The Japanese army has a wartime main mission: to bottle the Chinese fleet and prevent Beijing’s warships from reaching the Pacific Ocean.
That’s why Japanese planners take anti-buoy missiles very, very seriously. And why, last year, the Japanese Ministry of Defense took a look at its new anti-money missile design … and went back to the drawing board?
The ASM-3 lacked scope, the ministry decided. Instead of launching the missile into its existing 100-mile incarnation, he returned the weapon to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries on a main note.
Fly the missile twice as An Array … without making it much bigger.
A year later, the ASM-3 reappeared. In mid-July, Japan’s Minister of State for National Defense, Tomohiro Yamamoto, posted a social media photo showing an F-2 with the ASM-3 redesign on its wing.
The photo that the new edition of the missile is larger than the original edition, implying that engineers packed a larger rocket engine in its duration of approximately 17 feet.
The ASM-3 flies at a maximum speed of Mach 3, making its interception very difficult. But achieving this speed requires a new propulsion system. A solid-fuel rocket propellant fires first, accelerating the missile at a higher supersonic speed.
That’s when an air-breathing ramjet takes over, feeding off the same solid fuel but adding compressed air for sustained, powerful thrust. The ASM-3’s combined-cycle propulsion explains why it looks like a tiny spaceship.
The missile follows GPS coordinates to the target zone then switches on a radar for terminal guidance. Its warhead-size is classified, but could be hundreds of pounds—enough to sink or disable many warships with a single hit.
Despite all these capabilities, the ASM-3 still has compatibility under the wing of an F-2 fighter, its main aircraft carrier. It’s too big to have compatibility with the weapon bay of an F-35 stealth fighter, so Tokyo buys joint subsonic attack missiles for its F-35s.
Now boasting a 200-mile range—twice its original specification—the ASM-3 could become Japan’s most powerful anti-ship missile. If the unthinkable occurs and the United States and Japan ever go to war with China, the ASM-3 could be among the most decisive munitions in the bloody battle for control of the China Seas.