Japan is planning to spend billions on US military hardware, and defense companies are showing off their wares
33rd Fighter Wing F-35As taxiing at Volk Field during Northern Lightning in 2016.
Senior Airman Stormy Archer/US Air Force
TOKYO — Global arms firms showed off on Wednesday their wares in Japan as it prepared a plan to buy billions of dollars of US military equipment, including at least 40 Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters worth about $4 billion, four sources said.
The Lockheed Martin Corp F-35s, which will replace 100 aging F-15 fighter jets, are in addition to an earlier order for 42 of the aircraft.
The new procurement will leave Japan with about 100 stealth fighters, including some vertical-takeoff B variants that could fly from helicopter carriers, in a bid to give it an edge over China in the contested East China Sea.
Japan's JS Kaga helicopter carrier.
Yamada Taro/Wikimedia Commons
"It will be around 40 new aircraft," said one of the sources with knowledge of Japan's five-year plan. He described a Tuesday report in the Nikkei business daily that Japan would buy as many as 100 new F-35s as "aspirational."
The procurement plan, which will be released in December with a paper outlining defense goals, is widely expected to accelerate defense spending increases that are already pushing Japan beyond a self-imposed limit of 1% of gross domestic product.
Despite having a pacifist constitution, even at 1%, Japan already ranks as one of the world's biggest military spenders.
Sailors on the Japanese helicopter carrier Kaga practicing traditional sword fighting on the hangar deck in the Indian Ocean on September 28.
REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
Japan is bolstering defenses against North Korean ballistic missiles with two Lockheed Martin Aegis Ashore air-defense batteries.
It also wants to build a military equipped with modern fighter jets, longer-range missiles and drones, as well as ships and aircraft to ferry soldiers to project power along an island chain stretching almost to Taiwan.
For the year starting on April 1, the Ministry of Defense is seeking a 2.1% increase in spending to 5.3 trillion yen ($46.54 billion) for the seventh straight annual increase.
Those outlays have drawn foreign defense contractors to this week's Japan International Aerospace Exhibition in Tokyo.
'Longer operations'
The JSMDF submarine Oryu at its launch on October 4.
JMSDF/Twitter
Limited space at the show, which is being held early to avoid a clash with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, means that 300 fewer domestic companies are exhibiting compared with two years ago.
But the number of foreign companies has gone up to 294 from 195.
"We see opportunities for more F-35s," said Andy Latham, the head of business development for military aviation at BAE Systems, which builds the fighter's rear fuselage.
The British company also wants to partner with Japan on a new, longer-range fighter. They are together studying the development of beyond visual range air-launched missiles.
"That's indicative of the type of longer operations that Japan can become involved in," Latham said.
US contractors may be the biggest winners of Japan's increased spending because purchases of their equipment will help Japan deflect criticism from President Donald Trump over a trade surplus he says hurts US workers.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Donald Trump.
Evan Vucci/AP Images
Trump, who has threatened to put tariffs on Japanese cars, wants to make the United States even more dominant in the global weapons trade.
US overseas arms sales to foreign governments rose 13% to $192.3 billion in the year that ended September 30, the State Department said this month.
Japan, which is bound to the United States by a treaty that obliges US defense of Japan, is already one of their biggest and most profitable US markets.
"It seems that there are a lot of requirements and evolving ones," said Kenneth Loving, the regional director of General Atomics Indo Pacific, as he stood next to a model of an Avenger drone.
Japanese military planners are interested in that General Atomic unmanned aircraft, one of the sources said, because in addition to patrolling Japanese waters, it could be used to target ballistic missiles aimed at Japan.
(Reporting by Tim Kelly; additional reporting by Toshifumi Takemoto; editing by Robert Birsel)
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