New U.S.-Japan Plan to Realign Military Defenses

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 30, 2005; A18

The United States and Japan agreed yesterday to move forward with the biggest overhaul of the Pacific alliance in decades, aimed at bolstering military cooperation against new threats while consolidating U.S. forces on the island and withdrawing about 7,000 Marines from Okinawa.

The Marine ground and air forces, including the headquarters of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force, will be transferred to Guam to build up forces there. The move, expected to be complete in six years, will reduce the number of Marines on the island of Okinawa from 18,000 to about 11,000, defense officials said. Japan agreed to work with the United States to finance and thereby accelerate the move to Guam, in part to alleviate long-standing Japanese frictions with American forces on Okinawa.

The plan's goal, outlined in a 14-page bilateral report released yesterday, is for Japan -- with U.S. backing -- to beef up its defenses against threats ranging from ballistic missiles to attacks by guerrilla forces, or an invasion of its remote islands. Meanwhile, the militaries will realign their forces in Japan so they can work together more closely to counter regional and global threats such as terrorism.

"This relationship must and is in fact evolving to remain strong and relevant," said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at a news conference after meetings with his Japanese counterpart Yoshinori Ono, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura. The plan is part of the Pentagon's review of the posture of U.S. forces around the globe.

"We are in fact opening a new era" in the alliance, Ono told reporters.

A subtext of the cooperation, hinted at in the report, is to counter China's military buildup, which the Pentagon views as a growing threat not only to Taiwan but also to other Asian countries, such as Japan and India. Close defense cooperation "is essential to dissuade destabilizing military buildups, to deter aggression and to respond to diverse security challenges," the report said, in an apparent reference to Beijing's rapid military modernization. It called the U.S.-Japan alliance the "anchor" of regional security . . .

The Bush Administration's insistence on treating China's rise as a military threat will come back to haunt us big-time economically in the future. China will seek to isolate us economically in the region commensurately with our attempts to do the same with them militarily.

The Cold Warriors still want their China for all that she justifies in their bloated legacy weapons and platform programs. China is arguably a trillion-dollar gold miine in strategic justifications for acquisition programs that otherwise might suffer in a stringent reevaluation (yet to be done) WRT the Global War on Terror.

Involving Japan in this strategic mistake only reveals how infantile that country's security strategy and thinking remains: the antiquated (U.S. Cold Warriors) informing the immature (Japan).

The biggest danger in the world right now is the hangover of Cold War-imprinted political and military leadership in the U.S., China and Japan, and the frightening lack of imagination and strategic throught they bring to the key strategic issue of our age: locking in an alliance with China at today's prices. These players are stuck hopelessly in the past, and need to be watched vigorously until they're replaced by the next generation.

A deadly-weakened Bush Administration over the next three years may give rise to the China hawks running amok both on the Hill and in the Pentagon. Business needs to stand up and make itself heard. These dangerous types, if they have their way, will place us on a pathway to war with China within a decade.

Yes, such conflict would be a disaster, sending both China and the U.S. to second-tier status in the world. Meanwhile, our ground forces will be underfunded, understaffed, underprioritized, and overwhelmed in the GWOT.

For a good example of this, see the NYT story on how we're magically replicating the same problems on lack of armor with Iraqi forces:

October 30, 2005

Lack of Armor Proves Deadly for Iraqi Army
By MICHAEL MOSS
New York Times

After a string of deadly attacks against Iraqi forces in the spring, American soldiers in the Diyala Province northeast of Baghdad established an operation at their Army base to add armor to the unprotected open-bed trucks used by the Iraqis. But it is a meager enterprise: four Iraqi ironworkers armed with two welding torches and thin sheets of metal.

Even as American forces are relying more on Iraqis to fight the insurgency, the Iraqi Army is facing some of the same procurement problems that American troops have experienced in getting adequate armor and other equipment, according to interviews in Iraq with American and Iraqi military officials. But if the Americans have faced an uphill battle in getting vital gear - their shortfalls continue to this day - then their Iraqi counterparts are confronting a herculean task. . .

So yeah, these Cold War types not only threaten us with magnificent death in the future, they will waste a lot of American lives in the short run too.

Most pathetic in all of this is these guys' contention that they actually are thinking beyond the Cold War, but the truth is that all they do is resurrect the great power-war thinking of the Cold War and recast China in the new role as the Soviet Union. That's the big limitation with this crowd: they need a big enemy, otherwise they SIMPLY DON'T KNOW HOW TO MANAGE THE WORLD'S SECURITY SYSTEM.

It is time for this crowd to leave, not just here but throughout the Core.