was China Influenced by Israel's Lavi in the Design of the J-10 Vigorous Dragon?

Lessons Learnt

Everyone knows or thinks that Israel is under the protection of the US in the Middle East and this is true, but only up to a point... As long as we do not forget who is the Boss!

Israel first produced its own jets in 1967 after the French Dassault Mirage V order was embargoed. Israeli agents obtained Mirage V schematics (and most likely production components and even airframes), leading IAI (Israel Aerospace Industries) to produce two indigenous clone aircraft: Nesher and the improved Kfir. Both served the IAF (Israeli Air Force) and were widely exported.

Between 1969 and 1979, the IAF received high-performance twin-engine 3rd generation F-4 Phantom fighters and F-15 Eagle 4th generation air superiority interceptors from the United States (see Ref.1). However, the IAF wanted a cheaper single-engine tactical fighter to replace the increasingly vulnerable A-4 Skyhawk and Nesher jets. So why not design and build this replacement for the Nesher domestically?

These were the very years when the General Dynamics-designed YF-16 won the "Next Generation Fighter" competition in the US against the Northrop-designed YF-17, when mass production was about to begin and many allied countries (including Turkey) showed great interest in the F-16. In other words, the US had many potential customers for the F-16, including Israel, and a huge economic gain.

Israel and the US were locked in the biggest air war ever in the Middle East. The Pentagon was quietly trying to stop Israel's planned design and production of 300 Lavi advanced fighter jets. On the other hand, the Lavi project was attracting widespread interest among the Israeli public, and a spirit of national unity and solidarity was forming around the project. This also flattered Israeli politicians.

Israeli officials, who were using about $1.8 billion a year in American military aid money, were dragging the Lavi from the drawing board, to the production lines and into the sky, hoping that nothing would prevent this aid from being provided, hoping to make the state-of-the-art fighter-bomber for the 1990s a reality, and believing in the nation as a whole that this ideal would be realized.

Israel took the lead in this bizarre arms race, thanks to the fact that the first two Lavi prototypes were officially "put into service". The first Lavi rolled off the production line and began test flights.

Israeli officials spoke of the Lavi - Hebrew for lion cub - in tones reserved for the most revered national projects. The Lavi had become more than an airplane for Israel. In fact, for Israel, the Lavi program became "the equivalent of the American space program". It was a mega-project that Israeli officials believed could raise the country's entire technological level in software, computers and defense.

But did the "bear" in whose arms the "fox" had taken refuge care about this high ideal and serious achievement? The Pentagon finally announced the cancellation of the Lavi project and the suspension of the test flights of the prototypes produced and their removal to the museum. Israeli friends repeatedly explained to the Pentagon that if the Lavi project was canceled, thousands of Israeli engineers and high-tech contractors would lose their jobs, national pride would be damaged, scientific development would be restricted, brain drain would increase, and the effectiveness and competence of the air force would decrease, even saying that if this project was shelved, "the sky would fall to earth" (I think it was a theological emphasis).

In defense of the Lavi project against the Americans, then Prime Minister Shimon Peres said, "When you Americans went to the moon, your goal was not just the moon. "The goal was the only thing between you and the moon: scientific and technological progress along the way. Maybe if we had produced chocolate it would have been much cheaper and sweeter. But making chocolate is not going to bring real scientific achievement. You have to take real risks for real scientific success.''

However, the Pentagon made it clear that if Israel were to produce 300 or more of the Lavi aircraft, which are roughly similar to the US F-16, it would no longer provide Israel with US military aid worth $1.8 billion a year. This aid financed a large part of the Israeli defense budget. "The Lavi can fly, of course," one Israeli general said sadly, "but if it flies, the rest of the armed forces won't be able to fight.

Israeli officials consoled themselves with the idea that the Pentagon's opposition to the Lavi was not only about the F-16s they were going to sell them, but that because of the Israeli Air Force's outstanding reputation, they wanted every aviation company in the world to use their planes, that "Israel is to fighter planes what Pele and Maradona are to soccer". France, they claimed, had sold 1,200 Mirages to the world after Israel used them to devastating effect in the 1967 war. Israeli officials said that if the Lavi flew and fulfilled even half of its promises, American aircraft companies, especially General Dynamics, which supplied Israel with F-16s, would lose at least several billion dollars in sales. Northrop, which at the time was trying to sell F-20s to Israel, would also fail (indeed, the F-20 fighter jet was never a successful project). In the worst case scenario, Lavi would become a potential competitor to American jet fighter companies on the world market.

The Lavi may have been born and raised in Israel, but it was certainly designed in Paris in June 1967, after France, Israel's primary arms supplier, suddenly embargoed all arms sales to Israel. "From that moment on, it was decided that for Israel to survive, it had to be able to produce at least one tank, one navy ship, one jet fighter jet and missiles of every category on its own," said Benjamin Peled, a former air force commander. 

