America is polishing up its special, war-winning party trick for the coming China fight

The 48 single-engine F-35s will replace 36 aging, and non-stealthy, Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters belonging to the 35th Fighter Wing at Misawa air base in northern Japan. The single-engine F-16s carry special sensors in pods for detecting enemy radars – and also carry AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles for blowing up the radars or forcing their crews to power them down.

The F-35s won’t need the radar-detecting sensor pods, as their built-in sensors are already highly-tuned for pinpointing enemy radars. The Misawa-bound F-35s might be among the first to get a new version of the AGM-88 that fits inside the stealth fighter’s internal weapons bays, too. Carrying weapons internally preserves the F-35’s clean profile, which is one key to its radar-evading stealth.

The F-35s will be capable of other missions, of course – including air-to-air combat, anti-ship strikes and bombing runs over land – but the 35th Fighter Wing has long focused on defeating enemy air defences so that other US and allied squadrons and wings can bring their own firepower to bear without risking heavy losses. Once such specialist units were known as “wild weasels”: nowadays the mission is known as Suppression (or Destruction) of Enemy Air Defences, SEAD or DEAD. It is the unique US military capability which no other air force, not even Russia’s, really possesses. SEAD/DEAD has arguably won several important past campaigns for the US and its allies.

There are many components to SEAD/DEAD but fighters with sensors and anti-radar weapons are an important one. In boosting the 35th Fighter Wing from 36 old F-16s to 48 new F-35s, the US Air Force is acknowledging the growing danger Chinese air defences would pose to US and allied air operations around Taiwan. 

Those defences are especially dangerous for non-stealthy warplanes – including the new F-15EXs the Americans will be assigning to the 18th Wing at Kadena air base in Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture. The 36 twin-engine F-15EXs will replace the 50 or so 1980s-vintage F-15Cs that flew from Kadena until last year. 

The US Air Force gradually retired the older F-15s as their aging airframes became increasingly unreliable and unsafe to fly. The service partially covered their departure by rotating in squadrons from the mainland United States, but a permanent contingent of fighters and crews has always been the best solution, as the vast reaches of the western Pacific – and the intensive threat from Chinese missiles and jets – demands singular focus and constant training.

Where the old F-15Cs were strictly air-to-air fighters, the new F-15EXs – with their improved sensors and avionics – can attack targets in the air, at sea and on land. The F-15EX is the US Air Force’s newest fighter type – and the first type in the American inventory that’s compatible with the huge hypersonic land-attack missiles the Air Force is developing. Long range, hard-to-defend-against precision strike weapons are another vital part of the SEAD/DEAD toolkit.

To be clear, 84 fighters – however sophisticated – aren’t a lot of fighters in a region teeming with thousands of potential targets. But US commanders don’t expect the crews of those 48 F-35s and 36 F-15EXs to win an air war over Taiwan all by themselves. Their job is to meet the first wave of Chinese forces, buying time for reinforcement squadrons to arrive from North America.

They’re pickets. But they’re also symbols. The Pentagon’s new air power plan “demonstrates the ironclad US commitment to the defence of Japan and both countries’ shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific region,” the Pentagon stated.

It’s a commitment that millions of Taiwanese and Japanese people surely hope doesn’t end after the presidential election in the United States in November – an election in which Donald Trump is currently leading. Trump is known to admire authoritarian leaders like China’s Xi Jinping, and once described the Chinese ruler as a “brilliant guy … smart, brilliant, everything perfect”.

It could take years for all 84 new fighters to arrive. A lot could change in the meantime.