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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?"
Well, given that the F-22 has made more than one appearance in Japan, I am certain the Japanese government is interested. However, this raises more than a few issues, specifically related to technology and sociopolitical issues as well. The JDAF (Japanese Defense Air Force) has been so named as it has been a Japanese Constitutional issue that their armed forces are for defense only and not aggression. The interesting thing about stealth technology however, is that it is almost exclusively used for aggression rather than defense if you play your strategy according to tradition.
I got a quick tour of the F-22, but no pictures allowed of the F-22 during my last visit up to Hill AFB and the F-22 is making the rounds and is being explored for possible basing in other countries, but there are technology sales issues with the aircraft as it will be almost impossible to strip the sensitive technologies out of the aircraft and make it "saleable".
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While the external frame is very important to any airplane, stealthy or not, what matters is what goes into the plane and what materials is it built out of. You can't just build a life-size carbon fiber chassis and call it a stealth plane if you put a whole heap of non-stealthy stuff inside.
Stealth is a defensive technology anyway, meaning your fighter is stealthy only until a single weakness is found. You can't really say at this point if this is a project that will succeed. Or if it's even meant to succeed. I mean, would you put it past the Japanese to force the US hand to sell them to F22 by threatening to build a competitor which they might sell to god-knows-who to finance the development. the previous sentence is an artistic liberty I took to get my point across, i'm sure the F22 is more advanced than the F15 in areas other than stealth.
It's about time Japan got back into the jet fighter game, considering they haven't built an all-indigenous fighter since the Mitsubish F-1 (a relatively unimpressive fighter in the class of such technological heavyweights as the J-22 Orao and the Nanchang Q-5). The Mitsubishi F-2 was just a copy of the F-16 airframe with Japanese avionics.
While I can not speak with entire certainty about the last 60 years, I can say that there are a lot of people who feel that Japan is only an "ally" because they were forced to surrender in WWII due to a) the US dropping nukes on them (one on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki ... which were the only two the US had with months required to build another one, but the Japanese did not know that) and b) Russia had finally declared war on them.
Japan entered World War II with the intent of conquering Asia. They invaded China (without ever formally declaring War since both China and Japan feared it would cause their trading partners to stop supplying them) for it's resources and eventually The Philippines which was an act of war against the US. The Japanese were notorious for committing atrocities. Germany gets most of the attention for the Holocaust but the Japanese were also quite brutal. Usually we hear about the suicide pilots who would crash their planes into enemy ships but they also raped and tortured enemies and their "creed" (for lack of a better term) was "fight to the death". They would then mutilate bodies of killed enemies stuffing their genitals in their mouths etc. This was done to demoralize the Allied troops.
Now personally I do not believe the Japanese are still like this. Their surrender in WWII was with many conditions imposed by the Allies. They initially rejected the offer but after Russia declared war on them and the 2nd nuke was dropped on Nagasaki they felt they had no choice. My history isn't 100% up to snuff but I believe that the Allies worked with the Japanese government much the same way the current US government is trying to work with Iraq to instate a new government and new, democratic, systems etc. However, those who are young can not understand the positions of the veterans and their immediate descendants who passed on their strong hatred and mistrust of the Japanese for their utter brutality in WWII. It takes time for things to change. I don't think Japan really is an "ally" of the US. I think the US government still strongly mistrusts the Japanese and wants to keep them on a very short leash to make sure that the events of WWII do not repeat themselves.
The military game is not about volume and mass production anymore, as it was back in those days. The Zero was better than anything the allies had at the time, but in terms of people volume and production volume the US was non-beatable, at least once they were awake, something Admiral Yamamoto predicted very accurately when he said "I can run wild for six months ... after that, I have no expectation of success." The Pacific half of WWII was one of attrition. (The other half of it also was one, actually, once the little madman in Germany pulled in the USSR and the US.) There will never again be a war like WWII, and certainly to between Japan and anyone.
The military game nowadays is about high-tech capabilities, and its economic counterpart is about producing the support for those and selling that. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Japanese can beat the sh*t out of the US in this area if they really want to. If they don't, it'll only be for a "lack of wanting" imposed by their history. not for a lack of ability.
Besides, Japan beat the US in the car industry hands-down by doing just that: focus on becoming, being, and remaining better and persist until success is assured, no matter what. And that even was partly a volume game, meaning they beat the US on its home turf.
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That comparison may be valid for American vs. German tanks, but not for Japanese vs. American airplanes. Japan created what was undoubtedly its best fighter, the Zero, in 1939, and never did anything better than that. OTOH, the US kept releasing better and better planes during WWII; the P-51 had a cruising speed that was 20 mph faster than the Zero's *top* speed in level flight.
Japan beat the US in the car industry hands-down by doing just that: focus on becoming, being, and remaining better and persist until success is assured, no matter what
They did that in the video and audio industry, until everyone had all the VCRs and boomboxes they wanted. Then the focus shifted to computers and cellphones. Where is Japan now? Why is it that Sony, the unbeatable monster of audio and video equipment has to buy their phone technology from a Swedish corporation?
I think Japan has a very weak spot: they are excellent at improving existing technologies, but they cannot create new ones. When they finally dominate an industry, it becomes more or less irrelevant and a new industry dominates the economy.
I'm sure there will be better Japanese CPUs in the future to rival Intel or AMD, there'll be better Japanese cellphones than Nokia, Ericsson, or Motorola. But I'm ready to bet that by then there will exist a new gadget that no one imagines today, and that gadget will have been invented in the USA or Europe.
Just emit the right wavelength and find a dark spot moving in the sky (i.e. absence of normal atmospheric backscatter). Then launch a rocket with multi-spectral guidance system. It'll either see it visually, or through a radar (when it's close), or in infrared (it's warm, it burns fuel, you see). Check out C-400 Triumph. It shoots down anything and everything, whether it's in the stratosphere or close to the ground within the radius of 250 miles. Russians have no qualms selling this stuff to Arabs and the Chinese, either, so don't expect F-22 to ever be deployed over UAE or China. Or at least don't expect it to be deployed for long.