BY : aviationweek




U.S. refusal to supply Lockheed Martin F-22s for Japan’s current fighter requirement has prompted Tokyo’s defense ministry to propose a stealth technology demonstrator, ensuring it will be more independent of Washington in future programs.

Pushing back the decision date on a replacement for its F-4 Phantoms to 2009 at the earliest, the Japanese defense ministry says it is looking at flying the old McDonnell Douglas fighters longer. It is also seeking information on potential replacements from non-U.S. suppliers—presumably the Eurofighter consortium and Dassault Aviation.

Japanese media reports quote officials saying the proposed stealth technology demonstrator would give Tokyo leverage in seeking F-22s as Phantom replacements—suggesting that the U.S. might as well relent, because Japan will get a stealth fighter on its own if it has to. But it is obvious that Japan is in no position to develop a stealth fighter quickly enough for the Phantom replacement requirement, the F-X.

The project does, however, show that Japan is determined to be less dependent on the U.S. for later combat aircraft requirements, or at least to have a stronger position when negotiating for U.S. aircraft to fill them. The U.K. similarly invests in stealth partly to keep a seat at Washington’s technology table.

Japan’s Phantoms were built between 1971 and 1981 to a design that first flew in 1958. The 91 remaining aircraft are supposed to begin retiring in the fiscal year beginning April 2008.

The first seven of the replacement F-X type were to be ordered in fiscal year 2009, but it now appears that will be delayed, since Japan will not choose the successor type until then at soonest. It previously planned to make the choice in the middle of next year.

Japanese officials say the manned stealth demonstrator, smaller than an operational aircraft, would take about 10 years to develop, if the government accepts the defense ministry’s proposal to fund the program from next year. And that timeframe would support only a demonstrator; any operational derivative would likely not enter service until the 2020s.

The demonstrator would include technologies other than stealth, but would have neither a radar nor weapons. No technical details have been made available. The project would cost tens of billions of yen, or hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a Japanese press report evidently based on a deliberate official leak.

Some of the engineering development slack left by the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries F-2 fighter program, which ends in fiscal year 2011, would be taken up by the stealth demonstrator, but the manufacturing plants can be kept busy only by choosing an aircraft to fill the F-X requirement and ordering it into production.

“Japan does already have a good technological base for stealth aircraft,” says Satoshi Morimoto, director of the institute of world studies at Takushoku University in Tokyo, who was nonetheless skeptical about the country independently developing a stealth fighter. “The engine would probably have to come from somewhere else, because it would cost too much for Japan to develop it on its own,” he says.

Moreover, Japan bars itself from exporting weapons, so it couldn’t rely on foreign sales to help pay for development. South Korea will decide in 2009 whether to launch development of a proposed twin-engine stealth fighter, the KFX.

Japan announced its F-X delay and confirmed the stealth demonstrator plan a day after the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee decided to maintain the ban on F-22 exports, leaving intact a clause to that effect in a defense appropriations bill.

While Congress has been hostile to selling the F-22 to anyone, the U.S. Defense Dept. has not been so adamant, sometimes suggesting it would look favorably on supplying the aircraft to Japan. With a short authorized production run of 183 units that will make little progress down the learning curve, export sales would usefully cut costs for any follow-on U.S. Air Force buy.

But Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, said on July 25, “I don’t advocate F-22s for Japan.”

His statement was probably prompted by Japanese leaks several months ago of secret data about the Aegis naval anti-aircraft and anti-missile system. A Japanese naval officer married to a Chinese woman was found in March with a computer disk containing the data about Aegis, another extremely sensitive system but, unlike the F-22, one that the U.S. has supplied to Japan. The officer was not the only unauthorized person found holding the information.

Morimoto says that incident has become an issue in Japanese negotiations for the F-22.

Bruce Wright, the commander of U.S. forces in Japan, last month called the leak “a very serious problem.”

The Japanese are acutely aware of the damage the incident has caused. Vice Defense Minister Takemasa Moriya this month visited Washington and outlined new measures to ensure that secrets are kept.