In the film Uzbek state television broadcast on 28 August, each of the six J-10CE fighters landing at Karshi-Khanabad carried three external fuel tanks. It is the ferry fit of an air force that owns no tankers: the jets had come a long way on their own fuel, and the tanks said so. A fighter is bought in a season and kept for a generation. The MiG-29s and Su-27s parked at the same base were delivered to a different country, the Soviet Union, and they are still on the inventory.
That inventory, as a July count cited by one defence trade outlet has it, holds 38 MiG-29s, 25 Su-27s and 13 Su-25 attack aircraft: 63 nominal fighters, all of them Soviet-built. Uzbekistan spent the better part of a decade trying to replace them from the source. Talks with Moscow on the Su-30SM ran from 2017 to 2019 and a request went in during 2019, Kommersant recalled last week; no contract followed, and after 2022 Russian industry had its own war to supply. Kazakhstan, which kept buying, received a further six Su-30SMs in August 2024, taking its fleet of the type to 30. Tashkent chose a different road, and the first six aircraft on it are Chinese.
The purchase has a public spine and a private body. In July 2025 the defence minister, Major-General Shukhrat Khalmukhamedov, confirmed a multiyear agreement with China to acquire aircraft, without naming the type or the number. A requirement of 24 has circulated since, sourced to a Pakistani defence publication and repeated by the trade press; neither government has confirmed it, and neither has published a contract value or a delivery schedule. The six jets are what is confirmed. At the base that once hosted the United States Air Force, from 2001 until Tashkent asked it to leave in 2005, Chinese fighters now sit on the apron of the 60th Separate Mixed Aviation Brigade.
Pakistan is the only precedent, and it is a short one. The Pakistan Air Force inducted its first J-10CEs in March 2022, with talk of up to 25. In May 2025 it flew them against India and claimed five Indian aircraft, three of them Rafales. India's chief of defence staff, General Anil Chauhan, gave the answer that mattered at the Shangri-La Dialogue on 31 May: what was important was “not the jets being downed but why they were downed”, and he called the number Pakistan gave incorrect. Air forces in China, the United States and Europe, the IISS's Douglas Barrie said at the time, would work hard to get the ground truth on the tactics, techniques and procedures. A fighter without a combat record had acquired one, contested but real, and a queue of interested buyers behind it.
The queue is where the five-year story begins. Bangladesh, according to a Seoul Economic Daily report on 8 September, is in the final stages of a $2.3 billion package for more than 20 J-10CEs from the state exporter CATIC, payable in equal instalments over 10 years to 2036; The War Zone, two weeks earlier, described a government panel still drafting the agreement. The Korean paper gives the unit price as $62.7 million bare and roughly $115 million with support, training and infrastructure. Those two numbers describe the purchase better than any airframe count. The aircraft is the smaller half of what a buyer signs for.
The larger half is the network. The J-10CE's principal sensor is an active electronically scanned array radar; its engine is a single Chinese WS-10B; Pakistan's first six flew in a representative fit of two PL-10E short-range and four PL-15E beyond-visual-range missiles. Every software load for that radar, every missile, every engine module and every spare comes from one country for as long as the aircraft flies, and the Pakistani experience adds a line that does not appear in the brochure: Chinese personnel were deployed at Pakistani bases to provide on-site technical support. A fleet of 24 would need the same. The supplier of a fighter is a resident, not a vendor.
Uzbekistan already knows what a second supplier looks like in other domains. Its border troops took up combat duty with Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones in January, by the security service chief's announcement, and a contract for Turkish ANKA drones was reported a year earlier. Its first nuclear plant is Russian, launched in June; its second, if Serbia's president heard his host correctly on Tuesday, is to be Chinese. The pattern is a habit with a name in this outlet's pages, the two-supplier formula: a Russian first, a Chinese second, and the price of the first argued down by the presence of the second. In the air the habit works once. Fleets are different. A fleet cannot be split between suppliers the way a grid can. The second supplier of a fighter becomes the only supplier of that fighter, and of everything that keeps it in the sky.
Then there is the credit. A fighter sold on a decade of instalments is a decade of a relationship with the seller's state. The terms Tashkent accepted are unpublished; Dhaka's, if the Korean report holds, run to 2036. By then the Bangladeshi and Uzbek fleets would be halfway through their lives, still paying, still dependent on the same factory in Chengdu for the next upgrade. This is the mechanism by which a hardware sale becomes a standing arrangement, and it is the part most observers of the flypast will miss.
The region is sorting itself by supplier. Kazakhstan buys Russian. It flies 30 Su-30SMs and keeps ordering them. Azerbaijan is taking the JF-17 Block III from Pakistan, a Pakistani-Chinese design, in a reported order of 40. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan host Russian bases, and Russia's defence minister told Dushanbe on Tuesday that Moscow helps form the Tajik army's drone units. Uzbekistan, which suspended its membership of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation in 2012, now fields the only modern Chinese fighter between the Caspian and the Altai. The Turkish drones on its border and the Chinese jets at Karshi-Khanabad come from different suppliers with different links, and nothing in the record says whether they talk to each other.
The supplier of a fighter is a resident, not a vendor.
Five years out, the scenarios divide on two numbers. In the first, the requirement of 24 is completed by 2031, the MiG-29s go to storage or to Moscow's support offer, a Chinese technical detachment is a fixture at Karshi-Khanabad, a cohort of Uzbek pilots has trained in China, and the PL-15E's reach reshapes the defensive arithmetic of every neighbour whose air defence is Russian. In the second, the six remain six for years; the split fleet costs two supply chains; and Russian industry, back from its war, returns with Su-30SM offers at 2019 prices to an air force that has already moved its training, its munitions and its software elsewhere. Both scenarios end with the same resident at the base.
What neither scenario settles is the link. A modern fighter is a node in a network that tells its pilot what is friend and what is not, and that network is written by whoever built it. Uzbekistan's air defence radars are Soviet and Russian by inheritance; its new interceptors are Chinese by choice. By 2031 the question will have moved from the airframes to the software between them: who writes it, who reads it, and whether an air force that took a second supplier for its sky can ever add a third.
Adrian Cross writes the weekly column Five Years Ahead for Central Asia Wire. The views expressed are his own.