In order to improve their ability to jointly respond to war in the Taiwan Strait, the United States and Japan are speeding up the pace of relevant cooperation. On January 7, local time, Japan and the United States held a new annual meeting of the "Japan-U.S. Security And Security Consultative Committee", and reached a number of consensus on relevant military cooperation at the meeting.
According to the news of Taiwan media on the 17th, just recently, new news came out about these cooperation projects: The United States and Japan plan to jointly reserve arms around Taiwan to cope with possible high-intensity war.
In addition to the clichéd statement that the Diaoyu Islands apply to the Japan-US security treaty, and once again naming sensitive issues involving China's sovereignty, such as the South China Sea and Hong Kong, the biggest difference between the January 7 joint security meeting and previous years is that the relevant cooperation between the two sides has entered a stage of specific technical details.
For example, at the meeting, the two sides unanimously determined that the two militaries must further deepen bilateral cooperation in defense equipment and capabilities. This means that at the technical level, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and major military enterprises will cooperate with the Japan Self-Defense Force's Technical Research Headquarters and Mitsubishi and other military enterprises to bundle the military and scientific and technological forces of the two countries from the scientific research level and strengthen the ability of the two militaries to jointly cope with the challenges of China's new generation of technical weapons.
At the military level, this means that the two militaries, from grass-roots combat units to high-level command structures, will carry out in-depth communication and cooperation, and improve the mutual communication between the two militaries as much as possible to achieve the highest possible level of joint combat capability.
A base for U.S. forces in Japan
In fact, as early as the Cold War, in order to jointly resist the Soviet Union, the joint combat capability with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces has always been regarded as the focus of the US military. However, in the face of China's new "enemy", the joint combat capability of the Cold War era has obviously long been out of line with the changes of the times, and new changes to China have long entered the high-level agenda of the US and Japanese militaries.
For example, as early as last April, when then-Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga visited the United States, the Japanese and US militaries made a noise that they had made initial contacts on the formulation of a new joint combat plan. In December last year, the draft of the new joint operations plan was finally basically finalized and approved at the current meeting of the Japan-US Consultative Committee on Security and Security.
Although at present both the United States and Japan are tight-lipped about the contents of this new plan, it is certain that this new joint operational plan takes "there is a problem in the Taiwan Strait" as the largest operational concept and takes the joint armed intervention of the United States and Japan in the Taiwan Strait war as the main purpose. Further deepening details such as bilateral cooperation in defense equipment and capabilities is one of the concrete efforts that must be made to realize this joint combat plan.
Screenshots of related news
According to Taiwan media news on the 17th, at this meeting, the United States and Japan also discussed the issue of facility sharing and stockpiling arms, promised to increase the common use of US and Japanese military facilities, stocked the US military's precision-guided munitions in the warehouses of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, and worked to strengthen the situation of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in the region, including its southwest islands.
The so-called "Southwest Islands" refer to the numerous islands that stretch from the southernmost tip of the Japanese island of Kyushu to the north of Taiwan, which is commonly known as the most important component of the "First Island Chain". The westernmost of these islands, Yonaguni Island, is located just 108 kilometers off the eastern coast of Taiwan and is of great military value.
Since the dispute with China over the Diaoyu Islands, the Japanese government has been committed to improving the deployment capacity of the Self-Defense Forces in the southwest islands, such as Japan's "Patriot" and Type 03 air defense missile system has long become a frequent visitor to the southwest islands, Japan's purchase of V-22 tilting wing aircraft, AAV-7 amphibious transport vehicles, self-developed Type 16 mobile combat vehicles, C-2 transport aircraft and other cutting-edge equipment, are also tailor-made for the southwest islands.
Japanese V-22 transport aircraft
Therefore, now that Japan and the United States have sacrificed this joint combat plan against Taiwan, it means that the efforts of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces on the southwest islands for more than a decade can be "carried forward." Experts from the US think tank claim that after years of operation, the military facilities such as airports, barracks, warehouses, and oil depots on the island are quite complete, saving the US military the trouble of building itself again.
Using these existing facilities of the Self-Defense Forces, the US military can quickly replenish precision-guided munitions and oil in the vicinity, and under the circumstance that the US military's front-line combat capabilities deployed in Japan and other places are limited, this will greatly enhance the US military's ability to resist strikes and the intensity of dispatch, which is of great significance to determining the direction of victory or defeat in the War in the Taiwan Strait.
The U.S. military precision-guided munitions
For Japan, this kind of strengthening of its joint combat capabilities against China is also undesirable.
