President Trump said in an interview published Thursday that the U.S. flew three-dozen high-tech F-35 joint strike fighters directly over Tokyo in early February.
He told Time magazine that the flight happened as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was in Tokyo on Feb. 3-4 to reassure a long-time ally about the administration’s intentions and to meet with Japan President Shinzo Abe and other top officials.
“They flew over and everyone said where the hell did they come from? That’s stealth. It’s pretty cool, right,” he said, according to the magazine’s transcript. “Thirty-five of them flying at a high speed, low, and they were not detected. They flew right over the top of the deal, nobody knew they were coming.”
But at that time only 10 of the aircraft were deployed to the country, according to Feb.16 testimony by a top Marine Corps official. The Pentagon did not comment on Trump’s statement on Friday.
“To date, the Marine Corps has accepted 50 F-35B aircraft. Ten of those F-35Bs are now forward-deployed with [Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121] in Japan,” Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, deputy commandant for aviation, told a House panel nearly two weeks after Mattis’ meeting. “VMFA-121 will have their full complement of 16 aircraft by this summer.”
The Marine Corps became the first service to deploy the F-35 overseas in January, sending the squadron to an air station outside of Hiroshima, Japan.
Japan has also purchased the aircraft and received its first F-35 in September. It is in the process of building 38 in its own domestic factory, according to Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor that developed the fifth-generation fighter.
The addition of new aircraft and military flight routes are a touchy political issue for the Japanese. U.S. Forces Japan notified the country of the coming F-35 deployment last fall.
It was not immediately clear whether the aircraft Trump referred to could have been in transit or operating at another nearby U.S. base.
The Marine Corps F-35s are stationed at Iwakuni, which is about 500 miles southwest from downtown Tokyo, and the military operates a Navy and an Air Force base just outside Tokyo.
In that same interview, Trump implied that he has told the Navy to shelve its new launch system for aircraft carriers and go back to using steam catapults.
