Data on the air sorties in Southwest Asia are available once again and will appear periodically in the Data Points section of the airforce-magazine.com home page. The most recent Data Points entry, Airpower on the Rise, includes the air sorties data for all of 2010.
While U.S. defense officials have spent much of the past decade warning that China is the nation’s pacing threat and its People’s Liberation Army represents an urgent threat in the Indo-Pacific, several defense researchers are skeptical that the PLA has the human capital, the structural ability, or the political appetite…