For 11 days in November, the sky over the northwestern Chinese province of Gansu witnessed some of the most intensive dogfighting to ever take place in China. Jet fighters screamed overhead, twisting and turning in complex aerial maneuvers. Heavily laden bombers lumbered through the tangle of fighters, dodging enemy defenses as they lined up for bombing runs.

The warplanes and their crews were the real deal. It featured the best of the best of the Chinese military, which with 2,700 aircraft possesses the world's third largest aerial arsenal, after the U.S. and Russia. But the combat over the sprawling Dingxin Air Force Test and Training Base was simulated. Despite the ferocity of the maneuvers, no live weapons were fired. The mock battles of the annual "Red Sword/Blue Sword" exercise are meant to prepare the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) for the possibility of actual high-tech combat.

In terms of authenticity, China's pretend air battles are getting pretty close to the real thing. That improving realism, combined with Beijing's new fighters and other hardware, has some observers in the U.S. feeling uneasy. For decades the Pentagon has counted on highly realistic aerial training to mitigate the increasing age and decreasing size of its warplane holdings. "That [training] used to be a significant advantage U.S. air forces held relative to the PLAAF," Dave Deptula, a retired Air Force general who flew F-15 fighters, tells Danger Room.

The Pentagon still maintains other aerial edges, with more and better fighters – including stealth models – and support planes plus decades of combat experience in the Balkans, the Middle East and Central Asia. But with every scripted dogfight over Dingxin, the American war game advantage shrinks – and with it the overall U.S. margin of superiority.

Catching Up ———–

Beijing's air training renaissance has been a long time coming, and maps neatly – though belatedly – onto America's own advancements in simulated combat. Forty years ago, a humbled U.S. military, bloodied by the war in Vietnam, pioneered the use of realistic scenarios to train air crews for the lethal dangers of actual combat. China, likewise bruised in a botched invasion of Vietnam in 1979, watched from afar as the Americans' new Red Flag and Topgun exercises – run by the Air Force and Navy, respectively – revolutionized U.S. air power.

Red Flag, in particular, drove major changes in the way America prepares for war. The exercise, which today takes places at least semiannually, recreates an entire war on vast ranges in Nevada or Alaska, pitting a rotating contingent of good guys ("Blue Force") against ground defenses bolstered by veteran pilots ("Red Force") specifically tasked with simulating the tactics of potential enemy militaries. These "aggressors," as they're known, routinely slaughter the Blue Force, firing simulated missiles and guns tracked by a sophisticated electronic scoring system.

After four decades of refinement, today Red Flag has a reputation for being harder than real war. "It was almost as intense as Red Flag," one U.S. fighter pilot said of his missions over Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.

At first, Beijing was unable to copy the Americans' training innovations. The Chinese air force was wedded to highly restrictive Soviet-style tactics emphasizing direct control of warplanes by ground-based commanders, as opposed to the greater freedom of action and potential for learning afforded U.S. aviators. Moreover, the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s had wreaked havoc on the scientific-minded training establishment. "The ideological types in [the People's Republic of China] leadership thought it was capitalistic to train," wrote one U.S.-based Chinese analyst who goes by "Feng." The ideologues had even destroyed flight manuals.

It took decades of painful political reform to clear the way for Beijing's own version of Red Flag. Today the bureaucratic obstacles are fast falling away, and a rapidly modernizing Chinese air force, flush with cash and new equipment, is working hard to catch-up to the Americans. The introduction of the Russian-made Su-30 fighter in the 1990s finally gave the PLAAF a modern warplane it could match with more intensive training techniques. Beijing massively expanded the Dingxin airbase and its adjacent flight range. The Chinese began deploying small numbers of pilots and planes to Kazakhstan for exercises, laying the foundation for far bigger war games back home.

Beijing also formed several aggressor units flying specially painted fighters meant to replicate the planes of China's rivals.

Incrementally, and without much notice outside of China, the PLAAF transformed routine flight training into the regular Red Sword/Blue Sword mock air battles, modeled on Red Flag. By 2005 Beijing's war games were well underway. And a few years after that, the frontline improvements began to show. As late as 2008 Chinese fighters couldn't make it even halfway across the Taiwan Strait before being chased off by Taiwanese fighters and ground-based defenses. Today the situation is reversed, and Taiwanese jets find themselves quickly intercepted. "It shows improved reaction time and professionalism in the PLAAF," Feng wrote.

A PLAAF pilot at Dingxin with simulated kill markings on the side of his jet. Photo: via China Defense Blog

Golden Helmets ————–

For November's Red Sword/Blue Sword exercises, 108 pilots from 14 fighter regiments flocked to Dingxin alongside detachments from bomber and support units. They brought along a dizzying array of jets, including aging J-7s (based on the Soviet-era MiG-21) plus the latest J-10s and J-11s built in China and Su-30s acquired directly from Russia. H-6 bombers and Airborne Early Warning planes with giant radar dishes on top rounded out the aerial armada.

After a work-up period, the main mock fighting went on for 10 days. Some pilots racked up scores of missions and an equal number of simulated kills. The 11 best pilots were awarded the prestigious Golden Helmet award and lavished with praise in state-run media. "Some people are born for flight," crowed one official news report.

The latest war game contained important lessons for the PLAAF. The twin-engine J-11, a rough analog of America's F-15, reportedly cleaned up against the smaller single-engine J-10s, which are similar in layout to U.S. F-16s. Besides improving pilot skill, the exercise results could shape Beijing's warplane production plans.

In any event, China probably still has a way to go before it can match the U.S. plane-for-plane in the air. But the contest has officially begun, and with every simulated dogfight over the plains surrounding Dingxin, the Chinese inch closer to achieving the kind of realistic training that transformed the U.S. military into the world's leading air power.

Already Beijing enjoys one key advantage: Its training exercises receive steady funding, whereas the U.S. Air Force's own budget has been repeatedly threatened by political posturing in Washington. "Given the massive reductions in U.S. air combat training coming in the event of sequestration, the PLAAF won't have far to go to match and then exceed us in terms of flying time and exercises," Deptula warns.

It's still highly unlikely that U.S. and Chinese pilots will square off in battle. Among other reasons, the economies of the two nations are practically interconnected. But the surging Chinese war games could mean the beginning of the end to the unquestioned air-to-air combat domination that American pilots have enjoyed for at least a generation.