Quote Originally Posted by freemehul View Post
they are now, but military technology advances, its like early flight in WW1 initially only had a scouting or espionage role, only now we have bombers and fighter planes
Yes indeed, and that shift will most likely happen. But for those types of missions there isn't really any justifiable gain(the one you do gain is the ability for higher G-forces) in moving the cockpit from the aircraft to a separate location, that shift will happen when you can do away with the cockpit altogether and still have an aircraft that can make autonomous decisions, which is quite scary in and of itself.

Quote Originally Posted by freemehul View Post
I was actually pointing to a particular part in the commercial documentary. Couldn't really find a better one where it was mentioned that then advanced soviet planes were used by non-soviet states in a war that basically ended up in a stalemate. And that's only a few years after a weakened China came out of a civil war, with its economy that much smaller than it is today.
You're referring to the Mig-15 then I'd presume? Which wasn't a Chinese aircraft, it was a Soviet Union(Russian) one, which at the time didn't significantly lag behind the US or anybody else. But yes, the comfort zone in capabilities between American and Chinese aircraft will no doubt shrink in the coming decade or two. Especially considering that the new F-35 is a bastard of an aircraft that doesn't really excel at anything.

There are actually several quite interesting articles that do paint a pretty bleak picture for a conflict with China near Chinese territory, at least for very specific scenarios.
http://warisboring.com/articles/stop...u-s-air-power/

http://www.whiteoutpress.com/article...air-war-china/

http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/china...ide-would-win/

The summary seems to be that any conflict resulting in a US victory would have to be drawn out where the US could take advantage in it's technological/stealth advantage, go in, shoot missiles at close to maximum range where Chinese fighters would have trouble detecting them, then retreating to refuel, rearm, and repeat. A closer fight than that would either need a massive focus from the US(2/3rds of the US fighter fleet) or would end in disaster because the F-35 can't outfight anything in a dogfight.
Lockheed-Martin of course disputes this with lots of complaints and I guess we'll see if it changes significantly when the F-35 have been in full service for a while, but for now it comes off as more than a bit of a turkey.