As mentioned above, the United States strengthened its joint combat capability with Japan in the Cold War era mainly to deal with the Soviet threat, but there is actually another subtext, that is, to win Japan to fight for its own life while guarding and restraining Japan's military potential, to prevent Japan from taking advantage of the opportunity to re-militarize.
Therefore, although the Japanese Self-Defense Force in the Cold War era was well-equipped, its overall scale was severely constrained, and it was seriously biased at the technical level, and the more excellent areas were to make up for the corresponding shortcomings of the US military.
For example, the size of the Land Self-Defense Force is severely limited, and it only has the ability to defend itself; the Air Self-Defense Force focuses on strengthening the ability to intercept the air and the anti-ship against the sea, and the ground attack capability, especially the long-range precision guided attack capability, is completely emasculated; the Maritime Self-Defense Force focuses on strengthening the anti-submarine capability, so that it is jokingly called the "Anti-Submarine Brigade of the Third Fleet of the UNITED States Navy" by the outside world.
Japanese F-1 attack aircraft
During the Cold War era, Japan's self-preservation was still a problem in the face of soviet pressure, and Japanese society – both left and right – had little dissatisfaction with the status quo of the Self-Defense Forces. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the security threat on the Japanese mainland almost overnight, the Japanese left and right flanks diverged over the future course of the Self-Defense Forces:
The Japanese left believes that since the external threat has disappeared, Japan should be content with this peaceful status quo, drastically reduce the size of the Self-Defense Forces, shift the military budget to social welfare and other people's livelihood directions, and the joint combat capability with the United States should be limited to homeland defense, and should not follow the United States to fight everywhere;
The Japanese right-wing believes that since the external threat has disappeared, this means that Japan does not have to be cramped to just protect itself, but to take the opportunity to expand its influence and carry out all-round expansion at the diplomatic, military, economic and other levels, so that Japan's international status is enough to match its own economic strength, and then let Japan get rid of the shadow of the defeat in World War II and become a big country that can "make a difference" and "have a voice and color" in the international community.
As part of this strategy, the Self-Defense Forces should actively expand their forces, make up for the shortcomings of their own technical capabilities, and strive to become a real military force that has been fully normalizing the strength of the sea, land and air. At the same time, we must also actively project our forces overseas, take the initiative to intervene in military conflicts in the Asia-Pacific region, improve our military deterrence in the Asia-Pacific region, and eventually evolve this deterrent into Japan's "national influence."
Undoubtedly, this logic of the Japanese right is the source of Japan's theory of "national normalization" today.
Shinzo Abe
Of course, to persuade Japanese society to accept "national normalization," the right-wing forces must find an appropriate excuse for themselves, a new external enemy, so that the people immersed in the peace dividend after the collapse of the Soviet Union will once again feel anxious about national security.
And this new external enemy is China.
Knowing this, we can understand why politicians such as Junichiro Koizumi had to provoke the dispute over the Diaoyu Islands – it did not matter who the isolated island belonged to, and it was important to quarrel with China, so that the Japanese people felt a real "threat" from China, and then turned to support the right-wingers and agreed to support "national normalization" and improve the combat effectiveness of the Self-Defense Forces.
The Japanese Government is so eyeing the Taiwan issue and deliberately hyping up the mainland's "military threat" to Taiwan in order to realize this scheme once again. Coupled with the fact that Taiwan was once a Japanese colony, it would be better if the Japanese people could take the opportunity to awaken the national pride of the Japanese people in the "glory" of colonizing Asia in the old imperial era.
Today, facility sharing and arms reserves are further refinements of this joint combat plan, marking that the ambitions of the United States and Japan to jointly intervene in the Taiwan issue have entered the stage of concrete technological implementation.
U.S.-Japan coalition
It is worth noting that after the conclusion of this meeting of the "Japan-US Consultative Committee on Security and Safeguards," the Taiwan authorities are obviously the most "satisfied" and "excited" about this. In order to strike iron while it is hot and echo the determination of the United States and Japan to intervene in the Taiwan issue, Taiwan's legislature recently passed the "Special Budget for the Procurement of the Sea and Air Combat Capability Enhancement Program" worth NT$236.9 billion, announcing that it will start mass production of the extended-range "Hsiung Feng-III" supersonic anti-ship missile with a range of 400 kilometers from 2023.
The Determination of the Taiwanese to Resist to the End deserves our praise, but how "heroic" can this ambition, which is based on US-Japan intervention? This obviously has to be marked with a big question mark.
And the ambitious Japanese seem to have forgotten that if these strategic attempts of theirs are to be realized by interfering in the Taiwan issue, one of the premises is that they must win this war, and once they fail, the price they will have to pay will be far beyond their imagination.