Participants in these live-firing drills are jets of the PLAAF practicing skills needed in theoretical maritime war, according to the US Navy, its main rival in the ongoing Indo-Pacific standoff, reported Newsweek via MSN.
The main activities practiced by the Chinese warplanes is how to bomb and fire missiles properly on approaching heavily armed US ships.
During the drills, China's state broadcaster said last Monday that aircraft assigned to the South Sea Fleet, part of the People's Liberation Army's Southern Theater Command, unloaded "thousands of munitions."
Based on the report, the Chinese aviator was learning how to use their aircraft in focused "precision strike" and "saturation attack, releasing bombs and ship-killer missiles, with firing guns at lower altitudes in the sea.
The Southern Theater Command said the live-fire exercise took place on May 14 and 15 in a video uploaded on its official Weibo page on the same day. The drills seem to be situated just off the coast of Hainan Province in southern China.
The JH-7, China's two-seater fighter-bomber often nicknamed as the "Flying Leopard," is prominently displayed in the publicly available video, which depicts jets strafing and attacking a marked platform just below the water's surface.
The China National Radio broadcasted pictures of the shelling drill on May 20, and a military program broadcasted the first video the following day showing the PLAAF simulating anti-ship attacks with live ammunition.
The PLA announcement "followed only a few days after one US vessel intruded into the Chinese disputed sea in the region," added the state-owned Global Times, which also linked Monday's CCTV broadcast to recent US Navy maneuvers in the waterways around China.
A Communist Party publication seemed to be alluding to the USS Wilbur Curtis' freedom of navigation operation (FONOP) on Thursday, five days after the South Sea Fleet's drills concluded, cited Al Jazeera.
Since Beijing claims control over vast miles of the South China Sea (SCS) and the East China Sea, the American ship's transit was illegal. Later, they claimed they sent the boat away despite its regular mission for the US Navy in the Indo-Pacific.
It was not the first time an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, part of the US Seventh fleet, did a transit of the Taiwan Strait. Two days earlier, it passed the same areas of the SCS, also making the PLA angry.
China is one of the military powers growing faster than expected. The United States and its QUAD allies, Australia, Japan, and India, are contesting the claims of the People's Liberation Army Navy in the Indo-Pacific region.
US partners have been doing FONOPs in contested waters to remind the CCP, its claims are not accepted and will be confronted by the QUAD members.
Tokyo hosted US, French, and Australian troops in Japanese territory for the first time earlier this month for the Jeanne D'Arc 21, also known as ARC 21. The drills' naval elements started in the East China Sea and continued this week in the Western Pacific.
In simulating anti-ship attacks with live ammunition, the PLAAF assumes a war is inevitable and prepares heavily for it.
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