Bradley Perrett | The F-35 won't allow Australia to keep up with China, we need a 2030 fighter solution now

It's almost certainly the one we'll need for supplementing our current main fighter type, the Lockheed Martin F-35, in the second half of the 2030s.

The problem that we need to think about now is that the F-35 is likely to be badly outclassed by new Chinese fighters 15 years from now.

So the government should move quickly to secure some of the early production from the British-Italian-Japanese program, probably by contributing a few hundred million dollars to the development budget.

Getting better fighters as soon as possible may turn out to be critical for national security.

The Royal Australian Air Force likes to buy US aircraft, which usually offer great value for money: high technology, excellent weapons, good reliability and reasonable cost.

Also, when we buy American, operating alongside US forces is much easier.

But the next US fighter, which for the moment has the awkward name Next Generation Air Dominance, is most unlikely to be available to us. It's too secret

Just seven years from its intended entry into service, virtually nothing about the NGAD design has been revealed.

When it was at the same stage of development, the current top US fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was not nearly as secret as NGAD is now - and the Raptor was never made available for export.

Also, we cannot wait for some exportable US fighter that will follow the NGAD. Probably none will be available for at least 25 years.

China is going hammer and tongs in upgrading its military technology.

The F-35 very probably won't be up to the job of facing the latest Chinese fighters as we approach 2040. Its big advantages - in stealth and in giving its pilot an excellent understanding of what's going on - will no longer be at all special. And it will still have its disadvantages, notably its pretty ordinary flight performance - all that zooming-around business that is fundamental to what fighters do.

The F-35's diminishing value will not be so big a problem for the US, which will have the NGAD, but it's a dreadful prospect for Australia.

So we'd better look at non-US options, and there are only two.

One is a fighter that France, Germany and Spain intend to create under a program called Future Combat Air System. With highly capable French companies involved, it should be good.

But that program's timing must deter us.

It is not supposed to begin delivering fighters until around 2040, and the history of multinational European defence projects tells us that it could easily be delayed to ease pressure on national budgets.

Until this year, Britain and Italy were also planning to jointly develop a fighter, which was to be operational by 2035, and Japan was aiming to get one ready by about the same time.

Most interestingly from Australia's point of view, successive Japanese concept designs showed an enormous aircraft with unusually long range; it got the popular nickname Godzilla.

Australia and Japan both have to consider fighter missions over much greater distances than European countries do.

So Godzilla was already shaping up as a good-looking prospect for Australia - except that Japan didn't have nearly enough experience in designing advanced combat aircraft. Even with some US help in the program, as then planned, it looked too risky for us.

Now the British are coming.

To share development costs and increase production volume (thereby lowering the cost of each aircraft built), the British-Italian and Japanese projects were merged this month into the Global Combat Aircraft Program.

Britain's BAE Systems knows the whole box and dice of fighter development, while Rolls-Royce is one of the world's three great aero-engine companies.

Italy has experience, too, while Japan has been working for more than a decade in preparing advanced fighter technology.

Importantly, the first-delivery target is still 2035 and, Japan, under threat from China, can be expected to strongly resist any foot dragging that Britain and Italy may attempt at some stage.

So the timing suits us.

Also, Japan is becoming a crucial security partner for Australia. It has powerful and growing armed forces on our side of the world and faces the same problem with China that we do.

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So GCAP really is the fighter project we need to get in on.

But not as a major partner in the engineering. Australia knows next to nothing about designing fighters and could only add risk by taking a major development role.

The last thing Japan needs is to see its critical new fighter program go off the rails just because an Australian prime minister wanted to strut about in a fluro vest, warbling to the media about Aussie jobs.

Still, we might offer a little special technology, perhaps some from a remarkable radar company in Canberra, CEA Technologies. BAE's Melbourne and Adelaide operations might contribute, too.

But, above all, we just need to be near the front of the queue when the factories begin turning out the fighters.

An upfront cash contribution to development is likely to secure that.

We would also be able to observe the design as it evolved, offering comments on how it might be improved.

Even with a lot of British, Italian and Japanese experts involved, this will be a risky program.

But if we need advanced fighters early, we have no alternative to accepting risk.

So here's another task for our busy defence minister, Richard Marles: get on the phone to Tokyo, minister, and secure deliveries of our future fighter force.