As a result of this policy, Israel succeeded in developing and producing the Merkava tank, its own Saar patrol boats, a range of missiles and the Nesher, a clone of the Dassault-built Mirage III and V, in 1971, and the Kfir fighter-bomber, an American-engined imitation of the Dassault-built Mirage III and V, in 1974.

Every major world air force strives for a "high low mix" capability in its aircraft. This means a combination of "Cadillac of its class" air superiority fighter-bombers, such as the McDonnell Douglas F-15, and cheaper labor- and technology-intensive fighter-bombers, such as the A4 Skyhawk and Kfir, for air support of troops fighting on the ground. All three aircraft were flown by the Israeli Air Force.

In the late 1970s, Israel decided that it could never afford to build an aircraft to replace the F-15, but that it could and would do something to replace its outdated, low-quality aircraft. In 1978, then Defense Minister Ezer Weizman instructed engineers at IAI to plan a relatively small, inexpensive, single-engine aircraft to replace the Kfir and Skyhawk. Mr. Weizman acted on his own initiative, without any significant approval from the Council of Ministers. This model was to be repeated throughout the Lavi's design period. Working under these guidelines, IAI engineers submitted plans for the Lavi to the cabinet in 1980, which approved them. But in 1981, the then air force commander, Major General David Ivri, told then Prime Minister Menachem Begin that if the Lavi was to be useful to the air force well into the 1990s, it would have to be a much larger aircraft and equipped with a much more powerful engine. Mr. Begin made the decision, which would add several billion dollars to the total cost of the Lavi, on the grounds that ''the commander of the air force is an expert and if he says we need a bigger plane, we have to follow his decision.''

Even the Lavi's American critics acknowledged that, if it turned out as designed, the Lavi would be equal to or almost as good as the latest F-16 in many air-to-ground capabilities, while in the air-to-air category the Lavi would be clearly superior to the F-16. For the United States, this was seen as suggestive and unacceptable. Instead of developing the Lavi for Israel's low-mix fighter-bomber needs, Pentagon officials suggested that Israel meet them with the multipurpose F-16C. The US side, which meets its high-mix fighter-bomber needs with the F-15, insisted that they would provide Israel with all kinds of support in the procurement of the F-15 and the development of its systems. In fact, the US was telling Israel to "shut down the Lavi project".

However, Israel was determined to resist at all costs. "The Lavi will be able to carry more munitions at a longer range and higher speed than the F-16," said Nisan Ebel, IAI's deputy project manager for the Lavi, first of all, making the Pentagon even more aggressive.

The planes have historically been designed primarily to deal with an air-to-air threat. But after the Israeli Air Force lost more than 25 percent of its attack aircraft to Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles in the first three days of the 1973 war, the IAF began to realize that for multi-role fighter-bombers, surface-to-air missiles were a higher threat than air-to-air missiles, and that the aircraft's systems should be designed to counter this threat. Designed before the 1973 Yom Kippur war, the F-16 was indeed an excellent lightweight air-to-air fighter, backed by the experience of the Vietnam war, and the biggest supporter of this design was the American "Fighter Mafia" team (see Ref. 1), but later the F-16 was seriously adapted to air-ground bomber missions, especially with the C series.

The elegant IAI Lavi (lion cub) had delta wings (for high maneuvering performance) combined with canards, a second set of small wings near the nose for better lift and maneuverability. The Lion Cub was so highly maneuverable that, like the F-16, it was aerodynamically unstable, but controlled this instability with an advanced quadrouple redundant end-to-end flight control system (fly by wire).

Composite materials were extensively incorporated into the design to reduce the Lavi's weight to just 7.25 tons empty. A compact Pratt & Whitney 1120 turbofan suspended under the fuselage provided a large amount of thrust, allowing the little Lavi to fly at high speed to distant targets, carrying payloads of up to sixteen thousand pounds.

In fact, apart from the canards, the Lavi was very similar in appearance and capability to the US-made F-16s that entered Israeli Air Force service in 1980. 

Among many unique features, the Lavi would have state-of-the-art electronic warning sensors and countermeasures systems to detect specific air-to-air, ground-to-air threats. 

Israeli and US critics of the Lavi have pointed out that Israel has already invested $2 billion in development costs to reinvent an aircraft (F-16) it purchased from the US. However, in its air-to-surface attack capabilities, the Lavi differed from the F-16 in several respects. It had a lower maximum speed of Mach 2-1.6-1.8 compared to the F-16's Mach 2, but had a 50 percent longer range. It also had a powerful internally mounted jamming system for self-protection. The Lavi's Israeli-designed avionics were comparable to the later F-16C model rather than the more primitive F-16A.

