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Japanese Stealth Fighter Announced as 'Return of the Zero'
reporter writes "According to a news article by the Associated Press, Tokyo has begun developing an indigenous stealth jet fighter that will be deployed in 2016. Mitsubishi, the prime contractor, has already developed a full-scale model, of which several pictures have been accidentally leaked to the press. The model is named 'Mitsubishi ATD-X"'. A laboratory of the French government has evaluated the "stealthy-ness" of ATD-X, and given it a high rating. Will ATD-X achieve air superiority over the F-22, which Washington refuses to sell to Tokyo?"
Let's say things like they are. Even if Japanese were the worst plane builders in the world, they'd not sleep, eat, and would beat themselves bleeding, rebuilding the damn plane until it's better than the US one.
The F-22's radar is impressive, but here is the deal... You have to go active to see targets, particularly well concealed targets and that makes you "visible" as well. If the new JDAF fighter can remain "unseen" until it gets up close and personal and is a lighter, smaller and more nimble aircraft, the F-22 may have a problem.
Smaller, faster and quieter can oftentimes triumph over larger and more complex as demonstrated in at least one Naval wargame where an entire US carrier battlegroup lost the game to a couple diesel electric subs built by the Germans.
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Weird how we react when attacked, huh? You'd think we would just roll over and take it, instead of unleashing holy hell. At least it seems that's what people think we should do.
I'm not much a fan of military response, but it's not exactly unknown that as a country, we will fight back, often with excessive force and utter disregard for anything but our own interests.
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Wouldn't it be a bit premature to gauge air superiority while we just have a few pictures of a model of the plane.
The best defense is a good offense!
Actually, the best defense lies in making your positions as unassailable as possible (there are a variety of ways to do this). Victory is found by waiting for the other guy to screw up and exploiting his mistakes while trying not to make exploitable mistakes of your own.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Russians like making thigs "backwards" they tend to find quick and dirty ways to defeat really high technology. I'm sure they've already pulled some form of satillite or IR sensor to watch for stealth aircraft. Also, you'd have to guard the planes so that if they get shot down you can blow them in to smaller pieces.. great way to trust you pilots!
Stealth technology is both offensive and defensive. If you have a fleet of aging, non-stealth aircraft, say soviet era MiGs, you'd think twice about attacking a country that has invisible aircraft patrolling its skies. Stealth is a force multiplier for an air force because, since you can't track them, they could be anywhere.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Several years later in the Balkan war, our own stealth fighter was downed reportedly with Russian technology.
To which I call BS. The shoot down was not a technology failure. The shoot down was a tactical failure of the worst kind. If your commanders REQUIRE that your super secret plane flies the exact same route, while low to the ground, day in and day out, over populated areas which can observe this pattern, guess what, you can create an ambush for it. No super secret Russian technology required. As a result, the plane was shot down but firing a large number of visually aimed missiles. Basic math and physics won.
Mandated operating procedures were changed and heads did roll. The cause of the shoot down was American stupidity and not a Russian developed, anti-stealth, counter measure. The Russians did loot the crash site afterwards to obtain material samples.
For stealth, you'd never want to have edges perpendicular to the line of flight, there's just no way that they wouldn't have a strong radar return right back where you don't want it. This so-called mockup, while it may have some features that are stealth, is clearly not the final deal.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Fighters are about air superiority regardless of offense or defense. This has been the case since WWI.
The Luftwaffe didn't send fighters over the UK to defend Germany from British Bombers, but rather attempting to keep the RAF out of the sky. Whether shooting them on the runways or when they attempted to attack the German bombers didn't matter.
Of course the Luftwaffe had its role switched to defense in 1944, but it was still attempted to gain air superiority against allied fighters and bombers.
The role of the fighter is to destroy other aircraft. It can be used in defense or offense, but its key role is not defense like SAM or Flak batteries.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"Stealth" doesn't just mean "difficult to see on radar". It has to be quiet and difficult to see as well. Heat signature also has to be reduced to protect against heat-seeking missiles.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
No, my side should have the very best equipment, technology, and training, so that it can overwhelmingly crush and subdue any opponent. That is how it should be. We don't go to war to fight — we go to win — as quickly and with as few casualties as possible.
You, doofuses, are so good at "seeing the other side" of every story, you lose sight of your own side. War is not "fair" — you must be confusing it with sports...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't take offense in this statement.
