Japan F-35 buy big victory for troubled program - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Japan F-35 buy big victory for troubled program

TOKYO — Japan’s announcement on Tuesday that it has selected Lockheed Martin’s F-35 over Boeing’s F/A-18 Super Hornet and the Eurofighter Typhoon has been characterized as a big win for the troubled Joint Strike Fighter program.

“This was a very detailed and rigorous competition run very professionally. Many nations will look on Japan’s decision as a strong validation of the F-35’s maturity and capability,” said Dave Scott, director of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 International Business Development.

The announcement, delayed from last Friday, had been expected to go in favor of the F-35, which will now replace about 42 aging Mitsubishi F-4EJ Kai Phantoms under a contract valued at about $8 billion.

The cost of each jet is $114 million (8.9 billion yen), according to a Japanese Ministry of Defense official.

Japan’s Defense Minister Yasuo Ichikawa said at a news conference here that the F-35 had won after what he called “both an open and very strict evaluation” based on scoring four categories: performance, cost, local industrial participation and logistical support. “The result was that the F-35 got the best score.”

However, Ichikawa said, “of the four parameters, the most important was performance. When we think about our national security needs for our future fighters, we have to consider various security environments, and the movements and changes by various countries. In view of this we need to have a fighter that is capable of responding to these changing needs.”

According to Lockheed Martin, the first four aircraft will be delivered in 2016.

Scott said that while the Super Hornet and the Eurofighter Typhoon put up a good fight, it was probably the F-35’s stealth capability that helped it clinch the deal.

“The F-35’s capability is far beyond that of fourth-generation fighters. It has interoperability with all three services,” he said.

“Certainly stealth is becoming the essential component for air defense beyond fourth-generation fighters. Both Russia and China are developing and testing early models of fifth-generation fighters, and there is also the development of surface-to-air missiles on ships that makes fourth-generation fighters vulnerable.”

Jun Okumura, a counselor for Eurasia Group, said the Japanese government had probably made a sound decision. “There are all sorts of reasons why the F-35 was the fighter of choice: political, technical, and with what our neighbors are up to,” he said.

The win comes at a time when the Joint Strike Fighter program is running into trouble in the U.S.

With 2,440 planes on order worth $382 billion, the Pentagon’s biggest weapons program is about five years behind schedule and slogging through cost, technical and political entanglements.

A recent Pentagon report revealed 13 flaws that need to be fixed, while failure in Washington to agree on federal budget deficit slashing may lead to cuts in either or both the number and variants of the plane.

Scott said that winning an open and rigorous Request for Proposals in Japan could bring forward momentum to the program. There are about 700 F-35s on order from the program’s eight overseas partner nations.

“With Israel and Australia and Japan on board, each new additional quantity of orders brings benefits for all involved, with scale of production lowering costs,” Scott said.

While the number of planes is limited in the Japan order, local industry would receive substantial benefits from the deal, Scott added.

Lockheed is offering a production line-final assembly and checkout facility in Japan, as well as component and subcomponent assembly work. Japan is not a member of the F-35 partner program, so the procurement of F-35s by Japan will be through the Foreign Military Sales process.

“Our local partners will benefit substantially from the program. They will have final assembly, manufacture of a number of components and systems and structural parts, and engine assembly,” Scott said.

Okumura cautioned however that the selection of the F-35 does not mean that the fighter is an automatic choice for the F-XX program, a 100-plus fighter replacement for Japan’s aging fleet of F-15s, that will form Japan’s next big-ticket purchase.

“The Air Self-Defense Forces have in the past preferred to have a number of different fighters for different roles. And remember, the more F-35s that are produced locally, the more the cost will increase,” he said.