The People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLA) will strive to complete its transformation from mechanization to informationization, from an air force of aerial defense to one with both offensive and defensive capabilities, so that it will better shoulder the holy mission of defending the territorial airspace of the motherland, says Qiao Qingchen, commander of the PLA Air Force and Deng Changyou, the air force's commissar.

The PLA Air Force was founded on November 11, 1949. After 55 years, the air force has become a modern combined service comprising of aviators, surface-to-air missile, antiaircraft, radar and airborne troops with considerable capability of long-range combat, high-speed maneuver, and air and land operation.

In the high-tech war in the future, the air force will play a significant role in joint operations; in particular, it will play a decisive role in gaining mastery of the sky. Hence, the air force will realize transformation from an air force of aerial defense to the one with both offensive and defensive capabilities. On the basis of winning "local war under high-tech conditions", it will gradually fulfill the goal to reach an appropriate scale with optimized structure as well as offensive and defensive capabilities.

In the future, the air force will be dedicated to building an elite and capable force in terms of formation of the force, combat diameter, combat capabilities and ability to implement combat tasks assigned by the CPC central committee and military commission.

The air force will speed up informationization on the basis of mechanization. It will adhere to the development road of taking mechanization as base and informationization as predominance. In the interest of future development, it will push forward modernization at a high starting point; enhance the quality of armament to a new level so that the future combat and development are assured. It will make the PLA Air Force step on a new stage in quality and quantity of armament.

Aside from these, the air force will further improve its training mechanism in a bid to enhance combat capability; it will endeavor to foster high quality talents; further strengthen fostering of pilots, inter-disciplinary commanders, high-level science and technology talents and experts to gradually form sufficient middle-aged talents.

By People's Daily Online