Commentary There used to be a saying about the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), popular in the 1990s, that “it’s come a long ways, but it still has a long ways to go.” Putting the “it still has a long way to go” second basically belittled or dismissed whatever progress the PLA had made up until that point. Perhaps this statement was valid at the time, but it has not been true for quite a while now. Up until the early 2000s, it was commonplace to speak of Chinese military capabilities in terms of “pockets of excellence.” Some sectors of the Chinese defense industry were considered to be relatively good, such as ballistic missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and nuclear weapons. The rest of China’s defense products were pretty awful. The mainstays of the PLA Air Force during the 1990s and early 2000s were either Soviet-derived combat aircraft developed in the 1950s …