Revelations from a Japanese military observer
News is coming out of Tokyo that the Japanese government is embarking on a five-year program to build up Japan’s reconstituted armed forces. Reconstituted in defiance of the country’s constitution.
According to NHK television, Japan’s defense ministry plans to acquire attack drones and missiles capable of striking from outside the enemy’s air defense range as part of its defense buildup. It is noted that the combat drones, in addition to reconnaissance functions, will be able to carry out spot strikes. The missiles are to be used for “preventive strikes against bases of enemies intending to attack Japan. Such weapons are offensive and striking weapons, which until recently Japanese authorities have refrained from possessing.
At the same time, Japanese media reported that the Defense Ministry plans to request a budget of over 5.59 trillion yen (about $40.7 billion) for 2023, or more than 4 per cent more than in the current year. For a number of items, the requested budget does not include specific amounts. As a result, military allocations will increase by at least 1 trillion yen and exceed the mark of 6.5 trillion yen ($47.3 billion). These funds will be spent on the development and mass production of new anti-missile defense systems capable of intercepting hypersonic systems, among other things.
The Japanese government plans to multiply spending on military purposes to the level of 2% of GDP. Tokyo has also announced the creation of new space and cyber forces.
Japan has already established a modern navy with a distinct offensive component. For the first time, light aircraft carriers have been brought into service under the guise of helicopter carriers as a military strike force.
The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper recently reported on the Japanese government’s intention to adopt more than a thousand long-range cruise missiles. According to government sources, Tokyo intends to bridge the “gap” in the number of long-range missiles with Beijing. The publication claims that Chinese forces have about 1,900 land-based medium-range ballistic missiles and 300 cruise missiles capable of reaching Japanese territory.
In addition, Japanese authorities intend to upgrade the Type 12 land-launched anti-ship missiles developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, increasing their range from several hundred to thousands of kilometres, which will enable them to reach the territory of North Korea and China. According to media reports, the ground-launched version of the missile will arrive in the self-defence forces in fiscal year 2024, two years earlier than planned. Japanese sources also claim that a new national security strategy will be unveiled by the end of 2022, which will include a “counterattack capability”.
In 2018, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) managed to push through a bill that gave the Japanese army the ability to operate overseas in conjunction with the Americans. A Rapid Deployment Amphibious Brigade was formed, an elite marine unit that could be used in territorial conflicts “to liberate enemy captured islands”. It should be recalled that the Japanese government, contrary to postwar international decisions, has artificially created territorial conflicts with all its neighbours – Russia (the Kuril Islands), China (the Diaoyu-Senkaku Islands), the Republic of Korea and North Korea (the Dokdo-Takeshima Islands). At the same time, hotheads in the “land of the samurai” increasingly talk about “regaining territories lost in the war by military means”.
Is Japan’s armed forces capable of engaging in military adventures with the surrounding nuclear powers even now? The Japanese military expert Yu Koizumi, a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Science and Technology Studies at the University of Tokyo, told TASS in an interview.
While acknowledging that the government has embarked on a policy of procuring new types of military equipment, the expert believes that Japan does not yet have the capacity to conduct full-scale combat operations. “Japan’s self-defence forces were not created from the outset to fight a war on their own against a major power – originally the USSR,” Koizumi says. – Because of this, Japan’s self-defence forces possess extremely small amounts of ammunition. Specific figures are a military secret. However, it is clear that in the event of a real war, ammunition would run out very quickly”. TASS cites the economic daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun as saying that ammunition will last at best for no more than two months of military conflict, for example around Taiwan. Since the Cold War and the standoff with the Soviet Union, moreover, 70 percent of Japanese ammunition is concentrated on the northern island of Hokkaido and it is difficult to redeploy it quickly to potential hostilities in the East China Sea. For our part, despite the Japanese government’s statements about Japan’s likely involvement in possible events around Taiwan, it is doubtful that Tokyo will engage its military forces in hostilities against China.
Justifying plans to bring military spending to 2 per cent of GDP, Koizumi notes: “China now has predominant naval and air power there [around Taiwan]. If it wants to create real countermeasures, it will have to build up its other capabilities in addition to ammunition – for example, the required number of tankers, anti-ship missiles, air defense and electronic warfare systems. According to the Japanese expert, the implementation of such a program would probably require an increase in military spending to a level above 2% of GDP. There is now a debate as to whether the country can afford such additional spending.
However, there is no doubt that the decision to increase spending on the latest weaponry will be made, to begin with, up to 2% of GDP. Most likely, Japanese authorities will abandon the pacifist provisions of the Japanese Constitution in the foreseeable future. That will be followed by legalization of the Japanese armed forces and rapid development of a powerful military-industrial complex, which, among other things, should pull the Japanese economy out of its protracted state of stagnation. And then we can talk about the rebirth of the Land of the Rising Sun as a military power…
Anatoly Koshkin, FSK
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