Military News Today

Japan has been looking at ways to add the F-35 to its Naval Defence Force, giving it strength and better prepare itself for island hopping amphibious warfare contingencies to deter China. The JS Kaga, once a destroyer turned amphibious assault ship along with the JS Izumo to become a mini-carrier built around the F-35.

Japan is positioning itself as a serious geopolitical player in the Indo-Pacific airspace and the F-35 is an important part of Japan increasing its effective range of power and building one of the worlds top Air Forces with the F-35 fifth generation fighter, adding over 40 F-35’s to its Navy.

The F-35 is a multi-role fighter aircraft is to become the backbone of Japans air defence, using a singular platform that no other fighter currently available offers, which will also give Japan in any future conflict with China an aircraft superior to anything in the Indo-Pacific skies. China’s J-20 has a combat range of over 1000miles and a top speed of Mach 2 making it a very formidable fighter against the F-35, but the stealth technology of the F-35 is far superior to the J-20.

The F-35 radar cross section is no bigger than that of a bumble bee, where as the J-20 radar cross section is that of the F-117 Nighthawk, which back in the 80s and 90s was the best stealth technology available, but now, this technology is extremely outdated.

The next closest foreign stealth fighter would be the Russian Su-57 which is understood to have a radar cross section between 1.2m to 0.1m2 which is equivalent to the first attempts of stealth aircraft in the 1960s or the radar cross section of some forth generation fighter jets.

The Su-57 is again a formidable modern fighter and just like the J-20 can reach Mach 2, but cannot be truly called a stealth aircraft. The F-35 may only reach Mach 1.6, but you can clearly see, the technology of the F-35 is far superior and I’ve really only scratched the surface of how capable and superior the F-35 technology is making it the most advanced stealth fighter jet in the world.

The stealth technology to the F-35 is the F-22, again another US aircraft possessed by the US Defence industry. Any other comparative stealth technology is that being researched by the US Defence Industry on behalf of the US Government. No other country or state has come close to the stealth advancement of the US.

The newly retrofitted JS Kaga along with Japans multi-billion dollar purchase of the F-35 is the largest defence budget spending in Japans history since WW2, making Japan the largest international customer of the F-35B platform.