By James R. Holmes
A Chinese friend raises an excellent point about the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s fitness for a one-on-one engagement against China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy. To wit: the JMSDF was founded mainly as an appendage of the Cold War U.S. Pacific Fleet. While the sea service has expanded its repertoire since the Cold War—dispatching minesweepers to the Persian Gulf in 1991, refueling coalition naval forces in the Indian Ocean after 9/11, and patrolling the Gulf of Aden for pirates—it remains largely true to its founding missions to this day.
Under the division of labor worked out between the two navies, the U.S. Navy supplied the offensive firepower, manifest in aircraft carriers and other high-end implements of war. The defensive-minded JMSDF acted as a gapfiller, making itself proficient at niche missions like minesweeping, anti-submarine warfare, and offensive submarine warfare. Japanese mariners performed these duties with aplomb. The composite U.S.-Japanese fleet kept the Soviet Navy largely in check, complicating Soviet ships’ egress from ports like Vladivostok into the broad Pacific Ocean. Many skippers chose not to bother.Though such endeavors took place mostly out of public view, they constituted one of the success stories of the Cold War.
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