SNA (Seattle) — On June 15, Defense Minister Taro Kono announced a suspension of the deployment of the Aegis Ashore missile interception system—a suspension that ten days later became a cancellation. The progression from deciding to deploy Aegis Ashore, to cancelling it, to considering alternatives, reveals policy formation fraught with dysfunction. But as the players within the Abe administration, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, and the United States jockey for position, the repercussions—for Japanese politics, for the US-Japan Alliance, and for the East Asian security environment—will be deep.

Aegis Ashore was intended to complement Japan’s existing missile defense, which includes PAC-3 Patriot missile batteries and the Maritime Self-Defense Force’s Aegis-equipped destroyers. Aegis Ashore relies on technology similar to the latter, but is deployed to fixed sites on land. All of these systems are designed to detect, track, and shoot down ballistic missiles in flight.

Tokyo started to consider acquiring Aegis Ashore in 2014. It did not approve the purchase of the US system, however, until December 2017, a month after President Donald Trump announced, at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, that “Japan is going to be purchasing massive amounts of military equipment.” Abe adviser Isao Iijima has stated that Washington specifically pushed Japan to acquire Aegis Ashore.

As additional evidence that Abe’s desire to build rapport with Trump played a role in the purchase, it was a top-down decision, in contrast to the normal military procurement process in which the prime minister gets involved only at the last stage. 

Two sites were eventually selected, in Akita and Yamaguchi prefectures.

The motivations for cancelling Aegis Ashore may be even more difficult to untangle than those for purchasing it. According to Kono, the sole reason was that the Ministry of Defense (MOD) had promised host communities that falling booster rockets wouldn’t land on populated areas, but belatedly realized that ensuring this would require costly and time-consuming hardware fixes. This rationale was greeted with widespread skepticism.

It’s certainly true that after repeated bungling—falsely claiming that the Akita site was free of tsunami risk, mistakenly rejecting alternate sites, and, finally, having to admit that boosters might crash into peoples’ homes—the MOD’s credibility with the host communities was approaching nil. The booster problem, however, had long been known to some in the MOD and the Self-Defense Forces. A former admiral said, “From the beginning, the Japanese government’s story was impossible. I was a missile shooter. I knew how difficult it would be to control the fall of burned-out boosters.” Somehow, this didn’t percolate up the chain; former Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera claimed, “I had been briefed repeatedly that the rocket boosters could be controlled, but with this abrupt change, I must wonder whether the Defense Ministry had been lying.”

There may be a whiff of ass-covering in all this, but Japan’s military establishment clearly has a problem with stovepiped information, pointing to deep dysfunction that likely contributed to the Aegis Ashore fiasco.

Nevertheless, Kono seems acutely conscious of constricted budgets in the wake of Covid-19, so the overhaul’s cost may really have factored into his decision. The deeper reason, though, was likely that Aegis Ashore is already becoming obsolete. This year’s Defense White Paper notes that the enhanced capabilities of North Korean missiles (such as mobile launchers) “make early detection of the signs of a launch and the interception of missiles more difficult.”

Tokyo followed the suspension with an announcement that it would rewrite its National Security Strategy. In the weeks since the government “discovered” the booster problem in late May, it apparently decided that cancelling Aegis Ashore required—or provided an opportunity for—a major reappraisal of military policy.

Various ways of “filling the hole” left by Aegis Ashore have been proposed, such as deploying additional Aegis destroyers. But, right out of the gate, the main focus of proposed alternatives was a longtime conservative goal—the capacity to strike “enemy” bases. Abe raised this option just three days after the suspension. Evidently, the administration carefully planned the suspension’s rollout, including how to capitalize on it.

Previously, what was contemplated was striking a base after a missile launch so as to prevent a second. Views within the ruling party, however, have shifted toward preemption. Kono made conflicting statements on this, saying at one point, “Preemptive strikes violate international law and would never be on the table”; later, “it would not be unconstitutional to strike an enemy launch pad or base before a missile launch, instead of waiting for the missile’s booster phase.” A corner may have been turned.

In a sense, this proposal is a reverse image of Aegis Ashore. While the latter was likely compatible with war-renouncing Article 9 of the Constitution, preemptively striking enemy bases is an offensive capability that, at least by a literal reading, is not.

When Tokyo desires a capability that conflicts with Article 9, it declares that its use will be limited to the “minimum necessary level for the defense of the country” when “no other measures are available” to defend Japan. Such magic words supposedly render constitutional actions that would otherwise not be. But since the government itself determines whether such criteria are met, they’re virtually meaningless.

Even within the ruling party, there are dissenting voices. Takeshi Iwaya, Kono’s predecessor as defense minister, characterized the proposal as “a major shift in government policy about an exclusively defensive posture.” Knowing it won’t be easy to gain the acquiescence of the Japanese public, not to mention neighboring countries like South Korea, the ruling party is exploring innocuous-sounding names for the offensive capability, such as “self-defense counterattack capability.”