I *DO* take offense when such stupid bully statement gets modded up. The worst part is not that it's arrogant - I'm arrogant myself often enough. But it's stupid - and I can accept arrogance only in conjunction with intelligence. So if your intention was to get me mad - and I'm sure that's what it was rather than the deep desire to make a lasting contribution to mankind in form of a well thought-out statement - you succeeded, with the help of someone with mod points (you alone could not have done it).
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
You can bet that everything we know about military technology is outdated, They will only show us the unclassified stuff. The F-22 is cool, but what is the LATEST aircraft we (USA) have? The F-117a made it's first flight in 1977, but only a handful of people knew of it's existence until it was declassified in 1988.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
I am just stating the obvious. The US Shows quite a bit of self restraint given the weapons we have. If someone is attacking you, and you have a pellet gun, and a grenade, but choose to use the pellet gun for fear of injuring the innocent with the grenade, but at the cost of possibly not killing your enemy, what would call that?
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
A few points to your post and grandparent... We didn't unleash hell on Japan until well into the war, in fact not until Japan absolutely convinced our leadership and most Americans that they would fight to the last woman and child. Why nuke them? Why burn their cities? Well... it was a good start on killing them all. Apparently, they thought we didn't have the stomach for genocide. Wrong, wrong wrong... Actually, we did resist in similar bombing of Europe... we don't seem to enjoy mass killing, if at all avoidable. It seems that we misread the Japanese, and they misread us. I feel that Middle East terrorists have similarly misread us.
I tend to believe that MacArthur had a lot to do with the recovery of Japan, just as I believe that Japan and Germany should get most of the credit themselves. For example, MacArthur forbid troops form eating any Japanese food, and had a black and white policy for the troops treatment of the Japanese: no punishment for any crime, except death. The idea was that eating Japanese food while the Japanese were starving would cause great resentment. Also, MacArthur knew that American troops would fail miserably at the delicate balance of Japanese justice, so there was only one punishment, and the Japanese decided to avoid it. I believe most of the recovery of Japan and Germany had to do with their own cultures, the same cultures that nearly dominated the world.
In comparison, Iraq is basically screwed. Instead of MacArthur, we've got Bush running things (not good - duh). As for the people, it's no coincidence that the most famous childhood story from Iraq known to most Americans is "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves". It was so stupid to invade... with 20-20 hindsight.
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It's pretty obvious why they don't have a military. They about usurped our asses out of the Pacific over WWII. Now that they've been told no big military for you they know something the rest of us don't. Senseless waste of cash on military posturing. It's why Japan is one of the top economies right now.
in the meantime, Japan has become one of the US's most important allies and economic partners, and with the rise of China and the re-rise of Russia, I think it's important to consider that Japan may want to modify the nature of their military, and that maybe it's really in our best interests to allow them to do this.
"In our best interests" to "allow" them to do this? Who the hell do you think we are?
Japan is perfectly able to make their own decisions. Not only that, but they act in their own best interests, not ours. They do not exist solely as "our ally", they are a sovereign nation with their own issues to deal with.
I think it's both strange and a little sad to see Americans - and it's not just you - talking about Japan modifying their military as if it's both our decision to make, and a decision to be taken lightly. You don't understand Japan's domestic or international issues. You don't understand their constitution or their history. You've really got no place to be commenting on what they should or shouldn't do in our best interests. Japan will and should continue to act in its own best interests.
The Japanese public has shown little interest in modifying their military. They just voted out en masse the party that was in favor of doing so, and forced their nationalistic prime minister to resign in part because he was more concerned with things like modifying the military's constitutional basis than he was in fixing things like pensions and wage disparities. Why would they want to go down the same road that led them into WWII, go down the same road that's led the US into Vietnam and Iraq, down the same road that's led to the division of Korea? Why would they want to do that given the economic prosperity and success that they've built with both all the money they've saved and all the goodwill they've built up over the past 60 years by not employing an offensive military?
And how is this not intuitive to people outside of Japan?
Japan has had thousands of years of history dominated by war; they're experts in it. They look at us and see us as absolute beginners. They've now had 60 years of history dominated by peace and they've become one of the richest, best-educated and most technologically advanced countries in the world, with among the longest lifespans. They see the correlation between the two, why don't you?