However, the costs of jet fighter development in the 1980s increased exponentially as they became increasingly sophisticated. Unlike the Nesher and Kfir, the Lavi was not cloned from an existing design. IAI hoped to recover its investment costs by selling export-configured Lavi to states facing embargoes over their poor human rights records, particularly apartheid-era South Africa, Chile and Argentina.

The Lavi would have a highly sophisticated set of computers with uniform software, with memory capacity and communication speed far beyond that of the F-16. According to IAI, "the F-16 was to be a Commodore 64", "the Lavi was to be an I.B.M. PC with 500,000 bytes and a hard disk" (the generation of those years will know these examples). Israel and IAI were by no means giving up on the Lavi.

Finally, and most controversially, the IAI argued that the Lavi would be much more capable than the F-16, but much cheaper. At this stage in the Lavi's life cycle, right on the eve of the transition to mass production, one thing was certain: Israel and the Pentagon were engaged in a dialog of the blind and the deaf. The expectation of the final blow, from whom and when, dominated the air, and each side was on its guard.

The Pentagon underestimated the fact that the current Israeli government was too weak to stop Lavi, especially given its role as a high-tech national challenge. IAI, an SOE (State Owned Enterprise) wholly owned by the State of Israel, was the largest company in Israel, employing 22,000 staff. Together with their families, IAI employees alone elected three or four members of the Knesset (Israeli Parliament). IAI was comfortable that if Lavi was canceled, an estimated 4,000 engineers would be immediately unemployed and that the current weak coalition cabinet would not dare to cancel the Lavi project.

Fortunately, both sides now seemed to have learned from their mistakes. The Pentagon promised to provide Israel with many alternatives if it canceled the Lavi project. These were proposals that had to be taken seriously, at least from a financial point of view, since many of the components used in the Lavi are also used in the F-16 and F-18, and the Pentagon was offering Israeli IAI and its subcontractors a stake in the manufacture of these components. (For example, the vertical stabilizers of the entire world fleet of F-16s are manufactured in Israel. See. Ref.-2).

As the debates, back and forth, sometimes moderate approaches, sometimes sharp turns, continued, on August 30, 1987, the Israeli cabinet voted to end Israel's Lavi fighter program, bringing to an end the largest single weapons development effort in the history of the State of Israel. As the story behind this aircraft faded into history and its impact diminished among subsequent generations, its broader meaning and significance for Israel's national security was largely lost. The consequences of decisions that were not fully understood at the time they were made will often be scrutinized and judged by subsequent generations. For Lavi, the consequences behind this program and the ripple effects of its cancellation continue to ripple through Israel's strategic posture to this day.

From Israel to China

Thus ended Israel's indigenous production of jet fighters - but not the advanced weapons and components for jet fighters, which were largely supported by the technologies developed for the Lavi.

As the Israeli "Lavi" bids farewell to the skies, the Chinese "Vigorous Dragon" says hello...

While the J-10 "Vigorous Dragon" is not a state-of-the-art 5th generation stealth aircraft (see Ref.1), it was a major milestone in China's military modernization and "probably had some foreign assistance in its design, testing and development!!!".

John W. Golan, Lavi: The United States, Israel and a Controversial Fighter (see Ref.-5) wrote

Israel's "possible" involvement in the J-10 seems to have started at the same time as China opened its first diplomatic relations with Israel in January 1992 (based on estimates only). Israeli subcontractor experts were focused and intensely engaged in determining the aerodynamic and structural outlines of the J-10. Israeli influences on the J-10's design are evident; the close-coupled, delta wing, canard arrangement, a single-engine fighter with ventral engine intake, low fuselage area, and many other details strongly reflect the Lavi design.

The J-10 "Vigorous Dragon" is the fulcrum of China's efforts to modernize its vast fleet of single-engine jet fighters, of which 350 are currently in service. An agile tactical fighter similar to the ubiquitous F-16 Fighting Falcon, the J-10 Vigorous Dragon was the first indigenous Chinese design roughly on par with Western and Russian fourth-generation fighters. However, there was considerable evidence that the development of the J-10 was heavily subsidized by a jet fighter developed by Israel in the 1980s with US engines (the Lavi).

A notable export was the Python-3 heat-seeking missile, which boasted the ability to engage aircraft from any direction using a helmet-mounted sight. The technology was licensed for production by China's Xi'an Aircraft Corporation in 1989 as the PL-8 missile in service today.

Other technologies transferred include the E/LM-2035 doppler radar (derivatives installed on the J-8 and J-10 fighter) and the inertial navigation system.

In fact, in the 1980s, the US and Western Europe were also exporting military technology to China, which at the time was seen as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. US firms even explored co-developing updated J-7 and J-8 fighters for Beijing. But Sino-Western defense cooperation ended abruptly after the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989.