Such verbiage will not placate China and North Korea. Japan’s acquisition of preemptive strike capability would be destabilizing, and, as the Rand Corporation’s Jeffrey Hornung has suggested, in a crisis it could give those countries an incentive to preemptively attack Japan.

Assessing that a missile attack on Japan has been or is about to be launched would be technically challenging, requiring sophisticated surveillance capabilities. Given the MOD’s cavalcade of errors on Aegis Ashore, its competence for such an undertaking is questionable, and the costs of false positives or false negatives are enormous.

The cancellation will have an impact on the political arena. Knives are out for Kono, a reputed “maverick” with aspirations for the premiership. The Carnegie Endowment’s James Schoff suggests that some in the ruling party “maybe want to feel like they’re setting a trap for him to take the fall later when this doesn’t really work out because there are no other easy options.” Indeed, Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Toshihiro Nikai complained that, aside from Abe, no party officials were consulted on the decision, and Kono was obliged to apologize. One official anonymously predicted that Kono will be replaced in the next Cabinet reshuffle. Still, it’s too early to consider him down for the count.

More significantly, the debate on striking enemy bases will test the durability of the governing coalition. Komeito quickly expressed skepticism toward the idea, and if it stands in the way, the ruling party could explore replacing its coalition partner with the reliably militaristic Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai). On the other hand, that threat could also lead Komeito to seek a face-saving way of giving in, as it has done many times before.

The suspension and cancellation were received with special interest in two quarters. One was the United States.

When Kono told Abe of his desire to cancel the project, Abe reportedly asked, “You served as foreign minister so you clearly know what the situation is, don’t you?” The Foreign Ministry’s main job being managing relations with the United States, Abe was clearly worried about the reaction in Washington. Trump (if he’s ever informed) will be enraged at Abe backing out of a deal, even if, as is likely, Japan has to pay a penalty for breaking the contract. The cancellation, moreover, is sure to figure in the upcoming negotiations for host nation support; Trump’s team may now be even more obdurate in their demands.

But the US interest in Aegis Ashore was not limited to addressing the trade imbalance or building up the economy to boost Trump’s reelection chances. Professor Yoichiro Sato notes that, “From the beginning Japan’s participation in missile defense was inherently bound in bilateral collective defense, but the government has employed false rhetoric to disguise it as unilateral self-defense.” Indeed, the choice of the Akita and Yamaguchi sites happened to be suitable for intercepting North Korean missiles targeted at US bases in Guam or Hawaii. In any case, to the extent that the system would protect Japan, it would also protect US bases there, where one fourth of American troops abroad are stationed. The Pentagon will surely insist that any alternative also protect its assets.

Some in the United States questioned Japan’s reliability. As Hornung put it, “If something as necessary as Aegis Ashore could fall apart, there are likely to be questions about Japan’s commitment to other systems it has declared an interest in acquiring.” Others were even exasperated at Tokyo letting the safety of nearby communities get in the way of bulldozing the project through, and worried that convincing Japan to host intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) may be harder than they’d hoped.

On the other hand, Japan wonks in the United States were generally receptive to the idea of Japan acquiring strike capability, partly because it would provide an opportunity to sell equipment to Japan, but also out of eagerness for it to assume a greater role in the alliance.

Okinawans as well viewed these developments from a unique perspective. When Kono said, in reference to Aegis Ashore sites in mainland Japan, “In view of the cost and time for the deployment, we will halt the process,” they couldn’t help thinking of the ongoing construction of a US base at Henoko. While the budget for Aegis Ashore (including overhauling the boosters) was projected as some ¥650 billion (US$6 billion), that for the Henoko base (including reinforcing the soft sea floor) came to ¥930 billion yen (US$8.7 billion). Ten years were required for the Aegis project, compared to twelve for Henoko. So the question in many Okinawans’ minds was, why did the Aegis figures move Kono to abandon a project, but not the even more jaw-dropping Henoko figures?

Along the same lines was a remark by Abe: “We cannot move it (Aegis Ashore) forward anymore now that it’s become clear that the very premise we used when explaining to local people… is different.” The longstanding premise of the Henoko base—that it enables the quickest possible closure of the dangerous Futenma airbase—disintegrated when the government admitted that the soft ground problem would delay that to at least the mid-2030s. And yet Abe continues to “move it forward.”

Pacific Forum’s Brad Glosserman fretted that, in the wake of the Aegis cancellation, “Okinawans will likely double down (if that is possible) on resistance to building a relocation facility to the US Marine Air Station Futenma.” The same surely applies to any effort to saddle Okinawa with new deployments, such as American IRBMs.

Kono and Onodera might benefit from considering the possibility that, as with the Aegis booster issue, there are MOD technical experts who recognize fatal flaws in the Henoko plan, but keep it to themselves, not wishing to be figuratively shot for bearing bad news.

The Aegis Ashore fiasco is another case of dysfunctional policy-making in Japan. Information is siloed, the reasons for decisions are shrouded, and fundamental issues are scrupulously avoided. Leaders engage in misdirection, falsehoods, self-delusion, and hypocrisy, but go unchallenged, no matter how blatantly they contradict themselves.

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