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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.
Precisely. All that equipment we're carrying to detect gaseous anomalies - the thing's got to have a tailpipe!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
But what about the transforming capabilities? How many vehicle modes does it have? Will it have just the standard 2-arms and 2-legs robot mode, or will there be a third hybrid form that looks like a crab or a squid, or something?
It is very much like building your own state of the art, deep submicron IC fabrication plant. In the early days it was relatively easy to stay current, and in the 1970's even some universities could have a bleeding edge fab. As the technology gets more complex, the costs go up asymptotically, and the small players have to fold.
Many canadians remember the "Avro Arrow" the last fighter jet built here. To bring it into production would have taken up the entire defense budget, and once you have built enough fighters to satisfy the needs of your own air force, how do you keep the team together to maintain it and build enhanced versions? You either sell your aircraft to foreign nations, (often unstable and/or war torn 3rd world dictatorships that have disproportionately large military budgets) team up with foreign nations to increase your market and share the costs. (like the newest eurofighter) No matter how good the arrow was, (the project is still controversial) it couldn't be built economically without selling it abroad.
The Israeli's tried and failed with the Lavi project. Technically they could have done it, but it didn't make economic sense no matter how badly they wanted control and ownership of their own weapons platform.
Other countries such as Sweden and France manufacture high tech fighters - the French were notorious for selling their all over the world. I predict the project will probably fold after spending billions of dollars, and just maybe cranking out a factory prototype or two.
The US can do it simply because they are such a large country with the world's biggest military budget. Even they have run into problems where the production run was completed, yet they didn't want to lose the technology and expertise when the production line shut down and the team disbanded, so wound up buying more aircraft than the air force wanted.
My rights don't need management.
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.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You should have asked if the plane can combine with others to form a superior robot!
Sheesh, what's wrong with you realists?
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.
An interesting article on how perseverance and attention to details allowed the Serbs to down the F-117 stealth craft:
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htada/articles/20051121.aspx
Table-ized A.I.
The A6M Zero was considered obsolete by the Japanese government by late 1942, and was replaced by various aircraft such as the Ki-84 and N1K-J, both of which had a similar (or indeed, with the higher octane fuel the US was using, better!) performance to the P-51D and P-47D, and Japan had even higher performance fighters such as the Ki-83 about to enter service in 1945 when they surrendered.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.
The myth that Japan entered the war with the Zero and left it at that is simply that - a myth. The Zero was being replaced throughout 1943, 1944 and 1945 with better aircraft, with the only problem being that toward the end of the war Japan could not produce enough of them to sustain a defensive force.
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.
Internally it can hold 6 AIM-120Cs and 2 AIM-9s. That's it's primary configuration for air-to-air. With everything inside it is as stealthy as possible and as efficient as possible. Externally it can carry 4 fuel tanks, or two fuel tanks and four missiles (of varying types). Obviously hooking on external weapons makes it less stealthy, as well as increasing drag.
Remember: This isn't a bomber, though it can carry two bombs if needed (as the expense of 4 missiles) it's an air superiority fighter. It is designed to be fast, light, stealthy, and to kill other planes. Maneuverability and stealth are more important than maximum payload.
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.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Sheesh, what's wrong with you realists? Well duh! That's like asking if it's gonna have a landing gear.
You can't take the sky from me...
The US and previously the USSR, now Russia and China, have bene in a perpetual race to build the best fighter for over 50 years now, from the days of the F-86 and Mig-15, the F-4 and Mig-21 and F-15 and Su-27/30. Each time, one side has made a major improvement and then the other side has scrambled to keep up. The Mig-15 was the best until the US cougt up with the F-86, then the Mig-21 proved to be more nimble than the F-4 and along came the F-16. The USSR built the Mach 3 Mig-25 to counter a possible Mach 3 XB-70 US bomber and the US built the F-15 to counter that. The the Soviet built the Su-27 to counter the F-15 and the Mig-29 to counter the F-16. Since the late 80's the US has been working on the F-22, which has been both the most advanced jet fighter ever and also the most expensive. It was so expensive that the actual number pruchased has been reduced by two thirds, costnig about $100 million a piece. It is also so sensitive that it will likely never be exported.