However, in the mid-1990s, US newspapers began to report that intelligence agencies (CIA) were concerned about Israel's ongoing technology transfers to China, including some systems and components given to Israel by the US.

Concerns about Israeli-Chinese technology transfers prompted the US Congress to ban the export of the high-tech F-22 Raptor fighter. Unfortunately, the lack of export orders, combined with subsequent defense spending cuts, led to the early shutdown of the F-22 production line. In its final years, the Clinton administration also prevented Israel from exporting its Phalcon airborne early warning aircraft and forced China to spend years developing a wide range of its own AEW aircraft.

According to Golan, "Israel's participation in the J-10 program diminished, or so it seemed, when Russia began marketing Soviet-developed avionics systems!"

Both J-10 manufacturer Chengdu and IAI officials have flatly denied that they collaborated in the development of the J-10.

However, in 2008, Jane's magazine reported that in lengthy interviews with several visiting Russian engineers, the Russian engineers informed them that Chengdu "benefited from significant, direct input from Israel's Lavi program, including access to Israel IAI's Lavi aircraft itself". This included extensive design and performance modeling, wind tunnel testing and advanced aerodynamic design input. Jane's was also told that top Chengdu officials said they had one of the IAI Lavi prototypes at their Chengdu facility." So the claim was that, according to Chengdu officials, they also had a Lavi prototype at their facility.

Hypothetically, Jane's Russian sources could be spreading misinformation. Because Russia's aviation industry certainly has a "love and hate relationship" with China.

In any case, one could say that the J-10 was heavily inspired by the Lavi, rather than a direct clone. It is significantly longer and heavier and has different wings. In his book, Golan explains that China did not have access to the compact PW1120 engine and lacked the capacity for large-scale production of lightweight composite components. (China eventually achieved the latter with the Y-20 transport aircraft.) Chengdu therefore had to lengthen the fuselage of the J-10 by two meters to accommodate a Russian AL-31F turbofan, resulting in a jet weighing 11.75 tons.

From the outset, however, the J-10 remained an agile, versatile and inexpensive multipurpose fighter designed to combine high-tech avionics and guided weapons. While the J-10 was not a state-of-the-art stealth aircraft, it was an important milestone in China's military modernization and, as we highlighted above, was most likely created with some foreign assistance.

Conclusion:

Lavi was a project that would be a work of Israeli aviation knowledge and experience, a project that would be a matter of national pride. It was born out of Israel's need to "have a main battle tank of our own design and manufacture, a warship, an all-purpose missile and a multi-role jet fighter, so that we do not have to go through the problems we experienced as a result of the French Mirage embargo". But Israel eventually had to abandon its national projects that threatened the interests of the United States, in whose arms it had taken refuge. Although unproven, there have been repeated allegations, both in its own and US media, that Lavi technology was transferred to China, resulting in the J-10, and that China was thus introduced to western technology.

While the allegations do not concern us much, here is what we understand from Israel's experience in cloning or designing aircraft:

If you have all the design, test and development phases of the Mirage III and V, you can design the Nesher and Kfir, or rather "clone" the Mirage III and V, thus bypassing the design, test and development phases, which constitute at least 30% of the aircraft's life cycle cost. The knowledge and experience you gain in the maintenance of these aircraft will provide you with the infrastructure for Lavi's original design. With the experience and capabilities gained during this phase, you can modernize and use the F-4E, F-5 and even the MiG-21, and/or sell your technology to other countries (including Turkey's F-4E and F-5, Romania's MiG-21). If your original design is not allowed by your bear friend, you can at least make financial gains by selling that knowledge and experience to others, and you can also make money by forcing the country you sell to use your knowledge and experience in the maintenance phase.

References: 

1. Jet Fighter Development/Jet Fighter Generations, STRASAM, Center for Strategic Studies

https://strasam.org/savunma/havacilik-ve-uzay-sanayii/jet-savas-ucagi-gelisimi-jet-savas-ucagi-nesilleri-1197

2. Turkey did not "assemble" the F-16s. Turkey "Produced" the F-16s, STRASAM, Center for Strategic Studies

https://strasam.org/savunma/havacilik-ve-uzay-sanayii/turkiye-f-16larin-montajini-yapmadi-turkiye-f-16lari-uretti-1277

3. A Skirmish over Israel's New Jet, The New York Times, July 20, 1986

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/20/business/a-skirmish-over-israel-s-new-jet.html

4. U.S. Says Israel Gave Combat Jet Plans to China, Los Angeles Times, Dec. 28, 1994

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-12-28-mn-13774-story.html

5. Lavi: The United States, Israel and a Controversial Fighter, John W. Golan, Hardcover - Illustrated, January 1, 2016