Japan and U.S. agreed to accelerate joint missile production
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described Japan on Sunday as indispensable for tackling “Chinese aggression” and said the implementation of a plan to upgrade the U.S. military command in the country would get under way.
“We share a warrior ethos that defines our forces,” Hegseth told Japanese Defence Minister Gen Nakatani at a meeting in Tokyo. “Japan is our indispensable partner in deterring communist Chinese military aggression,” including across the Taiwan Strait, he said.
Japan hosts 50,000 U.S. military personnel, squadrons of fighter jets and Washington’s only forward-deployed aircraft carrier strike group along a 3,000-km (1,900-mile) East Asian archipelago.
In July, then-President Joe Biden’s White House announced a major revamp of the U.S. military command in Japan to deepen coordination with Tokyo’s forces, as the two countries labelled China their “greatest strategic challenge”.
That change will place a combined operational commander in Japan, who would be a counterpart to the head of a joint operation command established by Japan’s Self-Defense Forces last week.
Additionally, Japan is doubling military spending, including money to purchase longer-range missiles. The operational scope of its forces, however, is constrained by its U.S.-authored constitution, adopted after its World War Two defeat, which renounces the right to make war.
Hegseth and Nakatani agreed to accelerate a plan to jointly produce beyond-visual-range air-to-air AMRAAM missiles and to consider collaborating on production of SM-6 surface-to-air defence missiles to help ease a shortage of munitions, Nakatani said.
The U.S. Defense Secretary also asked his counterpart for greater access to Japan’s strategic southwest islands, along the edge of the East China Sea close to Taiwan.
The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
