Japan will receive even more of Kongsburg’s Joint Strike Missiles.
Here s What You Need to Know: Japan is preparing to push PLA Navy ships farther and farther away.
In a recent press release, the Norwegian defense and technology group Kongsberg announced they secured a contract with the government of Japan for delivery of additional Joint Strike Missiles. The deal, valued at 820 Norwegian Krone, or about $93 million, would be the second batch of Joint Strike Missiles received by Japan.
The original Kongsberg-Japan JSM deal was valued at a bit more than half of the current deal, and this recent contract reflects the reality of Japan’s F-35 fleet, which is growing fast. In a major arms deal announced earlier this summer, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced that the U.S. Department of State had cleared the way for Japan to buy more F-35s. Once realized, the Japan Self-Defense Forces will likely become the second largest F-35 operator in the world behind th
Japan is developing a longer-range, air-launched anti-ship cruise missile.
The reason? China’s navy is deploying longer-range anti-aircraft missiles, which means Japanese aircraft will have to launch their anti-ship weapons from longer range or risk being shot down.
Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya cited longer-range air defenses on warships belonging to “some countries,” though there could be little doubt that he was referring to one nation in particular.
“The plan involves extending the range of Japan s supersonic ASM-3 air-to-ship missiles, which are said to have a range of less than 200 kilometers [124 miles], to over 400 km [249 miles], with the aim of beefing up Tokyo s ability to defend a chain of outlying islands in the southwest,” according to Japan’s Mainichi newspaper several years back.
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The weeks leading up to January 11, 2011, marked a watershed episode for PLA watching. After years of cross-referencing enthusiast Chinese language defense chatter, monitoring the People’s Liberation Army’s operational security (OPSEC), carefully tracking rare semi-official and official statements, and debates about realism and ambition, the elusive fifth generation fighter project known since the mid-2000s variously as J-XX, J-13, J-14, XXJ, finally emerged in blurry poor-quality pictures at Chengdu Aircraft Corporation’s (CAC) factory from late December 2010. It arrived right on schedule.
As clearer pictures percolated from Chinese-language defense boards to the English language PLA watching forums, and then onto aerospace and defense blogs and mainstream alphabet soup media outlets, the finalized designation – J-20 – became accepted and widely used. Finally, on the aforementioned date, the first J-20 technology demonstrator conducted a successful maiden f
Story by Yoshihiro Inaba with additional reporting by Xavier Vavasseur
The ASM-3A announcement was made as part of a broader announcement in which the MoD published the “
XASM-3
JASDF F-2 fighter from Gifu air base in a test flight with two ASM-3 missiles in February 2020. Picture by local photographer Takeru Sugiyama.
For the record, Japan started full-scale development of a missile called XASM-3 in FY2010 that can be operated by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force (航空自衛隊, Kōkū Jieitai or JASDF) F-2 fighter jets. The XASM-3 was an air-launched anti-ship missile (ASM) that cruised at supersonic speeds (above Mach 3) thanks to the combination of a solid rocket booster and ramjet engine. It had a range of about 200 km (108 nautical miles).