Bradley Perrett covered China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. He is a Mandarin-speaking Australian.
Before joining Aviation Week in 2006 he was a macroeconomics, politics and aerospace journalist with Reuters. Perrett holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Macquarie University, Sydney. He left Aviation Week in 2020.
BEIJING — The Chinese air force says it will open six airfields to joint military and civil use in the current five-year planning period, running to 2015. The newly opened airfields, which have not been identified, join 63 military fields that the air force has made available for civilian use since the 1990s. Military flying takes up 23.51% of China’s usable airspace, the air force says in a statement released under the guise of a Xinhua news agency report. Civil traffic uses 32%, it says, without accounting for the rest.
BEIJING — Almost all of Australia’s people and defense industries are on the southeastern fringe of the continent. But valuable and vulnerable natural resources are in the north and west, much closer to Asia. Where should the country put the weight of its defense forces? Until now, the answer for the air force and navy has been “mostly in the southeast.” The government, no longer sure that is the right answer, launched a review of military basing on June 22.
