Here's how the F-35 stacks up to Russia and China's fifth-generation aircraft

China's Chengdu J-20 has one thing in common with the F-35 — it's not a fighter.

Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute, told Business Insider that the J-20 is "not a fighter, but an interceptor and a strike aircraft" that doesn't seek to contend with US jets in air-to-air battles.

Instead, "the Chinese are recognizing they can attack critical airborne support systems like AWACS (airborne early warning and control systems) and refueling planes so they can't do their job," Davis said. "If you can force the tankers back, then the F-35s and other platforms aren't sufficient because they can't reach their target."

While the Chinese certainly did engage in espionage to steal some of the US's stealth technology, they haven't quite cracked stealth integration, which US companies have been developing for 60 years.

On the J-20's stealth, a senior US low observable aircraft design engineer working in the industry told Business Insider that "the J-20 has many features copied from US 5th gen aircraft; however, it’s apparent from looking at many pictures of the aircraft that the designers don’t fully understand all the concepts of LO (low observable/stealth) design."

The real danger of China's J-20 lies not with its ability to fight against US fighters, but its laser-like focus on destroying the slower, unarmed planes that support US fighters with its long range and long range missiles, thereby keeping them out of fighting range.

China's J-31 looks a lot like the F-35, and Chinese nationals have been indicted for stealing confidential information about the F-35 program.

That said, the J-31 suffers from China's inferior composite materials technology and its ability to build planes in the supremely precise way a stealth airplane needs to be built. Additionally, there's reason to suspect the avionics in the Chinese programs lags significantly behind the F-35.

But the J-31, like the J-20, still poses a significant threat because China has developed long-range missiles, which combined with their ground-based radars, and radar sites in the South China Sea, could potentially pick off US stealth aircraft before the F-35s and F-22s could fire back.

Malcolm Davis told us that the J-31 doesn't just seek to compete with the US militarily, but that the J-31 "very clearly is an F-35 competitor in a commercial sense." Nations that weren't invited to participate in the F-35 program may seek to buy China's cheaper and somewhat comparable J-31.

A fleet of J-31s in the hands of Iran, for example, could pose a serious threat to US interests abroad.

Russia's PAK-FA (also known as the T-50) has been criticized as being fifth-generation "in name only," but as Russia proves time and time again, they don't need the most high-tech and expensive technology to pose a real threat to US aircraft.

The PAK-FA's greatest failure is in the stealth arena. While the PAK-FA has some stealth from the front angle, "it’s a dirty aircraft," according to a source who helps build stealth aircraft, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the work.

But stealth represents just one aspect of air combat, and the Russians have considerable counter-stealth technologies. So while the PAK-FA fails to deliver the stealth or total networking capacity of the F-35, it is a fighter, and a damn good one.

The US's F-22 has two-dimensional thrust vectoring nozzles at the engines and is the most agile plane the US has ever built. The PAK-FA has three-dimensional thrust vectoring nozzles and is even more agile.

Additionally, the PAK-FA can be armed to the teeth with infrared missiles that focus on heat and ignore the US's stealth. So while the US's fifth generation hinges on controlling the battle from range and at the jump off point, Russia's PAK-FA seems to focus straight in on close up fights, which the designers of the F-35 didn't focus on.

China and Russia have both shown the world something new in their fifth-generation aircraft. No longer will these rising powers simply look to advance the capabilities they currently have, but they will actively seek to go into new areas of aerial combat.

Both Russian and Chinese entries seem to focus on key weak points in the US's force structure with specialized aircraft.

But the US doesn't specialize. The F-35 does everything well and seeks the informational high ground with massive computing power, all-aspect stealth, and the ability to network with almost every set of eyes and ears in the US military.

The F-35 has limited range and ability for close combat, but unlike the Chinese and Russian fifth-gens that try to score kills on their own, the F-35 plays like a quarterback, sending targeting information to any platform available.

As the F-35 software develops, pilots will be free to take on many more demanding missions, but China and Russia's fifth-gens will still be confined to relatively narrow missions.