Does Japan get it? Maybe.

The cover story for the July 27 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology looks at the shift in Japan's power projection strategy and this is an area that I've been interested in as the Japanese Self-Defense Forces are now doing things and discussing things openly that just even several years ago would have been taboo in light of their post-war constitutional provisions regarding their military posture. Two interviews with high-ranking JASDF officers are featured, the first with Lt. General Hidetoshi Hirata, commander of the JASDF's Southwestern Composite Air Division based in Okinawa- it's Lt. Gen. Hirata's forces that are closest to potential threats with the rise in PLAAF capabilities and power projection.

One of the interesting aspects of the interview with Hirata was his non-endorsement of AESA as an upgrade to JASDF F-15J (AESA won't be part of the upgrade for 90 of their Eagles) but endorsement of capabilities that could be part of an AESA package. The following excerpt is from David Fulghum's Ares Defense blog:

“Our next fighters [including the F-X and F-XX] are expected to have a couple of critical capabilities to fulfill their mission,” Hirata says. “Networking and ISR are important in the situations and environments where F-X will be operated. It will need to function…as a node of the ISR network. That’s why the F-X needs good sensors, radar, electronic surveillance and communications.”

It's interesting that he points out a crucial cornerstone of network-centric warfare, the distribution of information to disparate assets. Having an aircraft that can act as a node in an information network makes it a force multiplier for everyone else in that network. It has already been published that AESA offers the capabilities that General Hirata is pointing out- if I'm not mistaken, AESA has shown itself not just to be a tool for detection, surveillance as a traditional radar, but it has also been shown to function as a high-bandwidth datalink, electronic sensor and communications link. These are capabilities that have the Australians jazzed, but I'll post on that at a later date.

Does Japan need F-22s? Maybe. They're a lot more proximately placed to fourth generation threats like the Chengdu J-10B and Shenyang J-11B, have a broad area of aerospace to cover (supercruise would make short work of the distances involved) and having all-aspect LO would give limited JASDF assets survivability in the face of numerically larger numbers.

But with the end of F-22 production, Japan may well be forced to take another approach where the network capabilities of an AESA class package might help offset without necessarily needing all-aspect LO.

Time will tell.