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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?"
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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Wouldn't it be a bit premature to gauge air superiority while we just have a few pictures of a model of the plane.
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.
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.
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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...
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"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
The Japanese surpised the US at Pearl Harbour, not only because it was a sneak attack, but also because it proved once and for all that in naval warfare the era of big-guns was over and the airplane would rule. In contrast to the Nippon Kaigun, the US navy had not yet understood this at the time, but the Pearl Harbor attack forced them into it. Many navies had carriers in 1940-1941, but only the Japanese understood what they were good for. That's not exactly an example of "take an existing success and improved it to perfection", but of a "change the paradigm". Actually, an American general saw the light in the 1920s as well, but was not believed in the US and court-martialled for his persistence. (So yes, it could be argued that the Japanese heard the idea from him, and I cannot prove that they had it already, but Mitchell's idea was not generally believed to be a good one. And that crucially is what the Japanese understood before embarking on their naval building programs.)
Interestingly, the ever-imaginative rocket-inventing Germans - who by the way also invented the true submarine (their revolutionary Type XXI) for replacing the "boats that also could dive if really needed" that everyone else was using, completely failed to see the importance of carriers throughout the war. With that I want to point out that it is not correct to extrapolate from one (actually even misunderstood) failure to do something to a general caracteristic. Carrier building and developing the correct doctrine to use them effectively takes time, and since the Germans didn't have a real navy in between 1918 and roughly about 1936 they didn't have that time. It doesn't make them idiots, though.
The Japanese collapse started at the combined battles in the Coral Sea and Midway (exactly after the six months predicted by Yamamoto), where they crucially lost most of their carrier fleet and experienced pilots. They simply did not have the resources to replace those. At that moment in time, the US was dangerously close to running out of carriers as well (just imagine Midway going the other way), but they had the resources to build many more in no time and they had the people to man them.
And on top of all that there is the entire Japanese oil shortage thing that prevented them from doing many things they would have liked to do. What use it is to mass-produce new planes (assuming for a moment you can do that) for carriers that you no longer have and can't build and that you couldn't effectively operate anyway for lack of oil and pilots.
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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.
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