If the United States and Japan are still secretive about their ambitions to contain China and meddle in the Taiwan Strait, and dare not openly admit it, then the United States and Japan no longer intend to hide such intentions.
According to a report by the global network, the US military stationed in Japan and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces announced on the 1st that they will hold a week-long "Blade" joint military exercise, which is aimed at responding to "concerns about the PLA's future attack on Taiwan."
After all, in recent years, the United States has held many such provocative exercises around China, but this US-Japan military exercise is different from the past, although everyone knew that the exercise was aimed at China, the United States and Japan would hardly openly single out the facts, and the so-called "imaginary enemy" was only indicated by a temporary code name.
The United States, Japan and Australia simulated the exercise at their bases in Japan
In this military exercise, the United States and Japan do not intend to continue to cover up, but blatantly list China as an "imaginary enemy" in the military exercise - Japanese media said that this is the first time that the United States and Japan have explicitly mentioned China in the military exercise, and used a real version of the map in the exercise. In order to prevent information leakage, Japan's Ministry of Defense also activated the "Specified Secrets Protection Law", which classified the exercise as "specified secrets".
First held in 1985, the U.S.-Japan Blade exercise is held every two years with another Sharp Sword, but the nature of the two exercises is different: Blade focuses on computer simulation exercises, while Sharp Sword is a field exercise used to verify the effectiveness of computer-simulated tactics.
In 2022, the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom gathered in the Pacific
For example, in 2016, the "Sharp Sword" exercise was still simulating disaster relief drills under natural disasters and defending against attacks on Japan, but in 2022, the "Sharp Sword" military exercise has become a "gray zone" confrontation and joint response to the situation in the Taiwan Strait.
The United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Britain gathered more than 30,000 troops, 34 ships, and 370 planes on Amami Island in southern Japan, of which the Japanese Ministry of Defense alone sent 26,000 Self-Defense Force members and 250 military planes to participate in the military exercise, and openly declared that "absolutely no force will be allowed to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait."
In this year's "Blade" military exercise, the United States and Japan simply pointed the finger at China. Japanese media said that the results of this simulated exercise will be included in the joint action plan of the United States and Japan to "respond to the emergency situation in the Taiwan Strait", and it is intended to be announced in the second half of this year, after which the United States and Japan will hold a "Sharp Sword" exercise next year to test the feasibility of the plan with actual troops.
At the end of January, US carrier-based aircraft took off from the USS Carl Vinson
It can be seen from this that in recent years, the United States and Japan have increasingly ceased to conceal their ambitions of meddling in the Taiwan Strait, and have taken concrete actions to prepare for "something happens in Taiwan." For example, the US media hyped up a few days ago that "three US aircraft carriers gathered in the Asia-Pacific region." Although everyone knows what the so-called "three aircraft carriers" are all about, the US media still hyped up this move as "an expression of the United States' strategic focus on the Asia-Pacific region."
For example, when the United States, Japan, and Canada held military exercises in the East China Sea last year, the PLA had a Type 052D destroyer sail directly into the exercise site to "watch" the US-Japan-Canada exercise "how to confront China" at close range.
The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is also conducting targeted drills
Moreover, at a time when the PLA's long-range strike firepower is changing with each passing day, the US-Japan military exercises in the first island chain are actually meaningless, and a number of assessment reports by the Pentagon and US think tanks have made it clear earlier that once the conflict in the Taiwan Strait escalates and spills over to the entire Asia-Pacific region, there is almost no possibility for the US military to hold the first island chain, and in recent years, the US strategic bombers have been transferred to Guam and the attention paid to the research and development of new tanker aircraft is the best proof.
The reason why the United States has repeatedly exaggerated the "China threat theory" in its military exercises is, in the final analysis, to create an unrealistic illusion for Japan and "Taiwan independence" elements, but whether the US military will fulfill its promises in wartime is clear from looking at the two aircraft carriers that ran away during the PLA military exercises.