That's one reason. The other reason is because they can depend on someone else spending lots of cash on "military posturing" to defend them.
There are a lot of peacenik kooks out there that like to try to adopt some holier-than-thou attitude that presumes that any military "posturing" is "senseless." The reality is that the world has always been--and continues to be--a very dangerous place. Feel free to hate Bush all you want. Feel free to think that Iraq was a bad idea. But be under no illusion: The world is every bit as dangerous today as it was in the 1930's--probably more so. Yes, it sucks that we have to spend so much money on our military and so many of our "allies" get relatively free rides. But the cold hard truth is that the free world does need to be defended and often fought for. I wouldn't mind some help doing so, but I'd rather we make the investment ourselves than that no-one make the investment.
You argument makes no sense. That $360 million per copy is money that didn't go to other weapons systems and its money that got tacked on to the national debt or taken out of tax payers pockets. THAT IS WHAT AN F-22 COST US, and you can't spin it any other way. Just because its sunk cost doesn't change the fact is money tacked on to the national debt, for which we the U.S. had to borrow money and is paying interest. The F-22 R&D program went on far longer than it was supposed to, suffered huge overruns, pretty much the standard procedure for every big Lockheed contract.
At the moment that kind of money would have been better spent on patrol vehicles for Iraq designed to withstand IED's. It could better go to repairing all the M-1's and Bradley's that were completely worn out in Iraq. If we actually needed an armored fighting force for an emergency right now, the U.S. doesn't really have one. The Army and Marines are completely broken with most of their working equipment tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the rest in depots in the U.S. broken down and and worn out.
The problem with the Air Force is that it has completely outstripped every adversary to the point they are mostly just squandering money competing with themselves. Russia and China are the only two potential adversaries that could even remotely challenge the U.S. in the air. The odds of China and the U.S. going to war now are really slim. China is every Republican businessman's wet dream, a gigantic pool of dirt cheap labor to profit from. China is bleeding the U.S. white in trade deficit the old fashioned capitalist way. They are so mutually dependent economically a war is the last thing on their minds. Russia is getting rich off its oil and gas reserves. It has no reason to throw all that away in a foolish war. It can control Europe just by threatening to turn off the gas pipelines in the middle of winter.
So who exactly is the F-22 or B-2 needed to fight? They are ridiculously expensive cold war relics, which are almost completely worthless in a world in which all of America's enemies are using unconventional warfare, like hijacked planes, suicide bombers and IED's. No one is foolish enough to go one on one with the U.S. in a conventional war, everyone has figured out its really cheap and easy to tie the U.S. up in knots with unconventional methods.
They are also to expensive and to big a trophy target to risk them by sending them
The A-10 is probably the most useful airplane the U.S. has in the real wars the U.S. is fighting now, its ancient and dirt cheap but it does the job that needs done in the real wars American is fighting now.
That Red Flag exercise was really telling, it was mostly F-22's beating F-15's. F-15's have had complete air superiority in every war they've been in. At this point the Air Force is just beating itself at enormous expense to the American tax payer. No on else is really even trying any more. Most fighters being built by other countries are for potential wars against countries which aren't the United States and to maintain some pretense that they could defend their air space against the United States if they had to when they probably couldn't, even against F-15's, F-18's and F-117's.
@de_machina
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"It was so stupid to invade... with 20-20 hindsight."
Who the hell needed hindsight? One had only to look at how well the Soviets had faired in the region to predict with high degree of accuracy what would happen if we stuck our noses in. (And not just Russia. Historically speaking, the same thing had happened to pretty much any other invader.)
But no, Bushy-boy had a bee in his bonnet for Saddam and was certain that once we demonstrated that might of the US that everyone would drop their weapons and tremble in fear. "Shock and awe", indeed.
And true to form, the military got their one set piece battle during the invasion. And won. And then things degenerated into the kind of guerilla fighting that screwed the Soviets and that we demonstrated we could handle so well in Vietnam.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I live in Japan; and let me just say, I do not want Japan re-arming into a wannabe military superpower so they can become the US's henchman in its future ill-conceived wars around the globe. I'd much rather Japan played a good, peaceful neighbour to China and Russia rather than an antagonistic bully like their "ally" across the ocean. It's much better for everyone that way.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.