Stealth vs. Skills Stealth vs. Skills. By: Perrett, Bradley, Aviation Week & Space Technology, 00052175, 12/8/2008, Vol. 169, Issue 22
The future of Mitsubishi's fighter capability depends on the coming F-X selection Japan's F-X fighter competition results will determine next year whether the national industry can sustain its tradition of domestic production of fast jets or instead be forced to accept a suspension and the risk of losing skills.
Lockheed Martin, Eurofighter and Boeing are presenting the Defense Ministry with stark choices, especially on the industrial side.
One Japanese official who has recently moved from the Defense Ministry to industry says that his former colleagues are inclined toward the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning to fill the F-X fighter requirement, but industry is lobbying for the Boeing F-15FX or F/A-18E/F Super Hornet or the Eurofighter Typhoon.
Simply put,
Lockheed Martin [F-35] can offer Japan the most advanced aircraft but perhaps the least industrial opportunity. Eurofighter is enticing Japanese industry with the largest and most useful range of work. And Boeing can offer some stealth with the Super Hornet or considerable development participation with the F-15FX, and top-shelf electronics with either fighter.
A request for proposals is likely within weeks, submission of bids around March and a selection in summer, in time for the next defense budget.
The air self-defense force needs 50 fighters to replace the last two squadrons of McDonnell Douglas F-4EJ Kai Phantoms.
The mission is air defense; competitors expect attack capability to get only secondary attention. Industry and government officials say Japan is not looking for an aircraft to penetrate North Korean air defenses to destroy ballistic missiles before launch, despite earlier comments hinting at such a priority (AW&ST Aug. 6, 2007, p. 26).
Another notable omission is any commitment to keep
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in the fighter business, although there's no doubt that the country would like to sustain and develop its domestic production, if it can. Japan has steadily developed that capability over the past half-century and most recently pushed it forward at great cost with Mitsubishi's F-2 program in the 1990s.
But the company will build the last F-2 strike fighter in 2011. Whatever official favor the
F-35 has at this early stage, its alluring stealth design must overcome three major disadvantages:
It probably cannot be built in Japan, it cannot be delivered as quickly as its competitors, and there could be a perception that its air-to-surface design slant is mismatched with the air-to-air requirement.Lockheed Martin says Japan could assemble the F-35, as Italy may, but the company declines to speculate on whether the U.S. government would allow a foreign country to produce the fighter--that is, build up the structure from raw materials and basic parts, and also make major systems.
No one else is doing that for the whole F-35, whose parts were parceled out long ago to companies in participating countries. The U.S. congressional refusal to let Japan even buy the F-22 Raptor, let alone build it, does not bode well for the prospect of a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries F-35 production line.
But there might be other ways to support Japanese industry. "We fully understand that industrial participation will be an important part of the program," says John Balderston, the executive running Lockheed Martin's bid.
The company (Lockheed) can offer more than F-35 assembly, he says, but he declines to give details. That might include help in upgrading the F-2, an enlargement of the F-16 whose development was supported by Lockheed Martin.
Japan's ban on arms exports seems to rule out any chance of the country taking on part of the F-16 production effort.
The ministry has asked
Boeing to offer both the
F-15FX and the
Super Hornet.
The
F-15FX's avionics would be developed with Japanese industry. Airframe production would be straightforward, since Mitsubishi built more than 200 F-15Js and F-15DJs and may still have the jigs and tools. On the other hand, that means that there would be little to learn on the manufacturing side.
Boeing's F-X leader, Phil Mills, says the ability to use the F-15J support infrastructure may be a more important advantage than familiarity in manufacturing.
Mills expects there would be very few limits on F-15FX licensed production. "There may be some technology that would not be available for license production, at least some parts of the radar."
The
Super Hornet, basically in U.S. Navy configuration, would offer a licensed manufacturing program and minimal development--rather like what Japan used to do before the difficult F-2 effort.
Eurofighter has no such obstacles.
"Japan can build as much of the Typhoon as it wants to, and it can develop the aircraft for the future, either on its own or as part of the consortium", says Mark Parkinson, a senior vice president of BAE Systems, which represents Eurofighter in Japan.
That would presumably include access to the advanced precision manufacturing technology which BAE developed for the Typhoon and later transferred to the F-35 and which Japan might need if it later goes ahead with its own stealth fighter (AW&ST, Nov. 3, p. 44). That follow-on project would offer to revive Japanese fighter building, maybe late next decade, if the ministry chooses imported F-35s for the F-X requirement.
The F-X delivery schedule is weighing on the ministry 's mind. Japan is getting phenomenal service from
the Phantom, with a basic design from the 1950s, early in the Cold War.
The aircraft can serve until 2015, more than a quarter century after the end of the Cold War, but not longer, says one industry executive.
One of the last two squadrons will need to be replaced in 2014.Lockheed Martin says it can begin F-35 deliveries in 2014 but does not comment on whether it could fill the order by the end of 2015, which seems unlikely. Balderston says Mitsubishi is building seven F-2s a year and Lockheed Martin could support a similar assembly and delivery rate with the F-35.
Having older, less advanced aircraft, the other two competitors can deliver much more quickly, as shown by Boeing's commitment to hand over the first Super Hornet to Australia less than three years after Canberra's 2007 contract signature.
And the Typhoon does seem to be a serious contender, no mere stalking-horse for U.S. companies that would have previously not expected serious European competition for a Japanese requirement. Japanese officials have not, however, repeated the 2007 statement of then-defense minister Shigeru Ishiba that, if Japan could not have the F-22, then it wanted the Typhoon.Similarly, Japan's request for Boeing to offer both of its fighters shows that it is seriously interested in the latest updates of aircraft designed in the 1970s and 1980s. A Japanese industry executive says the F-2 isn't being upgraded for F-X because it does not have enough internal volume, not because Japan thinks it must move to a stealthy successor.
Japan's emphasis on the air-defense mission can only help the Typhoon, which has the strongest focus on air combat among the contenders and can wield the special long-range capability of the Meteor ramjet air-to-air missile. A requirement emphasizing surface attack would have suited the F-35 and the F-15.
Boeing is nonetheless making much of the F-15FX's payload-radius in strike missions.
The F-2 has not performed as well as expected, so the defense ministry might give bonus points for a fighter that can help in anti-shipping work. (Nota: aquí es donde dijo Tayun que el EFA también les había encantado, como atacante marítimo)Japan hasn't asked Boeing about buying F/A-18G Growlers as part of the deal--a clear sign that it has no secret requirement to quietly get a penetrating strike capability as well as air defense.
Opponents of the F-35 assert that it is oriented too far toward surface attack, with only four internally stowed air-to-air missiles, Raytheon AIM-120 Amraams. "The aircraft isn't getting its due," in public assessments of its air combat capability, says Balderston, pointing to its ability to get in the first shot, thanks to stealth, and the option of externally mounting a pair of AIM-9 Sidewinders with "minimal" effect on its stealth characteristics.The Typhoon's most glaring shortcoming is its mechanically scanned radar antenna, a technology that Japan left behind when the F-2 introduced an electronically scanned array. BAE's Parkinson defends the radar's performance, however, and says it meets Japan's needs. So the Typhoon will be offered with that sensor and a capability to be upgraded to electronic scanning later.By Bradley Perrett, Tokyo and Yokohama, Japan
Stealth vs. Skills. By: Perrett, Bradley, Aviation Week & Space Technology, 00052175, 12/8/2008, Vol. 169, Issue 22