Japan Announces Plan to Export Next Generation Aircraft
It appears the Japanese government is seeing the economic benefits the ROK is receiving from their growing defense industry and wants to get their own piece of this growing market:
Japan’s Cabinet on Tuesday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it’s developing with Britain and Italy to other countries, in the latest move away from the country’s postwar pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project and part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to countries other than the partners.
Stars and Stripes
You can read more at the link.
“Gotta love England. It’s the only place I know where even decent and moral people can pop a couple of faggots in their mouth and then suck on a nice fag afterwards.”
https://twitter.com/OntWtf/status/1773385279916650814
The British Brodcasting what?
Joint projects for fighter jets have never worked out very well. Just look at Europe and their squabblings. Japan spent billions to develop their F2 jets with the help of the US – an inferior copy of the F16 but more expensive to make (rather than just buying an F16). It was also a massive failure as the US was stingy in transferring the key technologies that Japan sought. And Japan’s corrupt defense industry with massive price balloons on inferior homegrown Galapasgos technology isn’t going to help their development either.
It’s been a constant issue in Japan media and the internet. And oh, Japan wants to jointly “redevelop” South Korea’s T-50 trainer jet with Lockheed Martin, by somehow cutting out South Korea completely. I’m not sure how they could even think this is possible when the majority license holder of the T-50 is South Korea. But anyway Japan proposed to jointly redevelop the T-50 jets with the US, manufacture them in the US, and stick a Made-in USA sticker. Japan needs to replace its aging trainers but the choices (the Boeing T-7 project which is a complete disaster, and the Italian-made M-346 a rebadged Russian YAK) aren’t too appealing. Japan could just buy the T-50 from South Korea, but we’re talking about Japan here, where even Samsung has to hide its logo to sell a few smartphones in Japan.