(Zero Hedge)—Every few months, a Chinese research institute announces it has found a way to see the unseeable F-35, and every few months the fine print turns out to be doing most of the work. This week’s entry: a laser.
According to the South China Morning Post, researchers at the China Airborne Missile Academy, the PLA Air Force’s main air-to-air missile house, have modeled a missile-borne single-photon lidar that could detect and track an F-35 stealth fighter at up to 61.5km (38 miles). The paper, led by Li Zhiyuan, was published in the peer-reviewed Chinese journal Aero Weaponry on September 18.
Before the “F-35 is obsolete” crowd starts celebrating, three qualifiers: that range is (1) at night, (2) “under ideal conditions” and (3) a simulation. During the day it drops to 27.7km. And as SCMP itself concedes, “the study does not establish that the system has been built, flight-tested or integrated into an operational missile.”
(Some readers may notice the SCMP’s own URL advertises “615km”; we regret to inform them the decimal point exists, and it matters.)
Radar Can’t See It? Try Counting Photons
The pitch is simple enough. Stealth jets are shaped and coated to defeat radar, and their engines are managed to reduce infrared signatures. A laser, the Chinese team argues, is a blind spot: they chose the 1,064-nanometre wavelength because stealth aircraft have “fewer dedicated countermeasures against active laser detection than against conventional radar and infrared sensing.”
Unlike radar, single-photon lidar fires laser pulses and listens for the handful of photons bouncing back. Per the SCMP summary, the model of the F-35C:
- used low-power 1.0 millijoule pulses and a compact 100mm lens, sized for a missile’s nose;
- corrected for detector “dead time” and for noise from sky background, atmospheric backscatter and dark counts;
- needed a signal-to-noise ratio of 8.8 decibels, i.e. at least 9.4 returning photons, to lock on;
- at 27.7km, resolved the target to within 20cm in depth and 50cm transversely.
In other words, a Chinese missile would, in theory, be able to tell it’s chasing an F-35 rather than a seagull by catching about ten photons. Impressive physics. Whether it survives contact with clouds, rain, a maneuvering target and a seeker strapped to a missile moving at several times the speed of sound is another matter, and one the paper doesn’t claim to address.
“I Don’t Understand It, Technically”
The skeptics didn’t need much prompting. A military analyst who asked SCMP not to be named pointed to the obvious problem with any laser: it’s a pencil, not a floodlight.
“The laser beam is so narrow, it probably couldn’t serve as an early-warning radar; in the early stages, it’s just a rangefinder.” (emphasis ours)
Translation: you have to already know roughly where the F-35 is before you can find it with this, which is precisely the problem stealth is designed to create. Another expert familiar with military equipment was even more succinct: “I don’t understand it, technically.” We appreciate the candor, rarely seen in defense punditry.
Then there’s the range math, which SCMP helpfully spells out. The F-35’s short-range AIM-9X Sidewinder reaches about 16-32km, so a 61.5km lidar would outrange it. But the jet’s long-range air-to-air missiles “can strike targets past 160km”, which is more than twice the lidar’s best-case night range and nearly six times its daytime reach. Put differently, by the time the laser sees the F-35, the F-35 may have already seen, and shot, the launch platform.
The chart also puts this week’s headline in context: it’s not even China’s most ambitious F-35 detection claim. In early 2025 researchers at the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics (CIOMP) simulated a stratospheric airship infrared sensor that could spot an F-35 from 1,800km from behind or the side (about 350km head-on). The common thread: the bigger the number, the more theoretical the system.
The Inconvenient Data Point: Iran Already Hit One
None of this means the F-35 is invulnerable, and the most damaging real-world evidence didn’t come from a Chinese lab. On March 19, an F-35A on a combat mission over Iran was forced into an emergency landing after taking Iranian fire, as we flagged in real time:
https://twitter.com/zerohedge/status/2034656417215349058
Days later we reported that the pilot suffered shrapnel wounds, with Air & Space Forces Magazine concluding the jet was “most likely damaged by a surface-to-air missile.” The IRGC’s own footage was shot through an infrared (FLIR) system, and Chinese analysts have spent the months since arguing that passive infrared, not exotic new radars, is the stealth jet’s soft underbelly. The PLA even ran a live-fire drill in August pairing heat-seeking MANPADS with HQ-16 missiles against stealth target drones.
Which is the point: Iran didn’t need a photon-counting laser. It needed a heat-seeker, the right geometry and some luck.
The flip side is equally instructive. When US forces went into Caracas in January, the Chinese-built “anti-stealth” radars Venezuela had bought to deter exactly that kind of raid failed to mount an effective response (Jan 8), with no US aircraft lost. Marketing brochures, meet combat.
Why Bother With Lasers When The Parts Come To You?
The lidar paper lands as Beijing has a more direct route to F-35 secrets. Last month, F-35 components shipped from Australia to the US were diverted to Hong Kong, where Chinese authorities have taken possession of them:
Senate Intelligence chair Tom Cotton has since demanded a supply-chain security review (Oct 1), warning that “we can’t afford for U.S. military equipment to fall into the hands of a foreign adversary because of vulnerabilities in commercial transportation.” It’s hard to think of a cheaper counter-stealth program than FedEx with a detour.
Meanwhile, China’s own sixth-gen programs keep moving. Shenyang’s designers recently laid out a “leapfrog” roadmap (Sep 16) for the J-50, and the J-36 and J-50 prototypes are taking shape (Sep 18). SCMP notes Shenyang has mentioned laser weapons in its design drawings for both, and the 303 Research Institute recently showed an airborne laser weapon pod in Beijing. Lasers are clearly where the PLA wants to go, for seeing and eventually shooting.
The F-35 Has Bigger Problems Than Lasers
For investors, the lidar paper changes nothing in Lockheed Martin’s near term; the bigger swing factor is Washington. As Capital Alpha’s Byron Callan noted in his “Defense Look Ahead: Air Force Factors” note (available to pro subs), a key question is “what’s Air Force thinking on the F-35A if Congress does not pass the $350 billion in mandatory funding, which includes 38 F-35As?” Export demand, on the other hand, is hardly suffering: the US just approved a possible F-35 sale to Saudi Arabia of up to $24.3 billion, and Israel promptly asked for “compensation”.
And then there’s the bill, which no Chinese laser can match for lethality:
Bottom Line
Li and his team say the next step is “optimising photon-related parameters” and developing more accurate ways to find stealth targets with missile-borne lidar. Fair enough: today’s simulation is tomorrow’s seeker head, and nobody should dismiss China’s pace in sensors.
But on the evidence so far, we side with the skeptics. A narrow-beam laser that works best at night, needs to be pointed in roughly the right direction and tops out well inside the F-35’s own missile envelope is a terminal-guidance aid at best, not a stealth killer. The real threats to the F-35 are the boring ones: passive infrared (as Iran showed in March), leaky supply chains (as Hong Kong showed last month) and a sustainment bill heading for the trillions. We warned back in 2021 that the jet was at risk of falling behind Chinese and Russian defenses (Sep 16, 2021); that risk is real, but it’s arriving through heat signatures and cargo manifests, not photon counts. Then again, if the lidar ever does work, at least it’ll be cheaper than the jet it’s chasing.
Much more in the full Capital Alpha “Defense Look Ahead: Air Force Factors” note, available to pro subs.
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