By James R. Holmes
There's been a flurry of defense-related news out of Tokyo this week. More is doubtless in the offing as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his lieutenants revise Japan's National Defense Program Guidelines, the government's most authoritative statement of how it sees the security environment and intends to manage it.
A Chinese correspondent emails to ask the Naval Diplomat's views about all of this, including such matters as revising the postwar "peace" constitution to "normalize" the status of the Self-Defense Forces as a regular military force, and perhaps rename the SDF as such; undertaking collective self-defense measures alongside U.S. forces; mounting a more active defense against ballistic-missile attack; and reorienting forces toward defense of the southwestern islands. Whew! Is that all?
My answer, in brief, is that Tokyo should proceed on all of these fronts except the renaming issue, and that any constitutional revisions should spell out, explicitly and unambiguously, that the SDF will never go on the strategic offensive. Abe & Co. must elucidate their purposes with utter clarity, even as they shift to a less passive operational and tactical stance that's less dependent on the United States. They should forego certain options in advance. In that sense, the Japanese military should remain abnormal.
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