Japan Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Japan has growing doubts that its next-gen fighter project will meet a 2035 rollout target.. The joint Global Combat Air Program GCAP is falling behind schedule due to a lack of urgency from Britain and Italy, which could push deployment beyond 2040..

Japan should just do it alone. They have the technology.

gelgoog said:

Japan should just do it alone. They have the technology.

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they tried with Mitsubishi X-2 Shinshin but failed also they don't have Engines. but yeah they can get engines from USA

Sure they do. The XF9 engine.

The Mitsubishi X-2 Shinshin was a smaller scale prototype developed with the native engines they had back then.

sunnymaxi said:

Japan has growing doubts that its next-gen fighter project will meet a 2035 rollout target.. The joint Global Combat Air Program GCAP is falling behind schedule due to a lack of urgency from Britain and Italy, which could push deployment beyond 2040..

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No worry, Trump offers F-47 to Japan, really?

henrik said:

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This threatens to put major kinks in the plans of Japanese hawks. They have been trying to push the JASDF to match up against the PLAAF and it has not gone well. A decade ago when China was inducting just a few J-20s a year, the JASDF had F-15s and F-2 which were a respectable counter to China's Flankers and J-10s. But now, aside from a few F-35s, Japan still has to rely on their F-15s and F-2s and these planes are vastly outclassed by the new Flankers and J-10s that China now has in the hundreds. Once upon a time, the Japanese hawks could trick themselves into thinking that it was still okay because Chinese weapons were inferior, but that illusion can't be maintained any more.

And so Japan really needs GCAP to be done ASAP, and their partners just don't feel that same urgency. I don't think that there was any reason to think that GCAP could meet their deadlines. It just has too many pieces to get working right for any of the design process to develop smoothly. The last multi-nation fighter design was the Eurofighter and that program took forever to develop. GCAP is vastly more complicated so it only makes sense for it to take even longer. I suspect that Japan will just try to buy more F-35s as a stopgap solution.

The F-35 is the wrong airplane for Japan. It is an archipelago nation. They would be better served by a twin jet.
The F-2 is a fairly decent aircraft. It just was not produced in reasonable numbers and had a high cost per unit.
I think they would be better served by either GCAP or their own design. Buying American will be just stepping on the same rake as in the past. Japan today has the basic technology to make their own plane if they want to.

But then again Japan being cucked by the US in military procurement would be nothing new.

They'll probably end up buying more F-35s as a stopgap and then the F-47 when it comes out since it was already offered to them. I don't expect Japan to ever develop their own fighter again unless they are absolutely forced to. They just don't have it in them anymore (for many many reasons). However, they could potentially make a "kai" version of the F-35 and F-47 down the line. As far as I know, they do already produce the F-35A locally (finally assembly and maybe some parts of it, I'm not sure).

Japan already lost F-35 pilots when their aircraft fell into the ocean. Not that I expect them to learn anything.