In Defense of Japan

It’s cheap journalism to say that the battle between the F-35 and the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is heating up, because it’s only heating up in the press- the battle has been heating up between Lockheed Martin and Boeing for some time. After talking to people very familiar with what is going on, it does seem as budget pressures are putting a new sheen on the previously unfancied Super Hornet.

Let’s backtrack a few years. Ever since the tsunami of kokusanka in aerospace collided, broke, and ebbed on the impenetrable need to maintain good offices with the U.S.  in the FSX crisis (as told so well by Michael Green in Arming Japan, p.86-107 ) Japan’s aerospace ambitions long ago turned back to Meiji priorities- get the best technology in the world available and indigenize it.

The current war of words between the F-35 and the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and, indeed, the Eurofighter- which has many champions here among impartial observers- speaks volumes to the shifting and juggling of priorities facing Japanese planners.

Japan’s instinct was to have bought the F-22  and its stealth technology and pressed for squeezing as much technology and production transfer out of the U.S. as possible. A vain hope and crushed painfully.

The F-35 has been seen as the “next best thing” as it is a “5th generation” airframe that is stealthy and has all its weapons, fuel tanks and etc. subsumed into the airframe. But the F-35 has been fighting terrible battles of its own (see The Economist’s The last manned fighter for more details) with well publicized software and more serious difficulties and potentially soaring per-unit costs. Which is what made my private interview with former Top Gun pilot and now F-35 Program Manager Stephen O’Bryan (below) even more important.

The critical issues are always balancing cost (especially expensive local production) vs. technology transfer (and assuaging/ pushback against U.S. technonationalism), vs. jobs for MHI and KHI, vs. maintaining the Alliance all balanced by the fact that unless Japan purchases top-of-the-line fighters, it probably sends terrible signals to the Chinese.

Bearing all this in mind, the really astonishing thing is the distance the Super Hornet has traveled over the past year or so in perception. Three years ago it was assumed this plane, based on a 40-year-old design, wouldn’t stand a chance against the F-35. Again there are faint echos of the FSX saga again. Back in the day Japan felt forced to drop its preference for the original F-18, in which TDRI could fit all sorts of cool J-gear such as CCV, composite wings and phased array radar, for the F-16 because of the increasing arrogance of McDonnell Douglas, which insisted on blocking any Japanese improvements on the plane without paying MD first…

How times have changed. With U.S. industry in fear of reduced procurement until the U.S. finds more clients to arm or wars to fight, Lockheed Martin and Boeing seem to be falling over themselves to offer better and better deals.

“There is a clear sense that improvements have been made and that from an industrial point of view F-35 will be a much better deal than one would have thought in the past. And that to me sounds like they’re trying to outbid the Europeans, because they are those offering access to technology know-how,” says my good friend Alessio Patalano over at Kings College, London.

Despite clouds remaining over the actual cost and operability of the F-35 Patalano thinks it would be a major mistake to opt for the F/A-18E because it’s cheap. Purchases like this RFP are actually tools of statecraft and in the fast evolving East Asian landscape, Japan needs to maintain a modern, advanced air force, one capable of measuring itself up against modernising regional forces, both operationally and technically, he says.

Anyway, here is the original article. Enjoy!