- The U.S. Air Force recently deployed Virginia-based F-22 Raptors to Kadena Air Base.
- Kadena, Japan is just 400 miles from mainland China.
- The Air Force is pushing more stealthy fifth-generation fighters closer to China, which is great in peacetime but not so great in wartime.
The U.S. Air Force has redeployed F-22 Raptor jets more than 7,000 miles from home to a base literally on China’s doorstep. The 27th Fighter Squadron, normally based in Virginia, touched down in Okinawa, Japan in late April as part of a rotation of fighter jets to the island base. The F-22s will be within range of their Chinese Air Force counterparts: the J-20 “Mighty Dragon” stealth fighter.
A Visit From the Raptors
According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, F-22 Raptors of the 27th Fighter Squadron, 1st Fighter Wing, began touching down on Okinawa last month. The trip from Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia to Kadena Air Base on the island of Okinawa is a distance of 7,766 miles, nearly a third of the way around the world. A typical F-22 squadron includes between 18 and 21 of the stealthy fighters.
Kadena Air Base has hosted U.S. fighter aircraft since the end of World War II. In 1979, the base received F-15 fighter jets, and the air superiority fighters have been a continuous presence at the base ever since. In 2023, the Air Force began withdrawing the two F-15C/D squadrons on the island. The F-15s have been replaced by fighters from elsewhere, temporarily rotating through the base, including F-16s, F-35s, and F-22s. This mirrors the overall Pentagon strategy of rotating forces to trouble spots, such as sending Army brigades to Eastern Europe, allowing entire units to gain field experience in potential combat zones.
A Frontline Base
The deployment is meant to buttress Kadena Air Base’s defenses. Kadena, a U.S. base on a Japanese island in the Ryukyu Islands, is just 400 miles from mainland China and borders the East China Sea. The East China Sea is a major exercise area for the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, also known as the Chinese Air Force, with Chinese fighters and bombers regularly passing through the area.
A map published by Newsweek shows the flight paths of not only Chinese, but also Russian aircraft over the East China Sea, with activity both south of Okinawa in the Miyako Strait and also flights over the Senkaku Islands, which are claimed by both Japan and China.
The F-22s won’t be the only fifth-generation stealth fighters in the region. Wuyishan Air Base, in China’s Fujian province, was until recently home to nearly 50 obsolete Shenyang J-6W fighters converted to armed drones and the 41st Aviation Brigade, which counted more than 30 Shenyang J-11A fighters, 2 J-11BS fighters, and two Russian-made Su-27UBK fighters. In late November 2023, according to the Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute, six Chengdu J-20 “Mighty Dragon” fighter jets were spotted at Wuyishan Airbase. The J-20, introduced in 2012, is China’s first fifth-generation fighter jet and emblematic of the country’s dramatic military buildup. CASI speculates the 41st Brigade is trading in its older jets for J-20s.
Wuyishan is 200 miles from the Chinese coastline, on the East China Sea. The distance between Kadena and Wuyishan is only 600 miles. It is entirely possible that the F-22 Raptor deployment is a response to the J-20 deployment, and that Raptors and Mighty Dragon pilots might encounter one another in international airspace. The Air Force could learn a lot about the J-20 by openly confronting it in the air, and the F-22, a matchless air superiority fighter, is the ideal plane to do this. The more aggressive the confrontations, the more it will learn the capabilities of Chinese pilots and aircraft like the J-20.
Lessons From Desert Storm
In 1991, China watched as the United States and its Coalition allies rapidly destroyed the Iraqi military in a combined, coordinated air-land-sea campaign. The attack, with its heavy use of precision-guided weapons and air power, upended everything Chinese military planners knew about modern warfare.
The People’s Liberation Army came away from Desert Storm with two lessons. One was that their country’s military, organized and equipped along the same lines as the Iraqi military, was just as vulnerable to a Western-style attack. The second was that the U.S. and its allies relied heavily on overseas bases to support the attack, and without them, the Pentagon could not have projected its military power.
In the event of war, the PLA can be expected to attack U.S. bases in the Western Pacific region. This includes Kadena, which is within short-range ballistic missile and cruise missile attack range. China would need to attack U.S. bases even if the main target were Taiwan, to prevent them from being used to flow forces from North America to Taiwan’s rescue. The assumption is that an attack on Taiwan would instantly draw in the United States, so the quicker the bases were taken out the better. This would also likely draw in Japanese forces as the attacks would take place on Japanese soil. All of this makes an invasion of Taiwan considerably more complex than it appears.
The Pentagon, and the Air Force in particular, seem reluctant to permanently base fifth-generation fighter jets like the F-22 and F-35 on Okinawa. If Kadena is attacked on Day One of what would likely become World War III, it might be better if the air base was empty, with aircraft flying in only after Chinese attacks had slowed. In the meantime, however, Air Force pilots have the opportunity to cycle through Kadena, gaining firsthand knowledge of the area and Chinese military air operations.
The deployment of F-22s to a tiny island off the coast of China comes with both opportunities and risks. Short of war, the risks are small, but if war were to break out, the risk could include the loss of billions in irreplaceable fighter jets to a rain of Chinese missiles. It’s one of many decisions the Air Force will have to weigh as the U.S.-China relationship grows sour, and the two countries must thread their way between peace and war.
Kyle Mizokami is a writer on defense and security issues and has been at Popular Mechanics since 2015. If it involves explosions or projectiles, he's generally in favor of it. Kyle’s articles have appeared at The Daily Beast, U.S. Naval Institute News, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy, Combat Aircraft Monthly, VICE News, and others. He lives in San Francisco.
