The Chinese Navy Catches A Break As U.S. Marines Retire Anti-Ship Fighters

The U.S. Marine Corps expects in October to begin converting a second Japan-based squadron to new F-35B Lightning II stealth fighters.

That’s good news and bad. Good because the two-seat F/A-18D Hornets that Marine All-Weather Fighter-Attack Squadron 242 currently flies are old, tired and lacking in radar-evading qualities.

Bad because F/A-18s are the Marines’ main aerial ship-killers. And the F-35Bs can’t yet match that capability. This in a region teeming with Chinese warships.

The two-seat F/A-18D is an oddity. While the U.S. Navy flew D-model Hornets as training jets, the Marines assign them combat roles. Especially forward-air-control and reconnaissance—missions that benefit from a second pair of eyes in the cockpit.

Armed with pairs of Harpoon anti-ship missiles, the three-decade-old F/A-18Ds also hunt ships. That mission steadily has become more important as the Chinese navy modernizes and adds powerful new vessels such as the aircraft carriers Liaoning and Shandong.

An F/A-18D from VMFA(AW)-242 participates in a MAG-12 Harpoon training exercise in April 2020.

The Marines keep two fighter squadrons at Iwakuni. A third squadron often visits from the United States. They would be the first to fight in the event of war with China. Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 with its 16 F-35Bs has flown from Iwakuni since 2017. VMFA(AW)-242’s conversion will boost the base’s arsenal of stealth fighters to 32.

But it also will remove the permanent anti-ship capability from the base’s Marine Air Group 12. The F-35B isn’t compatible with the Harpoon. There is talk of adding the new Long-Range Anti-Ship missile and the smaller, shorter-range Naval Strike Missile to the stealth jump-jet, but that could take years.

It’s not that the F-35B can’t sink ships with its laser- and GPS-guided bombs. But even the Joint Stand-Off Weapon glide-bomb lacks range compared to the sea-skimming Harpoon with its 150-mile reach. And the guidance kits on land-attack weapons usually are less than ideal for targeting ships at sea.

What that means is that, for a few years at least, the Marines in Japan are going to lose much of their aerial anti-ship capability. U.S. Air Force and Navy planes can help fill the gap, as can the Marines’ new island-hopping battalions with their ground-launched anti-ship missiles.

But with the Chinese navy growing more powerful by the year, the Marines undoubtedly will breathe easier if and when their F-35Bs finally get anti-ship missiles.