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Italy, Japan, UK To Merge Projects for New Fighter Jet By 2035

Italy, Japan, UK To Merge Projects for New Fighter Jet By 2035
folder_openEurope... access_timeone year ago
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By Staff, Agencies

Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom announced a plan to merge their fighter jet development projects in a partnership that marks Japan’s first major industrial defense collaboration beyond the United States since World War Two.

The deal aims to put an advanced front-line fighter aircraft into operation by 2035, by combining the UK-led Future Combat Air System project, also known as Tempest, with Japan’s F-X program, the three countries said in a joint statement on Friday.

The collaboration will be called the Global Combat Air Program [GCAP].

“We are committed to upholding the rules-based, free and open international order, which is more important than ever at a time when these principles are contested, and threats and aggression are increasing,” the countries’ three leaders said in the statement.

The agreement comes as China ramps up military activity around Taiwan – which it claims as its own – and in the disputed South China Sea where Beijing has sought to bolster its expansive claims with military installations on artificial islands it has built.

Japan, which has a pacifist constitution, has already announced that it expects to double its defense spending over the next five years to about 2 percent of gross domestic product [GDP].

The statement said the project had been designed with “our allies and partners at its very heart” and with “future interoperability” in the United States, Europe, NATO and the Asia Pacific.

“We share ambition for this aircraft to be the centerpiece of a wider combat air system that will function across multiple domains,” the statement said.

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