To ctach up in this never ending race, Sukhoi in Russia has been working on a similar stealth aircraft to the F-22, called the PAK FA for many years now, and the first example should be flying next year, and Shenyang and Chengdu in China have been working on similar designs, the J-xx and J-13, but I doubt that any of these weapons will ever be used against any of the other. The Russia and Chinese jets are just as sensitive, security wise, as the F-22 is. There is much more chance that the Indians using the PAK and the Pakistanis, using the J-13/14 will duke it out amongst themselves, if Russia and China ever sell the weapons to them, being as sensitive as they are, than any of those fighting against the F-22.
These aircraft are so expensive that losing just one, be it in combat or to accidents mean that you've just lost some $100 million dollars in the case of the F-22. The fact that they will almost certainly not be used in combat against any foe that a F-16 couldn't cope with means that they, along with incredibly expensive stealth ships, stealth submarines, etc, are mostly expensive white elephants, flying around, doing a lot of impressive flight demos, and then eventually being scrapped in 30 years or so when they reach the end of their service lives.
I personally think that while the Japanese could certainly develop one of these aircraft on their own, and might very well do so in the face of the J-13/xx and the PAK if the US doesn't sell them the F-22, I think that a lot of what the Japanese are doing is simply bargaining to get the US to sell them the F-22. The costs of developing an advanced stealth fighter are not to be laughed at. However, as soon as the Russian PAK and Chinese J-13/xx are in active service, the aura of invincibility of the F-22 will decrease, and then I suppose we'll move on to round 6 of the never ending race to waste people's money and lives.
I'd recommend reading Downfall, by Richard Frank, to get the facts straight.
The Japanese were interested in a conditional surrender with four conditions: keep the Emperor, no occupation of Japan, evacuation from occupied areas to be done by Japan on a Japanese schedule, and war crime trials of Japanese to be conducted by the Japanese. That's the minimum that would be accepted by all members of the Liaison Council, and that council had to act pretty much unanimously. The Allies offered a conditional surrender, although with rather harsh conditions. The Japanese did not surrender before the nukes. They decided to use the Soviets as intermediaries, but never could decide what to ask for. There were some unofficial feelers through other countries, which the Japanese government stepped on hard.
Given that the Japanese weren't surrendering, and couldn't even agree on a proposal to start negotiations, the US really did have to use whatever means available to force surrender. Some people claimed that Japan was going to surrender in a few more months. I regard these claims as seriously optimistic, given that even in the circumstances there were plenty of Japanese willing to stage a coup to prevent the surrender. (Even so, delaying the surrender by three months would have killed far more civilians than the nukes did.)
There has, of course, been a lot of anti-American propaganda on the subject. Don't fall for it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You realize that Japan already occupied islands off the North American continent before we even attacked them right? They were already showing their version of a manifest destiny and had control over much of the pacific, from islands off the coast of Canada and Alaska(then Russian controller) to the South Pacific.
If you are referring to the two Aleutian islands they captured, that was six months after Pearl Harbor. The war was well under way by then. And to be pedantic, yes we had already attacked them many times by then, mostly carrier raids including the famous Doolittle B-15 raid on the home islands in April 1942, but also including surface ship attacks and submarine attacks.
Alaska was bought by the US from Russia in 1867. Japan didn't even open up to the outside world until 1854 and the Meiji restoration which began their "modern" era didn't happen until 1870. They were not even remotely capable of taking any foreign islands off the American coast before 1867.
Did you get your history from a box of cornflakes?
Infuriate left and right
to my original sentence below
A laboratory of the French government has evaluated the "stealthy-ness" of ATD-X.to create the following sentence.
A laboratory of the French government has evaluated the "stealthy-ness" of ATD-X, and given it a high rating.The modification by Zonk is a significant error. Neither Mitsubishi nor the French laboratory publicized the result of the evaluation. The result is highly classified.