{"id":6177,"date":"2017-03-19T15:37:41","date_gmt":"2017-03-19T22:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/us-asia-pacific-allies-rolling-out-f-35-stealth-fighter\/"},"modified":"2017-03-19T15:37:41","modified_gmt":"2017-03-19T22:37:41","slug":"us-asia-pacific-allies-rolling-out-f-35-stealth-fighter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/us-asia-pacific-allies-rolling-out-f-35-stealth-fighter\/","title":{"rendered":"US, Asia-Pacific allies rolling out F-35 stealth fighter"},"content":{"rendered":"

HONOLULU —<\/strong> The U.S. and its Asia-Pacific allies are rolling out their new stealth fighter jet, a cutting-edge plane that costs about $100 million each.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Air Force this week hosted allies and partners in Hawaii for a symposium on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which can sneak undetected behind enemy radar.<\/p>\n

Brig. Gen. Craig Wills, the strategic plans director at Pacific Air Forces, said the U.S. wanted to share its experiences with the F-35 and F-22, another stealth fighter, with allies and partners so they wouldn’t have to learn everything on their own.<\/p>\n

The Air Force will use the F-35 to replace the A-10 and the F-16, and say it represents a “quantum leap” in air combat capability over these older planes.<\/p>\n

“The idea with fifth generation is that we want to be able to operate in areas where others cannot, in places where our fourth generation airplanes can’t fly,” Wills said.<\/p>\n

The U.S. Marine Corps in January deployed 10 of the planes to a base in Japan. The U.S. Air Force plans to station the jet in Alaska within three years.<\/p>\n

Australia and Japan have already taken delivery of some of planes that they are using for pilot training in Arizona. South Korea is scheduled to get the plane next year.<\/p>\n

The F-35 is being built in different configurations for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. The Navy’s version is designed to take off and land on an aircraft carrier.<\/p>\n

The F-35 had massive budget overruns early on, but analysts say the cost has stabilized and even dropped a bit after negotiations between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin.<\/p>\n

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Virginia-based think tank, said the F-35 can make a “huge difference” in places like North Korea, where it could defeat air defenses and take out threats before they could react.<\/p>\n

“The F-35 could fly all the way from South Korea to the North Korean capital without anyone from North Korea knowing it was on its way,” he said.<\/p>\n

The Air Force currently has 103 planes in its possession, including one fully operational fighter wing at Hill Air Force Base in Utah.<\/p>\n

Other than Alaska, Wills said the Air Force hasn’t decided where in the Pacific it will station additional planes. Alaska’s Eielson Air Force Base is expected to get two squadrons.<\/p>\n

The Air Force currently bases F-22 jets in Hawaii and Alaska. Wills said the F-22 was designed to face down other fighter jets in the air, but also have an ability to hit ground targets. The F-35 was designed to strike ground targets and for air-to-air combat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

HONOLULU — The U.S. and its Asia-Pacific allies are rolling out their new stealth fighter jet, a cutting-edge plane that costs about $100 million each. The U.S. Air Force this week hosted allies and partners in Hawaii for a symposium on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which can sneak undetected behind enemy radar. Brig. Gen. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":6178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-6177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6177"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=6177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}