Although Qin Tairan has already looked at the J-7 UAV on a high line, it turns out that he is still a little too conservative, after the successful test flight of the J-7 unmanned prototype, when the test flight video was transmitted to the headquarters of the various services through the final assembly, it suddenly caused a sensation. The DSM R&D base was suddenly full of people, and not only the high-level leaders of the general assembly took turns to observe and inspect, but even the navy, air force, and even major military regions began to send competent personnel to observe and evaluate the role of this improved unmanned J-7 fighter on the spot for their own troops.

Although domestic military research and development units have also developed UAVs that can carry out armed attacks, relatively speaking, whether it is bomb load or control intelligence, none of them can be compared with the American Reaper UAV, let alone with J-7, a real fighter in terms of flight speed, maneuverability and bomb load.

Therefore, the major branches of the military have always been mainly used for auxiliary reconnaissance in the area of UAVs, and have not yet considered it as a new attack force.

However, now that DSM has re-unmanned the J-7, judging from the capabilities shown in the current test flight, it not only has a perfect automatic take-off and landing function, but also can show super maneuverability under ground control, and the easy completion of the Cobra maneuver is particularly impressive.

Manipulating the drone to annihilate the enemy thousands of miles away like a game plane, this is the dream of many people, these military bigwigs now actually see a realistic hope, although this hope is not too big, but the bigwigs of the major arms are very excited after watching the test flight of the J-7 drone, and they intuitively realize that this drone of the DSM may provide a new tactical way for their troops.

This new weapon not only has a huge imagination space, but more importantly, the cost performance is very prominent, which is a new firepower equipment that the major arms can obtain at a relatively low price, and for the Chinese military, which has been stretched thin on military spending, the combat cost performance is also an extremely important consideration, because the major arms have always had to make a choice of equipment under limited funds, and strive to maximize the combat power of this branch.

The J-7 series of fighters is already a decommissioned and mothballed weapon, which is equivalent to a semi-scrapped state, and this kind of inventory is a raw material that does not cost money for the major military branches, and if it costs millions of yuan to be able to transform it and obtain an unmanned air strike weapon, it is naturally a very good thing.

In this regard, the Army, which has always been constrained in financial constraints, has shown even more urgency; because in recent years military spending has been more inclined to the Air Force and Navy, and in the face of the endless emergence of new aircraft and warships, the Army's upgrading of weapons is obviously lower than that of the Navy and Air Force. The launch of the new model of the main battle tank was a major breakthrough after the advent of new materials and newly machined CNC machine tools of Dushi Heavy Industries.

Although the research and development of armed helicopters in the process of domestic research and development institutions has made a breakthrough, but the number of equipment that can be produced is extremely limited, compared to the cost of transformation of J-7 UAVs, the cost of the latest generation of armed helicopters is too expensive, often need tens of millions of yuan a one, which is still mostly produced by domestic goods.

If it is a state-of-the-art attack helicopter gunship like the US "Longbow Apache," the purchase price of each helicopter will cost more than $60 million plus training costs, and the price of the same main fighter is not inferior, and even if the United States is willing to sell such expensive weapons and equipment, the Chinese military cannot afford it.

Therefore, the cost of armed helicopter equipment of the Army Aviation Flying Regiment is too different from the cost of J-7 UAV transformation. Although in terms of use, the J-7 UAV needs to be supported by infrastructure such as airports, which is more demanding than the use environment of armed helicopters, and a rear base must be built.

But don't forget that our army is only based on defensive operations, basically relying on the domestic defense area to fight, in this case, this shortcoming is not so important, the army and the air force in the hot spot to share military airfields is not difficult, and in the front line can also build temporary airfields, for J-7, its take-off and landing requirements are much lower than passenger aircraft, the construction of airstrips does not take long at all, and it does not cost much.

The army bosses are very familiar with the ontology performance of the J-7 aircraft, and they are very confident in the low-altitude ability of the J-7 series, especially the greatly improved model after the J-7E, which has better performance than the DSM is now transformed, and the final assembly is now provided to the DSM for transformation is the J-7 series of J-7III, which is an early J-7 Although the near-air combat performance is also very good, it is very different from the J-7E in range and bomb load.

If the DSM can transform the J-7III model into a UAV with ground attack capabilities, which can be based on mounted rockets, anti-tank missiles, and laser-guided bombs, then for the army, this is enough, they don't need any over-the-horizon combat capabilities, they only need to have an air firepower with a low-altitude attack penetration capability, and be able to effectively attack targets such as tanks/artillery heavy firepower and fortifications on the ground, then everything is OK.

Because for the combat mission of the army, they only need to effectively cooperate with ground operations, and it is very ideal to be able to carry out three-dimensional strikes, even if the J-7 early improved UAV ammunition has a limited payload, but with the J-7 far exceeding the flight speed of the helicopter several times, it can also provide much stronger firepower than an armed helicopter by carrying out multiple loads between the base and the battlefield.

Therefore, if the most urgent thing for the army to know is whether DSM can develop a supporting automatic equipment for rapid loading and unloading of weapons, ammunition and fuel supply, if it can be done in half an hour at this point, then the value of this J-7 UAV to the army's combat capability is immeasurable.

You must know that this is an unmanned fighter, basically there is no need to consider the fatigue tolerance of personnel (ground control personnel can be replaced at any time), in a combat radius of 500 to 1000 kilometers, if the ammunition and fuel supply can be completed in half an hour, then at most every 2 hours can achieve a new round of attacks, this combat fire output intensity is simply incomparable to that of armed helicopters. At the cruising speed of a helicopter gunship, two hours is just enough for the helicopter to fly to the battlefield 500 kilometers away for the first round.

The most important thing is that this flying regiment does not need to spend huge manpower and material resources to train pilots, but only needs to pass the skills of simulated combat control on the ground, and this huge advantage is the guarantee that the army can quickly form a three-dimensional combat capability, which is incomparable with even armed helicopters. When the J-7 was retired, the Army, which was extremely lacking in air power support, had no idea of fighting this batch of air power, but without pilots, these planes were just a pile of scrap metal, although the Army could only watch this batch of J-7s become a warehouse display.

From the point of view of price, if the cost of transformation does not exceed 5 million yuan, as introduced by the general assembly, then the cost of equipping each group army with about 30 flying regiments is only 150 million yuan, and equipping the eight main field armies can only be completed by more than 1 billion yuan, and the combat power brought by these more than 1 billion yuan is stronger than that of equipping 1,000 new armed helicopters under the condition of relying on forward bases.

Where can such good things be found?