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Military
When Defense Turns to Offense...
Saturday, August 21, 2010
ASDF
Tokyo -- Conservative opinion in Japan continues to convince itself that the island nation faces some kind of imminent military threat from its neighbors.
To defend against these shadowy forces, we learn that it is now necessary to provide the SDF with offensive striking power.
Parliamentary Defense Secretary Akihisa Nagashima told a symposium yesterday that Japan needs to acquire the capacity to strike an enemy's missile launch sites preemptively or else the nation will not be able to "sufficiently defend itself."
Nagashima's view is a reprise of an earlier LDP defense panel's conclusions which argued along the same lines last year.
Meanwhile, the Defense Ministry recently announced that it would, for the first time, begin military drills simulating an amphibious assault on a remote island. The scenario, we are told, is one in which a hostile power captures a Japanese island and the SDF is tasked to take it back.
Opposition figures such as Shigeru Ishiba of the LDP have even talked about creating a Japanese force of Marines.
Additionally, an advisory panel to the prime minister is expected to issue a report in August arguing that North Korea and China pose military threats to Japan, that current defense policies are "no longer effective," and that Tokyo must "possess the will and ability to maintain stability in the [East Asian] region."
The report will also reiterate such conservative chestnuts as the need to have forward deployments of the SDF on remote islands, to revise the three non-nuclear principles, and to end the ban on the exercise of collective self-defense.
Finally, Keidanren - Japan's major business lobby - now says that the ban on weapons exports to nations other than the United States is not only limiting their potential financial profits but is even a "security risk" for the Japanese nation as a whole.
They argue that an arms race is already proceeding in East Asia and that Japan is falling dangerously behind in the contest.
Overall, it would appear that "regime change" in Japan has not derailed the rearmanent train in Japan, even if it may have slowed it down a bit.
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